Evaluating Marketing & Sales Talent to Maximize Budgets & Success

Due to the growing costs of marketing specific skill sets, it is imperative that you correctly evaluate the talent you have and the talent you plan to add. A failure to accurately assess talent during the hiring process and evaluate existing staff’s talent will make maximizing your marketing budget incredibly tricky. Ultimately, incorrect talent evaluation can result in inefficient budget allocation and wasted spend. To reinforce just how important it is to identify and assess talent, the following are six ways that talent evaluation can help you maximize your marketing budget.

Filling the various roles at your organization is no easy task. It's incredibly challenging if you're maintaining an internal marketing team. After all, much of your company's growth will be very dependent on whether or not your marketing efforts succeed. Not to mention that you will need to build a marketing team consisting of various specializations to develop and execute an effective marketing strategy. All these variables mean it can be challenging to fill the roles you need in your marketing department, cost-effectively. The last thing you want to do is to go over budget due to costly hires.

Your marketing strategy's strengths and weaknesses will be tied closely to your marketing talent’s strengths and weaknesses. Evaluating the talent you have on your team will help to identify the talent gaps that you need to address. It would be best if you did your due-diligence and determine your talent requirements since you don't want to waste your budget, hiring in-house staff members whose skill set doesn't address an area of need. Keep these steps in mind to identify your team's talent needs:

Evaluate The Past Performance And Future Goals Of Your Marketing Strategy

You won’t know what your talent needs are unless you know why you need that talent. Evaluate past performance and future goals using analytics to identify where your marketing efforts are succeeding or struggling and where talent upgrades are required. Doing so will reveal if specific skills are lacking in your current team that could improve performance.

Evaluate Individual Performances

Speak to the team manager to find out how your team is performing on an individual basis. You should also be able to monitor how individual marketers are performing through the use of data analytics. For instance, if your blog is getting lots of traffic, you might conclude that those responsible for promoting your content and optimizing it for SEO are doing a good job. However, if conversions are low, it could be that the content isn't up to par, and perhaps your content writers aren't doing a good job.

Speak To Team Managers

Not only can the team manager provide you with information about individual productivity and performance, but they can also inform you about talent gaps. The team manager can give you vital information about what talent and skills are required to address the team's needs.

Speak With Individual Team Members

Individual team members can give you a lot of valuable information about their needs as well. For instance, if your content isn't converting, you might want to speak to your content writers. You may find out that it doesn't have anything to do with their skills, but instead, they could be overworked because they lack research assistants and have to create more content than it's realistic to expect.

A common mistake businesses make is to assume that the only way to address a talent gap in their in-house marketing team is to hire additional marketing staff. While this is certainly one way to manage your marketing needs, it's not the only way. When evaluating your existing team's marketing talent, don't just evaluate their current abilities. Consider their potential as well if they could be cross-trained in a new yet related area of expertise. You may have team members on your existing marketing staff that could be trained to fill the role you need to address.

By finding existing talent on your team, you can save a lot of money by eliminating the hiring process. Bringing new talent to your team is expensive, especially when you consider the cost of advertising the position, the time it takes to recruit the candidates, and the time it takes to onboard and train new employees. Training an existing employee and promoting them is a much more cost-effective strategy for addressing your talent needs.

One of the most significant risks of hiring another employee to fill a position of need on your marketing team is the risk of a mis-hire. Maximizing your marketing budget becomes an impossible task if you’re wasting funds on hiring the wrong people. Knowing what your needs are is one thing, but being able to evaluate talent is another. It's not just about hiring someone with the right set of skills. You should find someone with experience relevant to the role you're filling and someone who can contribute positively to your company culture. They need to be a good fit in more than one way.

Hiring the wrong person, whether they're unqualified for the job, don't do their job well, or are a terrible fit for your team, can have severe financial consequences. If you're unfamiliar with the potential effects of a mis-hire, here are a few examples of how a mis-hire can be costly:

The General Costs Of Hiring And Maintaining An FTE

Hiring the wrong person essentially flushes all the money and time you spent on the recruitment process down the drain. And it may take some time to discover that an employee is a mis-hire. Once it becomes apparent that you hired the wrong person, you may have already spent a significant amount on their salary. Most businesses will try to retain the employee in the hopes that they will work out, but if they're a terrible fit, whether it be culturally, skill, or performance, you'll eventually have to fire them.

The Severance Costs Of The Employee

Mis-hires aren't always employees who aren't doing their job well. In some cases, you may have hired someone who you didn't need for the long-term or who is taking up more of your budget than you realized. If the mis-hire is a mistake on your part, there's a chance that you will have to let them go, which means that you may have to pay for severance fees, including extended salary and benefits.

The Costs Of Replacing The Mis-Hire

Recruitment costs are expensive as it is. In addition to added costs are the sunk costs of time wasted. If you need to fill the vacant position after firing a mis-hire, you will have to repeatedly go through the hiring process. You'll end up doubling the recruitment costs for just one area of need because you didn't hire the right person in the first place. While you may be able to reach out to candidates you interviewed in the first round of recruiting, there's a good chance that they've found jobs at this point, which means you'll have to start from scratch.

The Financial Consequences Of A Newly Caused Disruption

Finally, there are the financial consequences caused by the disruption of having hired the wrong person. For instance, if they did their job poorly, it may have resulted in costly mistakes that took time and money to fix or delayed essential projects. When one team member is making mistakes or is unproductive, it can also affect the team's performance. Not to mention that a mis-hire can also hurt your team's morale.

