Right People Right Seat

Summary

Ensuring you have the right people in the 'right' seats is vital for organizational success, particularly within the marketing team. This involves hiring individuals who align with your core values and defining the organizational structure to match your business goals, potentially considering staff augmentation through specialized agencies during challenging economic times.

By Payal Parikh, Director of Client Engagement and Head of Growth at Heinz Marketing

Do you have the right people in the ‘right’ seats in your organization? What about in the marketing organization? What about your team?

Having the ‘right person’ in the correct position is crucial for your organization’s success. So what does it mean? Let’s break it down into two parts:

Having the right person

Let’s face it, we all want to hire a superstar in marketing, juggling priorities, a great team player, etc., etc. But when this superstar performer isn’t a great culture fit, great values fit, then it becomes a problem.

At Heinz Marketing, we run our organization and decision-making on EOS principles, Entrepreneurial Operating System®. We have defined our Core Values and we live by that. We hire internal team members who demonstrate great value fit! Yes, they need to be experienced in marketing so we could serve our clients better, but most importantly they need to fit our values.

If someone is living by your core values, I would consider them the ‘right’ person for your team, for your organization.

Now let us look at the second part ‘right seat’.

Having the right seat

Now before you can even determine if that’s the right person for you, you need to first define the organizational structure. In other words, create seats if you don’t have those and structure your organization in a way that serves you better.

Let us look at the marketing organization closely. For a typical mid-level organization, we need people who can do:

• Content writing
• Graphics designing or creative team
• PR and brand work
• Manage partner marketing if you have any
• Demand generation
• Digital media specialist
• Marketing operations
• Business intelligence
• Project manager/Marketing manager
• Global marketing teams – for a global organization

Maybe I missed a few or maybe I have some roles that are intertwined. Based on your needs, define what this looks like and how many you need for the business goals that you are handling.

Do you think you have people to do all this work? If not, don’t worry. We are just creating seats right now.

Do you have people in the right seats?

After you’ve created your marketing org structure, evaluate if you have the right people for the seats you have defined.

If there are empty seats, do you think someone (the right person) within the organization would like to move there? If you cannot find someone from within then start looking outside. Find the ‘right person’ that has the know-how of the seat you are filling and most importantly, someone that lives by your core values.

What about the current economy?

A lot of companies are experiencing budget cuts and laying off staff. You still need to contribute to that pipeline, you still need help kicking off those campaigns to keep marketing relevant. Believe it or not, members of our CMO coffee talk community have started hiring agencies that specialize in those tasks.

That way, you get a focused skillset and you have the flexibility. It’s hard to dial up and down people and the staff, but easier with programs and agencies.

Let us know if we can help you with some staff augmentation and keep your engine running.

We have helped many B2B organizations solve this problem by developing their foundation – a solid marketing strategy. Let me know if you would like us to conduct an audit and help enhance your current marketing strategy.  Reach out to us for a free 30 min consultation! payal@heinzmarketing.com.