Marketing Headhunter

Warren Buffett on "Which candidate has the most potential?"

Sorry my postings have been so light.  I have been up to my eyeballs in truly epic searches.  Lots of hiring activity going on out there at the VP level.

One VP of Marketing search in particular has me feeling like the ball boy at Wimbledon, with a worldclass Fortune 500 company on the client side of the net, and several massively talented candidates on the other.  One of the most humbling things about the search is that the client has solicited my input on which candidates have the greatest leadership potential.  Tough question, especially in light of the marquee-level talent pool.  From an experience standpoint, all of them are highly qualified to do the job.

But which one has the X-factor?

To tease out this issue, I advised the client to consult the Catechism of management thought:  The Daily Drucker, wherein Peter Drucker first defines the term ...

"Leadership is not rank, it is responsibility.  It is the lifting of a subordinate’s vision to higher sights – the raising of a subordinate’s performance to a higher standard.  It is the building of a subordinate’s personality beyond its normal limitations.  A leader must set strict principles of conduct and responsibility, high standards of performance, and respect for the individual and his work."

Now that we know what we're looking for, exactly how would Mr. Drucker go about identifying a new leader of an institution?  As is typical, his answer's awesome:

• First: I would look at what the candidates have done – and what their strengths are. You can only perform with strength.  What has each candidate done with his strengths?
• Second:  I would look at the institution and ask: “What is the key challenge?”  I would try to match the candidate’s strengths with the needs.
• Third:  I would look for integrity. A leader sets an example, especially a strong leader.  He or she is someone on whom people – especially younger people – in the organization model themselves.

When selecting a leader, I always ask myself:  “Would I want one of my children to work under this person?"  If the leader is successful, then the young people will imitate him.  I ask myself: “Would I want my child to look like this?” [Man, is that powerful or what?]

The Warren Buffett Acid Test

But what should a hiring committee do if all of the candidates in the pool fit Mr. Drucker's profile?  I advised the client to do precisely what Warren Buffett did when he chose Deryck Maughan as the CEO of Solomon Brothers in the wake of Solomon Treasury Bond scandal of 1991.  In picking Mr. Maughan in a time of crisis from a similarly crowded field of superstar candidates, Mr. Buffett distilled his entire hiring process down to two simple questions:

"If this were an investment decision, ...

1. FROM which candidate would I want to COLLECT 10% of his earnings in perpetuity?
2. TO which candidate would I want to PAY 10% of his earnings in perpetuity?

… assuming I got to pocket the difference." [Don't you wish you had that kind of mental clarity?  Me too!]

Naturally, if there are six candidates under consideration, Mr. Buffett's method would separate the first and last, then the second and the fifth, and finally the third and fourth.  Voila:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 ranked as if you were going to be plunking down your very own cash for them.

Try it right now:  Write down the names of any six of your college buddies.  Now notice as your mind automatically begins to stack rate "intangibles" like energy, drive, focus, resourcefulness, decision quality, maturity, command presence, IQ, EQ, and so on.  Like magic, the wheat segregates to one side of the ledger, the chaff to the other.  If you are following the Good to Great "First Who, Then What" rule, then this is a great way to get the right people on the bus.
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Q:  Need the number of a recruiter who "gets it?"
A:  Download Harry's contact info for future reference.

Who Owns Your Blog: You or Your Employer?

Blogstar Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft, and this brings me back to my recent post about Steve Rubel's departure from CooperKatz.

Background:  A while back there was an interesting conversation on Shel Israel's blog "Naked Conversations."  Called The Power of Personal Brand, Mr. Israel's post discussed the positive impact an A-player's weblog can have on a corporate brand.  The post cited several examples -- but the most well known was Steve Rubel, whose widely-read blog MicroPersuasion ceased to be associated with his former employer, CooperKatz, when Mr. Rubel moved to Edelman PR several months ago.  Mr. Israel believes that CooperKatz failed to appreciate how much Mr. Rubel's blog did for its brand.  I'm sure he's right.

While the comments to Mr. Israel's post were intelligent and interesting, none addressed the larger issue of who "owns" the blog if the employee leaves.

Make no mistake:  This is a BIG, STINKING issue, and one that's best addressed sooner rather than later.

• Best case, ignoring the issue will allow your employer to "sell their interest" in your weblog back to you when you leave.
• Worst case, your employer will want to make an example of you to other employees and sue you for ownership of your blog, your domain name, and all of your blog's content.

Now you've got a fight on your hands -- a fight for your baby.  More often than not, your company will have deeper pockets than you -- and even if the matter never goes to trial, a volley of lawyer letters can easily cost you ten grand.

Trust in God and tie up your camels.

If you blog, here are five things you should do to minimize future conflicts with your employer.

