Hiring Your Next Marketing Leader: What CEOs Get Wrong

How can an executive team assess top 1% talent in minutes flat.

Why background is only part of the story.

Why psychometric testing is so important.

These are just a few topics we discuss with Huff Logue, an executive recruiter and coach with more than 30 years of experience. 

High Intent explores unfiltered lessons from the frontlines of modern marketing. I'm your host, Justin Rubner.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

What do CEOs get wrong about hiring executive level marketing talent? Should psychometric evaluation be in your hiring DNA? My next guest, Huff Logue, will answer these questions and more. I've known Huff for a while now. Matter of fact, he's my personal executive coach and he's helped me immensely. Huff's been an executive recruiter for 35 years now, placing senior talent at SAP, Accenture, and now with his own firm, Execulinks. He has an innate ability to quickly figure out how his clients can improve and to help them change quickly. Huff is next on High Intent, where we explore unfiltered lessons from the front lines of modern marketing. Let's do this. Will Huff, welcome to High Intent. Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah, so you've been a recruiter for over 30 years now, and you've worked at companies like SAP, Accenture, and your own firm, Execulinks. What are some common mistakes CEOs and companies make when they're hiring marketing and other go-to-market leaders?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Yeah. Great question. And probably one of the biggest mistakes they make is they start out describing the type of candidate or person or experience or knowledge or skills that they want. And that's part of the process, but they're skipping a step that needs to happen before that. And that is they need to first define what it is they're really looking for and get on the same page with the team. And so it's kind of like Albert Einstein is noted for saying, I'd spend 55 minutes trying to define the problem and five minutes coming up with the solution. Instead, they focus on what they have a vision of the solution versus defining the problem. So consequently, that creates a problem, as you can imagine.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

And how should they define the problem in terms of the executive that they're going to hire?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Yeah. So there's a shift instead of focusing on the executive or the candidate, instead to first focus on the role and this function in our business. So for example, we're looking to hire a CMO. Great. Well, instead of saying, I want someone with this kind of industry experience or knowledge and background, is to say, let's talk about with the team and those individuals that are going to make a decision on this hire. And let's agree, first of all, what do we need this role, this key function of our business to get done in our company in today's market? That's what they need to do. And I actually take companies through a process to help them define that. Well, let's talk about the process. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So I utilize a patented process that allows the job to speak. If the role could tell us what does superior performance look like, what would it tell us? And it's a benchmarking process. So what I do is send out a message to the senior leadership team that is going to be involved in interviewing and making the decision about the hire. And it starts with brainstorming. So the question is, what has to happen in this role in the first 90 days or the role fails? But it has to happen in the first six months in this role or the role fails. What has to happen in the first year in this role or the role fails? So everyone that has to interview the candidate in order for them to be hired must go through this process when I do a search. And so we first start out with brainstorming. People have their opinions and different biases about what they think the role should get done. And so we have a friendly debate, I will call it. Sometimes it gets very friendly. And then we come to agreement on consolidating the things that we want as a team. And then we prioritize what's most important again with a focus on what superior performance looks like in the role. So at the end of this session with the team that I facilitate, they walk away with the top six plus or minus results that must be achieved or the role fails. And then once they take that, and this solves a lot of other problems as well. Once they come up with that, then they go online and take a psychometric assessment that generates the scores on 55 attributes of superior performance. And so now we know what the behaviors, motivators, competencies, and acumen or cognitive structure of what superior performance looks like in this role. It becomes our benchmark. 33 million people have taken this. We have a lot of data. We know the means, the standard deviations, et cetera. And so now the company has a list of exactly what has to happen in the role, independent of a candidate, independent of knowledge, independent of experience. This is what has to happen. And so we now have the scores on these 55 attributes. So that's the beginning process before I begin to call the first candidate.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

I think I know how you're going to answer this, but in your experience, how often are these executives aligned on what needs to be done in the first 60, 90, 120 days? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

It's amazing how much they're not aligned, yet they think they are. For example, they might all be saying, no, we're looking for the same thing. We all want blue. But the problem is they want different shades of blue. And that's where the difference comes in. And the problem with that is that I know you didn't ask this, but this is why that's so important and why candidates feel it on the back end. Is the problem with that is when they're interviewing candidates, for them internally, they'll have different biases or pulls about, well, I think they should have this kind of industry experience, or no, I think product knowledge is more important, or I think functional strategic level planning is more important. And so they can't get unified internally, which drags out the interview process, lowers their confidence and making a decision because nobody's on the same page. And what it does for the candidate, and I'm sure many people have experienced this before, is the candidate looks in this, they can detect it. They're like a heat-seeking missile. You know, one of these things is not like the other, kind of thing, right? So they are discerning the discrepancy, and nobody wants to be in a team that's not on the same page. And how are you going to align what you want to do if they're not even aligned?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

