Are you looking for Barbie and forgetting to Lead Score?

A recruiter I’ve known for years showed me a CMO position spec and asked if I knew of any matches. The position looked pretty standard, covering the strategy, positioning, messaging, branding, press and lead gen under the standard umbrella, and I mentally noted a few good candidates who met the basic requirements.

As I delved deeper into the spec, the company described how they were looking to take their company and product space to a new level, citing how their industry was stuck back in the dark ages in terms of leveraging intellectual capital and interpersonal relationships for productivity and efficiency. I had seen this problem in several industries, where the “oldest man in the room” syndrome was the norm, and hoarding knowledge insured job security and maintained a rigid hierarchy. The implication is that a cultural change and essentially a change management process is attached to installing and acclimating the industry customers to newer, more open, and automated systems for creating, managing, and leveraging the knowledge base in the minds of the knowledge hoarders.

The right candidate would then require the marketing knowledge and experience for a normal CMO, but also the patience and change management mindset to educate train and persuade industry members to adopt new and potentially disruptive social technology. The bar was getting higher.  The company would clearly be breaking new ground, and the spec recognized the forward thinking required of the right candidate.

Then I came across the show stopper - the company wanted deep industry experience AND a track record of implementing similar socially oriented knowledge sharing and productivity tools.

Wait, did you catch that? The company was breaking new ground, bringing the industry out of the dark ages to do things that has never been done, but they wanted the same person to be an industry insider with a track record of doing things that the industry has not been doing, ever. Basically, the spec was asking for someone who has done what has never been done in an older industry that has a tradition of sticking to tradition.

That’s when you stop, take a step back, and ask the hard question. “Are you looking for Barbie?” Where Barbie is the mythical perfect person with the perfect background, skills, experience, and other qualities. I think every company would like to hire a “Barbie”, and there’s no reason not to want that, but the question has to be asked “What do you really want this person to do?”

My recruiter colleague has not gotten back to me, but the hiring company should take a long hard look and possibly do a stack ranking of the real requirements. For example the requirements might be:

Rating category	Weight	Score
Deep industry experience	1.2
Marketing executive experience	2
Experience driving cultural change	1.5
Experience marketing to multiple marketing verticals or segments	1.3
Experience in marketing knowledge tools	1.8
Experience in marketing social technologies	2
	Total

In the example above, the company would be identifying an experienced marketing executive weighted toward experience in social technologies and knowledge tools and less experienced with multiple vertical segment marketing and potentially less industry experience. Note that if the hiring firm stuck to hiring “Barbie” setting all categories at 2, then “industry experience” could completely replace “marketing social technologies”, and the firm would hire someone without the skill necessary to fill the role.

So trying to hire “Barbie” could lead to poor candidate sourcing and poor decision making in the hiring process. All parties concerned would be best be served by applying a “lead scoring” framework to systematically identify and engage the best candidates.

Do You Suffer from Induced Success-a-phobia

Silicon valley is a great place to meet entrepreneurs who, at first glance, have good or even great ideas with serious potential. In many cases, however, I've seen entrepreneurs afflicted with something I call induced success-a-phobia (my term) - or induced fear of success.

It’s easy to get stuck and distracted by the wrong things. After all, there’s no shortage of service providers trying to sell startups their services, sometimes waving the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) card or sometimes dangling promises of funding or customers. Some of these consultants are really good, sensing an insecurity or chink in the entrepreneur’s armor, and finding a way to extract money from the entrepreneur for non-core issues. It might be legal docs, business plans services, detailed financial projections, patents, revenue models and forecasts, slick marketing plans, etc. While those administrative tasks should not be ignored, entrepreneurs need to really ask themselves if what the service provider is selling will help the business succeed. Without answering that question, it’s easy to get so buried in the administrative distractions that they never execute on their vision.

A friend pointed me at a young, 23 year old CEO, whose first two companies were not ground breaking or even high-tech, but this CEO had a vision and repeatedly executed, simply following through on what needed to get done. He created a business where there was none, recognizing the needs he could fill, then taking the steps to fill them. He did not appear to lose much time on raising money, either, mostly focusing on customers and sales. Both of the first two businesses did not sound like they were VC backable, but as an entrepreneur with a vision, he plowed ahead and executed anyway, seemingly oblivious that he was pursing tough businesses with few technical advantages on his side.

This CEO epitomizes the gumption that I often see missing here in the valley, regardless of age and experience. He saw a need and filled it, without an if, and, or but. He just went for it. He had an idea, figured out what needed to be done, then put the plan in motion. In his case, even flying to China to setup manufacturing, building a sales team, then aggressively building channel at Mac World. He did all that at 19. Of course, that’s a rare case, but compare that to what I often see entrepreneurs doing here in the valley. If they don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis by simply going to endless meetups and startup seminars, they come down with induced success-a-phobia.

While my advice may sound flippant, there’s a key concept where many would-be entrepreneurs should start - “Nothing great was ever built by worrying about why it can’t be done”. I sometimes use a sports analogy to lay it out in simple terms, and my apologies to the original idea owner: “You can never take a swing if you don’t step up to bat, and you can never hit a home run if you never swing the bat.” Know the key elements that matter in your business, and take the steps necessary to get where you want to go.