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Practice Leader: Ralph Dieckmann
The link between a great idea and success lies in marketing genius; the degree of success in sales prowess. We understand when the imagination is not captured, businesses can fail anywhere between the elevator pitch to a venture investor and the politics of a complicated cross-cultural construction contract negotiation. Without great marketing and sales leadership, there would be few great companies.
Because creativity is so hard to measure and sales executives can be such clever conversationalists, the assistance of professional recruiters with advanced interviewing skills can add enormous value to these searches, which are so critical in leveraging top line results. This has been one of the differential advantages Dieckmann & Associates has been bringing to its clients for twenty years.
We know how to build success into our sales and marketing assignments in a variety of ways. The first is to use a third party discovery process as an objective control mechanism in the early phases of our work. Next, we carefully structure interviews to validate the methodologies employed by candidate executives to generate ideas and build and monitor sales models, comparing results across the candidate's industry. Then we re-verify by conducting multiple business references.
"It is a curiosity that so many executives seem to believe that recruiting sales and marketing leaders is comparatively straight forward," says Managing Director Ralph Dieckmann, "when the turnover rate in these functions is higher than other senior positions. It just looks easy because the candidates are so visible. Many hiring executives have been fooled because they did not use rigorous care in the selection process. These are difficult assessments"
Our Forecast for the Near Term:
It All Depends!
The birds have come home to roost now that the economy is contracting. Real marketing talent will produce real results compared to the competition during all phases of the business cycle - and those practitioners will find themselves still in demand. The pretenders, sheltered in the safe harbor of the 1990's, are being found out - and moved out. For them, this will be a difficult time. Their former companies will have to be agile and re-staff with great care, assuring themselves of true vision in marketing and true grit in sales.
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