Hire or Train? Obtaining the Right Skills For Your Organization.
Overview: Converting from traditional Marketing to automated Marketing has
a major impact on your organization’s Marketing team. This requires
establishing the correct type of organization to achieve your goals.
Tags:
Marketing Automation, Marketing Automation Organization, Demand Center, Demand
Center Organization, Marketing Automation Skills
We learned
last week that roles and responsibilities vary widely, depending on the
organizational model your organization employs. Expectations of the very same
title in one model may vary widely from expectations in another. As
expectations and responsibilities vary, so do the related skill sets and
demeanors of the individuals in those positions. So, how will you acquire those
necessary skill sets to manage a Demand Center? Further, how will you balance
those skills against the personality required to flourish in your particular
organizational model?
While I am
not an organizational development expert, I have helped many different
organizations build demand centers of all types, as well as hired and fired my
own demand center and consulting staff. In my experience, both an individual’s
skill set and personality are key to successfully staffing your Demand Center.
Your HR and/or recruiting staff can help you identify the individual’s skills
and personality. As hiring manager, you
are responsible for understanding your requirements. It is not rocket science,
and here are some guiding principles.
You must
have these necessary skill sets in your organization:
· Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)
Administration & Management
· CRM Platform Administration & Management
· Program/Campaign Architecture & Design
· Campaign Management & Execution
· Creative/Content Creation
·
Lead Lifecycle Process Management
·
Vendor Management
·
Content Administration &
Management
·
Documentation Management
·
Cross-functional communications
All skills
must be present; the organizational model determines which organizational
branch controls each particular skill. With
the exception of very large organizations, individual positions often have
responsibilities requiring multiple skill sets. When skill sets are distributed
across the organization, they must closely align with the positional roles and
responsibilities to ensure your Demand Center is not responsible for a function
for which is it not equipped to perform (see Part 3
of this series).
Skill sets
are the better-defined half of the equation. Skills are trainable. An
individual’s personality – those traits defining whether or not he or she is
well suited for a particular type of role – is the more complex half of the
equation. As we saw in last week’s edition, the identical job title may be an
entirely different experience in each of the three organizational models. To
make the evaluation a bit more concrete, I’ve devised a chart to illustrate how
personality types map to each of the three organizational models.
Definitions
Strategic: Makes decisions spanning time and context, applying to all
tactical execution.
Tactical: Makes decisions specific only to one particular context or
tactical execution.
Automated: Performs similar tasks at a high volume with a high degree of
precision.
Craftsman: Performs unique and complex tasks at a low volume with a high
degree of accuracy.
Although not
an exact science, this can be used as a guide to determine is your candidate is
going to be well suited for a particular position in your Demand Center
organization.
Notes:
Organizations often discount the necessity
for some of the “soft” skills listed above in designing a Demand Center
organization. Often, they assign those “additional” responsibilities to
technical managers without proper training or considering the individual’s disposition
towards that kind of work. To set your organization up for success, you should
give appropriate consideration to every skill set and make reasonable efforts
to staff the responsibility with the necessary skills.
To the original question: hire or train? It
is often the soft skills or personality traits that determine success in a
particular role. A Tactical, Automated personality will be a great fit for an
Integrated Demand Center organization, executing high volumes of campaigns
built from prefabricated templates. This individual will take pride in
executing against large numeric goals, such as email per month. A Strategic,
Craftsman personality will underperform in an Integrated model environment,
preferring a Centralized or Distributed role in which daily challenges vary
greatly. This individual will express success in terms of a limited number of
projects with widespread impact.
Hire or train? It absolutely depends on the
personalities currently in your organization, their ability to learn new
skills, their disposition towards change and your ability as a leader to engage
them in meaningful skills training. If one of these elements is not present,
you need to hire.
In next week’s
edition, we are going to shift from organizing and building your demand center
to understanding why your Demand Center may not be producing the expected ROI.
Better yet, what to do about it!