1.  Get a written agreement with your employer that your blog is your intellectual property in perpetuity and throughout the universe.  Like any prenuptial agreement, this may require you to have an uncomfortable conversation, but you simply must deal with this issue before your company realizes its importance.  Such an agreement might require you to set an editorial platform for your blog and stick to it -- but you should be doing that anyway.  Otherwise, in the wake of your departure, your company's lawyer may send you a letter stating "In the absence of any agreement to the contrary, yada yada yada ..."  Now you're in a pickle.

Re: timing - Unless you are planning to leave in the next 90 days, wait until your next salary negotiation or until your non-compete agreement is updated.  In other words, wait until it's appropriate to bring it up.  Otherwise, management will think you're up to no good.

2.  Don't blog about your company.  By all means you must have a teachable point of view on your profession for your blog to be of any benefit to you professionally.  But the more you mix your company's identity with your blog, the harder it will be to separate the two later on.  Blog about your function (marketing, accounting, finance, etc.) and your industry (retail, aerospace, accounting, etc.), but leave your company out of it.

3.  Be able to prove conclusively that you wrote your blog off hours.  This means that all of your blog's time stamps must be for times when you were out of the office.

4.  Do not check your weblog stats at work.  Even if you never authored a post at work, a forensic computer investigator can retrieve your page views.  If those page views create the impression that you were blogging on company time, you've got a problem.  Don't expect a jury to appreciate the difference between creating a post and checking your stats.  More likely they'll just think you were blogging on the job and vote accordingly.

Of course, a forensic investigation cuts both ways:  If you never log into your blog account at work -- then when your former employer hassles you, you can simply demand that they hire a forensic investigator to prove any assertion to the contrary.

5.  Blog with your personal email address and personal phone number.  Ask yourself:  "If I left tomorrow and one of my readers wanted to reach me, where would they go first?"  This is a critical issue for two reasons:  a.) Being unfindable could cost you business in your new role, and b.) You don't want your business associates sending potentially sensitive emails to your former employer.  Such emails and voice mails may be held against you in a court of law.
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How to Reach a Niche Market

I saw this classified ad and thought of you (marketers):

Well, this guy certainly knows what he wants in a woman!  But it's hard to tell if "Single Male" is also a "Seasoned Marketer."  Let's see if we can learn something about targeting and reaching such a tightly-defined "niche market."

Question:  What do you think Loverboy's response rate will be?

Answer:  "It depends on where he runs it."

If Loverboy runs the ad in Popular Science, he can expect a lot of sleepless nights pining away for Miss Right.  She may never see it.  And if he runs an ad in the USA today, he may go broke.  How come?

Do the math.  Assume that Miss Right is a "one-in-a-million" girl, and that there are 300 million Americans.  Accordingly, there are 300 young ladies in this target market.  Of these 300 ladies, assume 1-in-100 reads USA Today three times a year -- perhaps when they're killing time in the hotel lobby at an S.I. swimsuit photo shoot or a NORML convention.

Marketing Fact:  The effects of print advertising are cumulative.  In any real-life situation, only one-third of your market will see an ad the first time you run it.  To be seen by 100% of your readership, you need to run an ad at least three times.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Guerrilla marketing expert Jay Levinson says it can take up to nine impressions to develop a top-of-mind position with a target buyer.  That's 27 insertions.  And that's in real life.

In our example, however, the numbers are much worse.  Three supermodels reading USA Today three times per year is the same as one supermodel reading USA Today nine times per year.  Nine "supermodel days" divided by the number of print issues per year (312) equals a probability of < 3% that our "target reader" will see our ad on any given day.  D'oh!

Is it worth it?  Probably not.  Remember, Miss Right is a beer-brewing, dope growing, double-jointed supermodel twin.  In all likelihood, she's already got a rich, burly, possessive boyfriend and is not going to respond to a classified ad -- no matter how many times she sees it.  (I never said she was cheap!)

What if Loverboy runs the ad in "Brewmaster" magazine?  His chances improve.  And his chances would be better still if he simultaneously ran the ad in "Twins" magazine.  But there's gotta be a more effective way to reach our tightly-defined market than through simple classified advertising.  Any ideas?

Why not send direct mail?

Sure!  In marketing, it's always better to mail to one highly-qualified prospect many times than many poorly targeted prospects once.  Loverboy could mail an open love letter to all of the female subscribers of Brewmaster.  Better, but not great.

What if he merges Brewmaster's subscriber list with one from "Twins" magazine?  Better still.  And what if he merges the combined "Brewmaster / Twins" list with a list of NORML members?  Better still.  And finally, what if he merges and purges the merged and purged "Brewmaster / Twins / NORML" list with the list from Cosmopolitan magazine?  Even better.