We've talked about this before, but you want the CEO involved early on in the interview process. I think a lot of times the MO is the CEO comes in at the last minute and gives a thumbs up or thumbs down based on a gut decision, right? Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Yeah, what you'll hear a lot of times is yeah, I don't really need to be involved in the interview process, but when you decide on who you want, I want my team to do it, I'm delegating this responsibility, and I'll just interview them just to check off and you know make sure they fit culturally. I have been bitten in the butt so many times by listening to that. So I don't believe it because inevitably what ends up happening is that a good candidate will be presented, the executive team will spend a lot of time and effort and money involved in finding candidates, get in front of the CEO, and the CEO brings up something that no one even discussed, thought about, or that is now important because of the latest trends externally in the marketplace. My requirement is in order for me to do a search, they A have to go through my job benchmarking process, and B, they must all participate. Anybody that is going to meet this candidate or talk with this candidate must participate in this process, or I won't do the search.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

You know, I have to imagine that some CEOs may feel a little concerned about the impression that they're stepping on other team leaders' toes, maybe in getting involved early in the process.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah, well, this is a critical decision. And for the CEO not to be involved in it and to be there to support and listen and understand, I think is a mistake. I think that some CEOs that are good delegators and they're good leaders have good team members and they rely on them and they trust them, and so they delegate to do that. But it's very rare that you see that happen.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Yeah. Give me some examples of what would be in the psychometric test.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Good question. As mentioned earlier, what we're trying to measure are 12 behaviors, six motivators or drivers, we're looking at 25 business-related competencies, and we're looking at it's kind of binary, six or twelve cognitive structure uh attributes. I can go deeper if you like.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

No, that's good. And you recommend that any employee or just executives uh take a psychometric evaluation?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

I think everyone should do it. Everyone should. Here's something to remember. People are typically hired for what they know, but they're typically let go for who they are. That has nothing to do with what's on their resume or CV. Right. So what we do is help you tell who the candidate is also. And it's not in a vacuum. You have to compare the candidate to something. You have to compare their personality and DNA and psychometric profile to something. And you need to compare it to the job or the role that they're going to be involved in. Okay. I can take your psychometric profile, your assessment, and go, well, great, here's who you are, but does that mean you're fit for the company, for the hiring manager, for the role, for this time in this stage in the life cycle of the company?

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah. We have to have that information.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Absolutely. Not a lot, but there are certain profiles that do give pushback to it. Like people who like to shoot from the hip, maybe. I think some people feel that they are really good at hiring and that they're good at the gut check and being able to read others. I think there's another category of individuals that don't put as much value on psychometric assessments. They kind of think it's hocus pocus, sort of, you know, touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy stuff. And, you know, you can tell immediately when people are like that, they tend to be more operationally metric. You know, your operating executives, your financial executives, they're used to numbers and quantified. So this type of language, when I start talking about someone that has strong problem-solving skills, or analysis and decision-making skills, or presentation skills, or someone that personally has high accountability in what they do, or high sales skills. They kind of it's hard for them to measure. It's not something they can grasp or consume.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Yep. Well, let me talk for a second about a kind of a frustrating observation I have with JDs, and that is overly specific uh requirements. And you know, we're talking niche, super niche things here. Like, you know, you must have grown a legal CRM platform from 5 million to 20 million, and I feel like these are used as top filters to weed out candidates when they should maybe be used at the bottom as kind of a deciding metric. And in my view, you're potentially weeding out, you know, good marketing or any talent for that perspective. And the result is over-indexing on things that potentially should be lower. I have no idea how you're going to answer this, but do you agree with that? Or do you feel that having these kinds of filters in helps companies in a good way when you potentially have a lot of candidates?

