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What Skills to Look for When Hiring or Assembling a Marketing Team

Since our beginning in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, Sales Renewal has been extolling the importance of assembling a custom team with both broad and deep expertise in all the skills your specific business needs to grow its revenue. While we understood that there would always be need for brand-focused and creative people, we also understood that the “Team” would have to expand beyond the boundaries of traditional and digital Marketing to include business analysts, marketing strategists and a fair number of technologists too.

Here’s an example mix of from one of our clients – the percentages can be interpreted as both the custom mix of skills on their team as well as budget (e.g., Paid Marketing is 15% of the overall Marketing budget)

Given all the financial pressures and technological changes since 2009, we are happily no longer alone in advocating this view. Here then is a survey of some other views on what makes an ideal Revenue Generation Team.

When Forbes recently asked CMOs what skills their teams needed they emphasized creativity, technology, big data skills and analytics. They also emphasized the importance of flexibility since change is a constant and what’s important today, might be not be in the future.

The Pedowtiz Goup takes a bit less a big company, brand focus and adopts one more oriented on revenue generation:

“as C-level executives have become laser-focused on revenue, the expectations of marketing have changed. This new revenue obligation – coupled with the emergence of new marketing automation technologies – has blurred the line between sales and marketing. Today’s executives expect a measurable return on their marketing investment and, for the first time, marketers have the tools available to directly connect marketing activities to revenue.

New “revenue campaigns” executed with marketing automation follow leads from first inquiry to close with set revenue goals, metrics, and even quality reviews to determine overall effectiveness. Just like sales – these new revenue marketing teams manage a repeatable, predictable and scalable funnel with a plan that follows the entire lifecycle of a lead.”

They also call out the need for these 6 critical skills:

  1. VP of Revenue Marketing
  2. Business Analyst
  3. Power User or Marketing Technologist
  4. Nurture Specialist
  5. Content Specialist
  6. Creative Specialist

Marketing Score further breaks that list down into 15 more specific, less digitally-focused skill sets:

  1. Coding/Programming
  2. Copywriting/Publishing
  3. Data Analysis
  4. Email Marketing
  5. Event Planning/Production
  6. Graphic Design
  7. Lead Management/Nurturing
  8. Mobile Strategy
  9. Paid Search Management
  10. Public Relations
  11. Search Engine Optimization
  12. Social Media
  13. Strategic Planning
  14. Video Production/Editing
  15. Website Management

What skills do you think your revenue generating team needs? Let us know in the comments.