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Marketing Hires: How to Evaluate The Experiencer, The Optimizer and The Builder

Today’s case studies about data-driven marketing present stories of leaders and their successes. After all, history is written by the winners (or their vendors). However, many CMOs may be feeling like they’ve been sucked into the jet engine of this Big Data thing, and are struggling to create some order from a chaos they’re chasing.

One form this pursuit takes is a rush to hire world-class data science/marketing analytics talent. This is hard because the envelope’s edge of this still-forming discipline encompasses so many complementary skills: domain expertise, infrastructure management, data acquisition and transformation, statistical modeling, visualization, and perhaps most importantly synthesis and communication. Yet this complex expression of the recruiting challenge makes us blind to three more fundamental talents, which if missing or out of balance you should get after immediately.

For short, we can call these capabilities “Experiencers,” “Optimizers” and “Builders:”

1. Think of Experiencers as artists.

They think in terms of customer persona portraits and journey map/purchase funnel landscapes to describe their work.

2. Your team should also include Optimizers.

The quant traders of the marketing world, they think in terms of “selling” expensive media, and “buying” cheaper sources of demand.

3. Lastly, you need Builders who think first of the capabilities you need, technically and process-wise, for a successful analytic operation.

The very best data scientists have all of these talents, developed well past threshold levels. But even if your data scientists can beat up your competition’s, they alone will be unproductive unless the rest of your marketing team’s mid-to-senior leaders (as well as key partners) don’t also have at least a spike on one of these dimensions and an appreciation for the others. With this balance, you’re more likely to be aligned on opportunities to pursue, fueled with the right data, and flexible enough operationally to realize the ROI your analytic investment promises.

 

This article was written by Cesar Brea (On Marketing) from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the cloud hiring platform.