By Francis Moran
It has been a common lament of technology companies in Canada that this country lacks high-quality sales and marketing talent, driving CEOs to source their c-level executives from south of the border. The most common refrain is that they are looking for someone who has “been there, done that,” and such folks are simply not lying thick on the ground in these parts.
I’m pretty sure I don’t buy into the underlying proposition but let’s assume for the moment that it has merit. I certainly wouldn’t argue that you would want to de-risk your go-to-market and sales strategies by hiring folks who can demonstrate they have the ability to build and drive world-class sales and marketing organizations playing in your target market. While I do think such folks can be found up here in the frozen north, the bigger criticism I have with CEOs who go head-hunting for talent down south is that they perpetuate a chicken-and-egg situation that ultimately plays against them.
If you’re never going to hire someone who hasn’t already done exactly what you need doing, how will we ever build a Canadian talent pool? How will you ever beak free of the vicious circle that sees you hire in expensive talent that isn’t committed to the local market and so won’t stay very long, thereby starting the whole cycle all over again?
The answer seems quite obvious to me — you oblige your expensive hires to transfer their knowledge to their teams so as to create the next generation of c-level executives who are a-level players.
This obvious solution seems to be lost on many, however.
I had the sorry experience a few years ago of sitting in on a bit of a complaint-fest by Ottawa-area technology CEOs who had a number of challenges, some more legitimate than others. One CEO told the story of how long it had taken him to recruit his latest VP of marketing and how much it had cost in head-hunting fees. “And I’m just going to have to do it all over again in 12 or 18 months,” he said. I asked him how many people in his company would be reporting into the new VP and was told there were five people in the department. “And so,” I said, “A key part of your new man’s mandate — indeed, something that a big part of his at-risk compensation will be based on — is that he identify and groom his successor, right?”
You could hear the crickets chirp.
For this guy, it was a lamentable but clearly acceptable business practice that he spend a fortune in time and company resources to lure into town the latest in a string of hired marketing gunslingers who would do his thing for a year or so and then make tracks out of town, leaving nothing behind. Completely lost on him was the concept that he had not just the opportunity but, indeed, the obligation to his shareholders and the local technology community, to make sure that his new guy’s personal knowledge and skill set were converted into institutional knowledge during the oh-too-short tenure with the company.
Fortunately, there are some more enlightened CEOs out there, and I met one of them yesterday.
As part of an entirely outstanding presentation to Communitech‘s Techworking breakfast in Waterloo yesterday morning, Polar Mobile‘s Kunal Gupta said he searched high and low in Canada for a new VP of sales before identifying the perfect candidate in California. While Canada is a wellspring of technical resources like software engineers, Gupta said, “I was disappointed we couldn’t find the business talent locally that we needed to scale the business.”
I challenged him afterwards in the same way I had challenged that first CEO and Gupta was way ahead of me. Oh ya, he assured me; his new sales guy is contractually obligated to spend a significant portion of every month in face-to-face interaction with the balance of the team in Toronto precisely to make sure that that personal knowledge is captured and converted into institutional knowledge. (My colleague Linda Forrest will report tomorrow on the rest of Gupta’s excellent presentation.)
How tough is it for you to find the seasoned business talent you need to scale your business? If you’re constantly having to go elsewhere to hire that talent, what kind of a farm-team system could you put in place to make sure that the next generation of marquee players your company needs is being cultivated right within your own organization?
/// COMMENTS
4 Comments »Maureen McCann
June 03, 2011 8:23 amThere is no doubt recruiting c-level executives is time consuming and therefore expensive. From my perspective, companies are so busy “putting out fires” to maximize shareholder value, and improve their organization’s bottom-line performance, that there is no time, and little effort reserved for succession planning.
However, this chicken-and-egg situation is not solely the result of companies looking to our southerly neighbour for talent. As humble Canadians, many individual c-level executives find it challenging to market themselves at the level required of their position. My experiences tell me that c-level executives are not actively out there promoting themselves for future positions. This could be due to any number of reasons they are too busy, they feel the organizations should come to them, and/or they do not know how to promote themselves effectively. In other words, they are not attending to their own career development and progression, much the same way companies are not succession planning.
Francis, great question asked at the end of this post using the farm-team idea. My feeling is that companies find it challenging to invest in their people because of diminishing employee loyalty. What is the cost of investing in talent, only to watch them walk out the door – versus the annual/bi-annual cost of running a recruitment campaign? No easy answers to this one, I’m afraid.
James LaPalme
June 05, 2011 7:15 pmI have been in sales, sales management & business development in tech for 20 years in Canada and I concur with your conclusions. It can be a very difficult environment for commercial types to thrive in – I have seen many excellent individuals either move south or be way under utilized. “Canadian’ mindset wrt to VP level sales, business development & marketing is there are none here. I even know several VCs that won’t even consider a Canadian candidate, with a common response “He/She can not be any good if they are still here”. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have chosen to stay in Canada and have resisted the rather large pull of Boston and/or San Francisco (Bay are) for career growth.
Loyalty, experience and success seem to be secondary criteria to geography and large resume claims (I once sat beside a senior OEM sales person for MS Windows division in 1999 – good for him but a shaved monkey would have been successful in that environment. With out a deep bench in both engineering AND business (marketing, sales & business development) our success rate in the next RIM, Cognos or ATI will be less than it should.
Francis Moran
June 05, 2011 7:25 pmIt’s great to hear from a Canadian who has thrived — you have thrived, right, James? — here in Canada. You are among the many successful sales and marketing folks I believe are going unnoticed by those with the can’t-get-there-from-here attitude.
Maureen: Thanks for adding your excellent perspective. I think that employers who demonstrate genuine caring for their employees, something that includes the possibility of a promising career path all the way to the executive suite, will retain those employees in far higher numbers than the competition.
James LaPalme
April 21, 2014 2:01 pmFrancis
Would not say thrived – but close – in spite of geography.
15ish years ago – a group of similar skilled and experience and capable business folks (sales, channel, alliance, business development) all lived in Canada (Ottawa-Toronto-Waterloo). All except for one stayed – that would be me. Well the guys that went to Silicon Valley have thrived well beyond expectations. The others – Boston, Dallas and EU have done very well – thrived.
My survival has been predominately based on CEO’s from outside Ontario seeing my value. Best to move on to more receptive fertile ground if ambitious. A successful strategy is to move south do a few years and remove the pure northern business experience then come back – which my experience is very few will.