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Yeah. So I think there's probably two schools of thought here. And it also depends on who is actually driving those requirements that they're looking for. Simply put, recruiters or talent acquisition people, whether they're internal to the company or external to the company, are kind of working somewhat of a checklist. And they're just doing what they've been told by their client, whether an internal client hiring manager or an external client company. And so they're being paid a fee or have kind of, you know, their butt on the line to produce a specific candidate the way that the hiring executive wants it, right? So you have to understand that. And then the second thing is individual, it's coming from a hiring executive or an executive that's part of the interview process, but they're not a talent acquisition or recruiter individual. And then you have, especially at the C level, you have the board influence. In today's world, especially in technology, the boards are heavy and dominant with bankers, private equity. Yeah. Right. And so they tend to be numbers focused and metric focused. And they've been doing this long enough now that they kind of have playbooks. So in their mind, they think this is the only way to hire sometimes, is I only want someone with this kind of experience, this kind of knowledge, this type of product, et cetera. And so they might have five things that are on their list. Okay. And so I've got something else I want to follow up with here, so stay with me. So they have their five things that they want. And you also have to look at supply and demand in the market. Currently, today, we have low demand and high supply of talent. In fact, it's it's the biggest number of people in the market looking for the least amount of jobs I've ever seen at the executive level, right? So it's a buyer's market for companies, and they can kind of get what they want. So they're holding to that. And so that's one of the big challenges that people are facing. And, you know, think back when people used to must have a degree. Well, you know, have you noticed how having a degree is not as important as it used to be? Now at the executive level, it may be, but we're talking about you'd have to have a degree, must have. But now let's talk about why they're giving you these key requirements and holding to that. And it almost seems like, well, you want your cake and eat it too, right? Well, in a sense, they do. But here's the key thing, and here's the differentiator, and this will help both the executives hiring as well as candidates that are interviewing. When a job spec is put together, they're telling you what the requirements are, they're telling you what they want, W-H-A-T. Okay. They're telling you their vision of the solution, right? But what they're not telling you is why do they want that? The WHY. And so it's like the Harvard professor that said, people don't want a quarter-inch drill bit, they want a quarter-inch hole. Sure. Yeah. And so when they're giving you the requirements, or you're interviewing, you've got these requirements, they're telling you without you knowing, well, how did you come up with that? Or why is that important? Or what's the impact of this, right? So when you're interviewing, for example, you always want to not only understand the what are you looking for, let me be clear so I understand, but why is that important? There's always a why behind the what. Okay. The thing that executives fail to realize is again, this goes back to when they don't do the process I mentioned before, they start talking about a candidate first. I want this and this. Put that aside. Let's deal with what the problem really is. Let's define it. Let's be clear. Let's be clear about the results that need to be achieved and why is that important. Now, granted, you will come across reasons why they say they need this type of industry experience. For example, so tell me, can you help me understand why it's so important to have this particular industry experience? And they will say, well, in the past, we've hired people or hired someone that was in this role before. They came in with great strategy and knowledge that, but they didn't know our industry. And so the learning curve was long. They didn't seem to ever really grasp it, they didn't really connect with our audience. And so we just don't want to do that again, right? Makes sense. But how would you counter that? And what I would say is, well, can you help me understand a little bit more about what the dynamic was? You're trying to dig a little bit deeper. Why do you think that they weren't able to get up to speed? And so now you're in a position to say, well, I understand what you're telling me is you want someone that can identify with the market, knows the heartbeat and the pulse of your target audience, understands where the competition has that ability to do that. And I'm glad you brought that up because that's one of the unique things I've been able to do if you look at my career and my history. Every company I went to, guess what? I didn't have industry knowledge. However, in every job, I ended up in the senior role because of my intense focus on the ability to go and understand the customer, regardless of their industry, right? They're still buyers, they're still human. And so I've been able to do that successfully. Does that make sense and how I'd be able to help you?