Remember too, that Miss Right will likely be a member of the Supermodels Union and possibly a Circ du Soleil alumni member.  By combining all of these lists, Loverboys ends up with a tiny -- and much more expensive -- list.  But it can be worth it, especially if the expected Lifetime Value of the target customer is high.

Here's how it works.

Imagine we crack open an SRDS book and the lists in the above example have the following rental fees ...

• Brewmaster - $85/M
• Twins - $67/M
• NORML - $54/M
• Cosmopolitan - $98/M
• Supermodels union - $150/M
• Circ du Soleil alumni list - $770/M

The letter "M" means "per thousand names."  So sending a direct mail piece to ten-thousand Cosmo subscribers will cost $98 per-thousand, or $980.  Every time you merge / purge this list with another, you incur the costs of both lists -- but you end up with a smaller and much more qualified sift of prospects.

To merge / purge all of these lists would cost $1224 per thousand (even though there are only 300 women in our entire niche).  $1224 / 300 = $4.08 per name, assuming that the entire niche matches the screen.  It won't, of course.  But let's say that through this exercise we end up with five names.  $1224 / 5 = $244.80 per name.

Note:  According to Land's End circulation guru Steve Waddick, if the same person is on multiple lists, then you can contact that name multiple times without having to re-rent the name.  Therefore, if each of the 5 names were on three of the lists, you could contact each one three times (15 total contacts) at no additional rental cost, which would bring your cost down to $81.60/contact.  A good list broker can help you manage these issues.

Would you pay it?

If the odds are better than 1-in-5 that one of these girls is available, I'd say YES.  Realistically though, the odds are probably much longer than that.  But what if Loverboy is desperate and goes for it anyway?  He should know that "direct mail" is not limited to postcards and # 10 envelopes.  Given a highly targeted, high value prospect, direct mail could mean a dozen roses or a box of Omaha Steaks -- several times each year.  What have you spent so far on your current love interest?

Action item:  As yourself "Exactly who is my target buyer (... and what exactly do they read?)"  The more tightly defined the better!  And the more tightly defined your customer is -- the tighter you can make your message-to-market match.

Imagine how effective Loverboy's ad would have been if he had known the name of his dream girl, say Claire Fenton.  His classified ad headline could have been ...

Attention Claire Fenton !!

Talk about a clutter-busting headline!  If Claire Fenton were a market of one, then you couldn't possibly have a tighter message-to-market match than that.  And if Claire Fenton had seen the ad, she would have read it.  Several times.  Now more than ever, the most effective marketing campaigns are the most tightly targeted.  Check out The Long Tail for more on this phenomenon.

Indeed, Loverboy certainly knew what he wanted in a girlfriend.  Are you that specific about your customers?  You should be!  The latest research from Columbia University indicates that the wrong kinds of customers can actually destroy value for your company.  It pays to be selective -- especially in small business, where resources are tight.

For novice market researchers, this 30-page workbook by Dr. John Amos of the University of Missouri is just what the doctor ordered.  It's loaded with research ideas and nifty resource links to get you started.  Next, check out 75 things every mailer should know about mailing lists.  It will rock your world.
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Q:  Need the number of a recruiter who "gets it?"
A:  Download Harry's contact info for future reference.

Top 25 Marketing Blogs

File under:  "Damn, I wish I'd thought of that."

Mack Collier of Viral Garden has developed a list of the world's Top 25 Marketing Blogs based on each blog's Alexa ranking.  Mr. Collier's goal was to create an "AP Top 25" for the global marketing community, a very smart move indeed:  Now marketers everywhere will either check Mr. Collier's weekly rankings to see what everyone else is reading, or bust their tails to make the list -- promoting it when they do.  Either way, there's plenty of PR and link candy to be accrued by Viral Garden.

According to Mr. Collier, "The rankings are according to Alexa, and if I think your blog focuses mainly on marketing, or marketing is at least half the content, then I added you (and the content couldn't be all news-related, like Marketing Vox).  Judgment calls had to be made, like including Creating Passionate Users and What's Next, and not including Micro Persuasion and AdRants."

No argument here.  MarketingHeadhunter.com is # 23 this week -- although I'm sure the competition will stiffen considerably as Mr. Collier develops a more comprehensive list of blogs to track.

Regardless, Mr. Collier has created a potentially great franchise -- and now he needs to huff these little flames into a bonfire before somebody else does.  Frankly, I'm surprised Technorati didn't think of this sooner.  If I worked at Technorati, I'd create a list like this for every rabid niche and subculture out there -- as in Top 25 Wedding Blogs, Top 25 Golf Blogs, etc.

And if I were Mr. Collier, I'd buy the domain names Top25MarketingBlogs.com and TopMarketingBlogs.com before somebody swipes his idea.  Even if Mr. Collier doesn't want to build on these domains, it's always smart to pre-empt the competition.  For it is written:  Trust in God and tie up your camels.
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