back

Hitting Revenue Growth Goals in Today’s Environment

11 August 2022

This article discusses why hiring great marketing and sales talent is critical to hitting revenue growth goals and outlines the reasons companies are failing to hire the best people quickly – and how to address them.

Here in the second half of 2022, companies are facing several well-documented economic headwinds. However, your revenue targets are probably unchanged, or if you’re lucky, tempered, but still not easy to achieve. In this environment, you need to do more than cut costs to achieve your goals. You need to make smart investments in growth, including having the best marketing and sales leaders who can quickly evolve your growth plans and do more with less. However, finding these people is harder than you might think.

Great People Solve Tough Problems
As executive coach JP Flaum once shared with Graham Weaver, the founder of Alpine Investments, “Are you going to get to your goals with B or C CEOs running your portfolio companies? If you’re not building a suite of A leaders, Graham, how would you rate yourself as a CEO?”

The same thing is true for your Marketing and Sales Leaders and their direct reports – it’s more important than ever to have strong A+ marketing and sales leaders and teams in place. The demand for this key talent is still extremely tight. The difference between good and great in Marketing and Sales is 10X.

Why do companies fail to hire the best people quickly, putting growth goals at risk?

1. It’s Still a Tight Talent Market.
With a handful of high-profile companies doing layoffs in the last few months, it’s easy to think there are more people looking for jobs like yours. It’s still tough out there – ask any in-house recruiter or hiring manager. Here’s why:

2. In-house Recruiting Teams Are Spread Too Thin
Many think that an in-house recruiter they are already paying can get the job done. As great as they may be, they still face many challenges.

3. Recruiters don’t intimately understand the Marketing and Sales functions and skills they are hiring for.
Generalist recruiters are less effective with marketing roles because marketing is changing faster than any other function in the company, people are specializing to stay more current, marketing is getting more technical and analytical yet often requires creativity, the channels and techniques that work change quickly, and even at the top, different personas have emerged.

It takes either a marketer or someone with marketing expertise to identify the best candidates for your role, but also to “pressure test” them. Marketers are good at marketing themselves, know the right buzzwords, and can talk, but they may not be hands-on, or launched new programs from scratch, or scaled existing channels and initiatives. Without this specialization and expertise, how can a recruiter go a few levels deeper to see if they were simply “in the room where it happened,” or led it and drove impact?

4. There’s a real cost in lost time, wasted effort, and delayed impact on the business.
Whether you are trying to fill a role with in-house and/or contingency recruiters, or even generalist retained firms, all of the above applies – with painful consequences:

RevelOne was created by Marketers to solve exactly these problems.
We put a three-person team on every search. The recruiter leading your search only does 5 to 6 searches at any time. You benefit from us knowing and being able to reach a massive network of 130,000+ marketing and salespeople. We understand and help you refine your requirements, then identify the 100 to 300 best candidates for your role, and then we get in touch with them and present your opportunity to these almost always passive candidates. We pressure-test them so you only spend time interviewing the best candidates and end up hiring a great person quickly.

We can pierce through all of the issues above – the tight talent market and all of those challenges faced by in-house recruiters. The result? We’re still successfully closing out searches in 3 months on average and a third of the time in 5 to 8 weeks.

 

If you’re a VC or PE-backed tech company needing to hire great marketing and sales talent – contact us and one of our co-founders or VPs would be glad to help.

Want to stay up-to-date?

Join our mailing list to receive our latest insights, tools, and articles.

We'll need a valid email address.

Thank you for subscribing. Want to learn more about RevelOne?

Download RevelOne Overview

Hiring a Marketing Leader