1. You can’t afford to lose ground to the competition while you search for a new executive for 3-6 months
2. You can’t afford to hire a full-time experienced senior executive
3. You need to boost sales this year
4. Your marketing and sales are misaligned
5. You want to take your company to the next level in sales
6. You need the expertise to enter a new market
7. A significant revenue or marketing event is in jeopardy
8. Totally new strategies or programs must be implemented or tested
9. A specific skill set is needed, but not permanently
10. Additional bandwidth needed, but not permanently
11. Objectivity in a leadership position would be beneficial, especially during strategic planning
12. Hands-on coaching and training is required to elevate skill and process knowledge of existing staff

According to the book Leadership on Demand by Charles Besondy and Paul Travis:

“Large companies believe in having succession plans and management development programs. Typically, a manager will be identified as having potential ‘for upper management’ and that person is groomed and mentored for years. We all know companies who have policies of moving executives from department to department, country to country, in an effort to prepare them for a senior management role. The goal is that senior managers should be well-rounded individuals with broad knowledge of the business.”

While organizations definitely need executives with general knowledge in a lot of areas, organizations also need specialists to be effective. Bringing in an interim sales executive to address a particular issue that they have extensive knowledge and experience in can be an effective way to improve specific areas of your organization’s sales department. One place to find interim sales executives is at an interim executive company like OneAccord, which has 32 sales and marketing executives in 12 states, each with their unique set of skills and areas of expertise (view OneAccord Interim Executive profiles).

Photo by Keith Allison

There are a variety of elements needed in selecting the right candidates for interim sales or marketing roles. Certainly experience in the industry is a plus and having experience in the specific horizontals is valuable, however what stands out in selecting the right person are the characteristics that make up an ‘ideal’ Sales Executive or Marketing Executive.

We have spent several years and invested lots of money in determining the ideal characteristics of these key executives. Dr. Tami Hoogestraat, Psychologist, and I have modeled the characteristics of the top eight key roles (CEO, CFO, CMO, CSO, COO, CTO, Customer Service & HR) in organizations. We surveyed a large number of CEOs, Presidents and owners of businesses in small, medium and large companies and in a variety of industries. Our findings reveal that the characteristics needed for these roles are highly consistent, regardless of geography, industry or size of organization.

The executive in charge of marketing is somewhat different from the characteristics of the executive in charge of sales. But, frequently the senior executive must incorporate both sets of characteristics. Generally speaking the marketing executive must excel at problem solving and decision making, while the sales executive must excel at social and communication skills. In combination, both of these must be present.

So, following are the characteristics (in order of priority) for each of these important roles:

Marketing Executive:

• Customer Focus

• Formal Presentation

• Resourcefulness

• Creativity

• Persuasiveness

• Passion for Company

• Strategic Planning

Sales Executive:

• Customer Focus

• Persuasiveness

• Formal Presentation

• Boldness

• First Impression

• Extroversion

• Passion for Company

Our 3Sixty Leadership Assessment is the best way to determine if your team has the right characteristics to succeed in today’s difficult environment.

Interim management executive, Scott Philips, is a C-level executive based in Portland with over 30 years of diversified experience in enterprise wide leadership. He is recognized as an action-oriented leader with strengths in strategic management, business assessments, global brand building, business development and enterprise selling. Scott’s experience in analyzing market data, developing solutions and effectively executing plans have resulted in significant revenue growth in a number of companies in a wide variety of industries. He can be reached at 503.913.2705 or scott.philips(at)oneaccordpartners.com

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We need to remember the current anxiety extends to our clients and their concerns about their company, staff and their own positions. We must help them justify their own roles by helping them stay relevant.

Key to this concept is learning more about solving our clients’ immediate problems. Discerning and analyzing those issues and how our product or service fits is critical. We need to be able to address client pain immediately and work to make him or her more effective.

With budgets drying up, the interim management’s role has now shifted. We are no longer here merely to help companies with cutting edge technology or driving future revenue by investing in multi-year projects with far-off return scenarios. If our customers are concerned about making their own quarterly numbers, they are less likely to be impressed with your product’s ability to automate their perfectly fine manual processes.

We can no longer “drop in, hand off and move on.” Rather we must remain in front of our customer, providing new ideas and unquestioned value.

Jonathan Gilliam is a interim marketing executive for OneAccord and is based in the Austin area. Jonathan has a deep background in business development, market analysis, opportunity development, relationship management and C-level sales. Mr. Gilliam welcomes questions at 512.775.7566 or Jonathan.Gilliam(at)OneAccordCorp.com. Jonathan also blogs at Business Developments.

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Submit a Sales Question to be Answered by the OneAccord Interim Management Executives

The most obvious reason to hire an interim executive is to fill a vacancy when an executive leaves until a permanent replacement can be hired. Quickly hiring an interim sales executive can reduce the negative impact in productivity often caused when an executive leaves a top position.

Save Money by Not Hiring a FTE

Your company may not need a full time sales executive for the entire year. An alternative is hiring an interim sales executive who has 20+ years of experience to establish a sales strategy for the year. You only pay him or her for a couple months while they lay out a strategy to take sales to the next level and then have a competent manager, who is less expensive, to maintain the strategy for the rest of the year.

Increase Bandwidth to Tackle Tough Challenges or Take Advantage of Opportunity

When facing extraordinary challenges or a tremendous opportunity, it can benefit an organization to bring on additional resources to temporarily increase bandwidth at the executive level. An interim sales executive can work in tandem with the full time sales executive to get things done at a key time for the company.

Get High Cost Executives for a Fraction of the Price

It can cost an organization a million dollars to hire an experienced and proven sales executive to lead your sales to grow to the next level. Factor in the headhunter commission, the signing bonus, competitive salary and benefits, and the costs can add up. The alternative is to hire an interim executive to do the same thing but without a lot of the expense. An interim sales executive who has a proven track record or growing a company by several multiples in revenue can be hired on to work a couple days a week and not require the bonuses, benefits, and finders fees.

Acquire Difficult to Find Executive Talent

An interim executive from a good interim executive firm often has 20+ years of experience at Fortune 500 companies. Often executives with this type of experience would be difficult to acquire for a small or midsized company. However interim executives with this level of experience are easily accessible, you just have to contact an interim executive firm like OneAccord.

Photo by Barun Patro

I heard it again yesterday. A person mentioned that companies who are in a “crisis” or in a “turnaround” situation should consider interim management in operations, finance, sales, or marketing. That is a true statement, but the majority of interim engagements are not in troubled companies.

Just because a company brings in an interim manager it isn’t a sign the company is in trouble.

Most interim marketing and sales executives, for instance, are engaged by a company to address one or more of these situations:

• Revenue growth has flat-lined, or is in decline. What worked in the past isn’t working now and the management team needs objective insight, new energy and different skill sets for a season to help them point the growth curve in the right direction again.

• There’s a temporary gap in leadership, gap in skill set, or gap in bandwidth that has an unacceptably high opportunity cost associated with the gap.

There should be no scarlet letter associated with the hiring of an on-demand leader. It simply means the company is very smart about how it allocates its resources.

Chuck Besondy is a principal at One Accord Partners and is co-author of Leadership on Demand: How Smart CEO’s Tap Interim Management to Drive Revenue. You can read more about Interim Sales and Marketing Management by Chuck Besondy at his blog One Riot-One Ranger.

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