SPEAKER_00 17:01

I need to bring you on interviews when I'm interviewing people and when I'm being interviewed. Can I do that? Sure, we can do that. Okay. All right. Well, let's say that the CEO has a couple candidates with this niche experience, and the person has allegedly grown and hit certain revenue numbers that are important for the job. As you know, numbers can lie. And how do you recommend that a CEO or any hiring manager cut through the numbers and the metrics fashion show and really get to a point where they can analyze true potential?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Yeah, so this is a broad question because I think there's multiple ways you can do this. And the first thing that comes to mind, and what I like to try to do, is listen to and understand the details of what they did. It's common, for example, when someone's saying, Well, I did this or I did this or we did this. It's an I versus we thing. And this is a common mistake going back to one of your original questions. What are some of the mistakes that a lot of executives make? Is they don't ask enough detailed questions. They kind of ask their top two favorite questions, get a good answer and a warm and fuzzy and go, I like this person, and they stopped qualifying. They're buying now, they're not still qualifying. And this is kind of what you're talking about. How do you really qualify? How do you really validate? How do you understand what they really did and how that might even apply to us going from 50 to 300 million, right? And whatever that number may be. And so I think you have to keep asking and digging. It's like peeling back the onion. Some people refer to it as the five whys, right? But you know, so tell me, understand. So if I were interviewing you, so Justin, tell me about your role as a company. When you showed up on the scene and it was $50 million, how many customers did you have? What was the revenue? You said it was around $50 million. What were you tracking? And what was working and what was not working when you showed up? And then what did you do when you got there? What was the first thing you did? What was the second thing? And I would take it from a sort of a help me understand type of approach if I were talking with a candidate, because I want them to really open up. I tend to have a good ability of getting people to let their defenses down and just get them to open up and talk to me about it, right? So you say in year two, you went from 50 to 75 million. What was that new revenue? Was that new products to new markets? Was that an old product to new market? Was that you're right, et cetera? And digging into that, what did the team look like? How did you do that? What changed in marketing if you're asking about marketing? You know, what was in place? What did you put in place? How did that work in terms of generating leads? What were kind of the close ratios? Was sales executing on that? What else contributed to that? Who else was on the team? Who did you interact with the most? What was the biggest eye-opener for you that took you from 75 to your next level, which was 125 million the following year? How did you do that? Right. And you know, when you're talking to sales and even marketing candidates, especially salespeople, they're trained chameleons. So they know what to say to get you to shake your head up and down and go yes, right? And so you can't just take the surface level answers. Again, you have to dig deeper and explore and understand and dissect. Peel that on your back, keep going deeper. And you can tell when people don't have a if they're giving you the glossy over answer. I love my my favorite one is in talking to you know sales executives, for example. You're talking about I see here that you closed coke. Yeah, I'm the guy that closed coke, right? And then you've talked to, you know, over the years, several people. And guess what? They all the ones that closed coke. They didn't really close Coke, right? They just sold Coke more.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Okay. I see this a lot, and I talk to a lot of executives in the PE back companies, and you know, a common point that I think a lot of people want, especially at earlier stage companies, is when you've been interviewing people in your recruiting role at the executive level, do you find that people can often talk strategy and how do you figure out whether or not they can actually execute?

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Great question. So I do believe that there are individuals based on their uh strengths and their DNA that are very good at being visionaries, being strategic, seeing the big picture, understanding how the people Pieces fit together, not just internally in the organization between sales, marketing, customer success, et cetera, but also in terms of the market, the competition, the analyst, the all the factors that are outside the control of the company in that market that can impact them, whether it's tariffs or geopolitical issues, et cetera. They have this higher level, 50,000-foot-level perspective, and they tend to talk in terms of that. They talk in terms of vision. They're good at doing that, right? They're seers. They can see clearly the big picture. There are others that can't see the forest for the trees, but they're very good at the tactical execution. They're good at taking an idea or a vision and running with it, putting the components together. In our assessments, we actually can tell what type of individual they are. Can you be both? You can, but it's rare.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

It's rare. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

It's rare. Yep. And so if you think about companies and the level of position you're hiring, are you trying to hire a true C-level CMO marketing executive that is going to help answer some questions or address some issues in the market where things are changing or things are shifting, or now AI is making it easier for people to develop their own sub-apps that they don't need the full Salesforce suite, for example, which is kind of what's been going around these days, right? And so how do we deal with that? What's our strategy? What's our approach to that?

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Have you ever made uh a really bad hire?

SPEAKER_01 23:28

The good news in 35 years of recruiting, I've only had five people not work out.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

So I tend to be extremely accurate. And I go into a lot of detail just as I'm promoting this. When I'm putting together a profile, when I'm talking with an executive about what they're trying to hire, I'm asking a lot of questions. I'm collecting a lot of data. And it's still a learning or evolutionary process through that search because what people tell you they want and who they are and what their mission and values are, and whatever's on the plaque in the lobby of their office, is not necessarily the reality of that. So you're really reading between the lines, just like you're reading people saying, I what I think my judgment call here is this is what they're really looking for. And a lot of times I'm hired not just because I, you know, as some people say, seek, find, hunt, kill, and destroy. What I'm really doing, and a lot of the executives say, you've helped me in my decision-making process of what I really needed and helped me choose the right person for that.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

So in the very few bad hires that you've had, has there been a common denominator?

SPEAKER_01 24:31

I think they were all kind of unique in one sense. I don't know. There's not enough there to have a common denominator.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Well, congratulations on only five. That's impressive.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