Removing a mis-hire from your team is one thing. If the mis-hire does a lousy job, it could be hurting your marketing efforts and disrupt your team. However, at some point, you might consider making cutbacks to your team if your business has taken a dip and you have a smaller budget to work with than usual. When faced with a shrinking B2B marketing budget, cutbacks may be necessary. However, you need to evaluate your team's talent and potential to make the right cuts. If you let the wrong employees go, it can do significant damage to your marketing capabilities in the following ways:

Creating Talent Gaps

The last thing you want to do is remove an employee who fills a critical role or has a specialized skill set needed for upcoming projects or long-term efforts. Evaluating your existing talent is crucial to avoiding talent gaps. For instance, if you believe you have "C" level marketers that can be promoted within to fill the role of a highly paid "B" level player, then letting that “B” level employee go could be a viable solution. 

On the other hand, you may have two "C" level players who make roughly the same as one "B" level player. However, if that "B" player is highly skilled and those "C" players are easily replaceable, you may want to consider letting the two “C” players go and keeping the “B” player. If you need to let team members go, evaluating existing talent and potential talent is critical to preventing talent gaps from developing due to letting the wrong employees go. 

Overworking Other Team Members

If your team is small, then letting an FTE go can significantly burden the rest of your marketing personnel. Odds are, they will have to pick up the slack due to the loss of resources. Even if they are qualified to do so, you could end up overworking them. If your marketing team is overworked, they will become stressed out, and they will be more prone to making mistakes. If you plan to let someone go, you need to consider the work they were responsible for.

Unnecessary Disruptions And Hurt Team Morale

When you remove employees because of budget cutbacks, it can disrupt your existing marketing campaigns and cause delays to scheduled projects. Such disruptions are even more likely if the employee you removed had a unique skill set no one else on your team has. Depending on who is removed from your team, you could hurt the team's morale as well. Low morale can have a significant impact on your marketing team's productivity and performance.

Avoiding mis-hires isn't the only goal of hiring additional FTEs to address the needs of your marketing. If one of your goals is to maximize your marketing budget, it’s critical to identify the best candidate. It's not enough to find someone who can competently fill an existing talent gap; you want someone who is highly qualified and will improve your marketing.

There is an alternative to hiring FTEs that is more cost-effective, which is to outsource your needs to a marketing agency. A marketing agency can contribute much more than a single full-time employee will ever be capable of doing. If you don't currently have room in your budget to outsource marketing, much less to hire an FTE, strongly consider making room. It might seem counterintuitive to make cutbacks to your marketing team just so that you have the funds to outsource, but doing so can be one of the most effective ways to maximize your budget. The following are a few examples of how outsourcing can help with maximizing your B2B marketing budget:

Reduce The Costs And Risks Associated With Hiring FTEs

Depending on the plan, outsourcing marketing for a year can be less expensive than hiring a single full-time employee to add to your marketing team. Outsourcing B2B marketing is even more cost-effective when you consider that you won't have to pay for all of the costs associated with hiring full-time employees (including overhead costs). With that in mind, making room in your budget for outsourcing can help you save money on having to hire and maintain additional FTEs.

Replace Mis-Hires And Under-Performing “C” Players

Suppose you have any mis-hires on your team. In that case, removing them can not only have a positive impact on your team's morale and productivity; it can also provide you with room in the budget for outsourcing B2B marketing.  Instead of replacing the mis-hire with another full-time employee, you can rely on the marketing agency you work with to use rented marketers to take on the mis-hire's old responsibilities (and perform them with tremendous success).

Should you not have any mis-hires on your team, consider removing under-performing “C” players. A “C” player who's not performing well will likely never cut it as a “B” player. Replacing underperforming “C” players with outsourced marketing can significantly improve your marketing capabilities. 

Supplement Your Existing Team By Addressing Talent Gaps

It might not seem worth it to remove a permanent team member to free up money to outsource. However, making room in your budget to pay for a marketing agency is well worth the trouble. Not only will that agency take over the departing in-house team member’s workload, but they will be able to address any talent gaps your team has, both in the present and in the future. As a result, you may be able to plan projects that your in-house team may not have had the expertise to complete before working with an agency.

Provide Flexibility To Your Budget

Companies maxing out their marketing budget often cannot afford to replace employees who do not perform up to standards. By making room in your budget to outsource, you provide yourself with more financial flexibility. Outsourcing marketing not only allows you to replace underperforming team members, but it's also a more cost-effective option for addressing talent gaps. And when you outsource, you'll have an easier time scaling your marketing efforts up and down based on how the business is doing. Scaling becomes much more challenging if you're limited to an in-house marketing team.

If maximizing your marketing budget is your goal (and it certainly should be), you need to optimize your marketing team. To optimize your in-house marketing team, you need to be able to evaluate talent effectively. Understanding how to assess talent can help you identify talent gaps, avoid mis-hires, and improve your hiring capabilities. It's also important to note that outsourcing to a reputable B2B marketing agency can be hugely beneficial. Not only is outsourcing more cost-effective than hiring an FTE, but a professional consulting firm can assist in evaluating your talent, optimizing your marketing strategy, and maximizing your marketing budget.