I will say the first one was in my first five years of recruiting, and I like to tell this story because there was a company years ago called Ross Systems, and they sold financial applications primarily on Deck VAX. And I was working on a on Deck VAX machines.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Right is what that is.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Well, well, it was an IBM, okay. And it wasn't, it was kind of the third-tier player of the big iron companies, but they were selling software, it just that happens to be the platform they're running on. So they're selling software, and I placed this really sharp executive with the company, and he left in two weeks. And I called him up and I said, What happened? And he says, Well, I got an offer from my ideal company that I wanted called Red Brick. And at the time, sales executives made like a base of 55 with 110 OTE. He made two years in a row about $600,000 a year, plus he got early equity and made $1.2 million. So he left for another good opportunity. So I guess I could say the candidate was so good he was better than you can't predict that. You can't predict that. Yeah. And sometimes you just miss stuff. I mean, people have secrets and they're good chameleons, and yeah, you miss it.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Another big reason why people don't work out, and this is really important, and I would really like executives that are hiring to understand this. So a lot of times they say, Hey, I want you to go find the best person out there that's going to fit here, and I want them from these companies, and I want this kind of achievement. And you get your laundry list, they tell me what you want. And you can hire the best person in the world from your competition, and it's still not work out because hiring is an equation. Yes, we want to get the best person that meets the profile of what we're, you know, decided on what success looks like. But if you take the best person in the world from your competition and you don't lead or manage them properly, they're gonna leave or you're gonna fire them. Right. So you can't just hire someone and stop there. And we have as a society in the business world and especially in technology, nobody does training, nobody does enrichment, nobody does, you know, continuing education. I mean, they do, but when I started the story, I went to NCR Corporation right out of college. You know why I chose it? Because they had blue chip training and they were very focused, and that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn from the best, and they were the best. In fact, a lot of people don't know this, but IBM, Tom Watson, was an ex-NCR guy. Yeah, right. And so I made the decision to go there because I wanted to learn and grow. Companies don't do that anymore, they only hire for what you've done. No, and that's why people get into a challenge in their interview process, is because they say, Oh, well, I can do that, I promise. And they go, Yeah, I don't have the time, patience, willingness to do that.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

So, do you want companies to have some of these training programs back?

SPEAKER_01 27:39

I want hiring executives to tune into the people they hire and understand them in terms of their superpowers and what they bring to the table and the areas where they could use some development and maybe mentorship and training. And that's just, I want to say somewhat of a lost art, and they're under pressure. I got to get numbers, I got to get it done. I don't have time to manage you.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

What if you're, I don't know, cross-functional collaboration skills are not the best, you're gonna struggle.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

Yeah.

unknown 28:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Or you can take initiative with your hiring executive, and especially if you're a rising star in your career, and even if you're already at a certain level, always looking for, hey, I would like to grow and develop in these areas, and I'd like to leverage on your knowledge or expertise and you know your success. Would you be willing to help me in this area? Okay. Sometimes you might have to manage up in order to get the skills and knowledge and experience.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Here's a common example. So there's a lot of VP of finance types of individuals or a lot of VPs of marketing, a lot of that VP, senior VP level tier that haven't broken into the C level, right? If you're a VP of finance and you want to be a CFO, there are things that CFOs, even certain CFOs, there's a lot of CFOs out there that haven't experienced a fundraise going through the roadshow and IPO, that haven't managed a private equity board. They haven't had the experience doing these things and preparing and addressing those issues. They need that experience. They need someone that will allow them to ride shotgun or to take some pieces of that, right? So, hey, give it to me. Let me do that for you. How can I help you with that? Get engaged with that, get your name on that so that when you're now looking for your next opportunity, and they say, Have you been involved in a fundraise or in an IPO? An acquisition. Yeah. Acquisition, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Yeah. Okay. All right, Huff. You've told me you have a secret here, a secret weapon that you can identify the top 1% of talent within a couple of minutes or even less. Yep. How do you do this?

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Well, if you input your credit card, I'd be more than happy to share with you. Oh, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'll be more than happy to share with you. So I observed this behavior when I first got into recruiting, and it's remained constant until today. And that is there's a difference between the top 10% and the other 90%, but there's also a distinct difference between the top 1% and that other 9%. And that is they are extremely good qualifiers. They do it up front and they do it very diplomatically. And you don't even know it. You don't so yeah. One of the things I'll do when I interview someone is I'll say, So say I'm interviewing you. We get on the call, and rather than me start asking questions, I'm gonna throw the ball to you. And I'm gonna say, So, Justin, how are you doing today? Good like that. So, well, what's going on in your world today? Just casual, you know, and you'll say, Well, you know, and I see where you go with this, right? But people that are top 1%, they'll answer the question and say, Hey, Huff, let me ask you, you we're talking about this particular opportunity. Can I ask you a few questions about it? Or can you share with they kind of get right to business? What they're trying to do is qualify to make sure that they are investing their time right with you. They're very conscious about the value of who they are and and time, they're results-oriented, they don't waste time talking about nothing forever, and they don't ramble. They're very focused, they're very clear. You can tell it. And so the quick story is there was a company that people may recall called Soft for 2000, and then we're in Finium, and I don't who bought them now after maybe Oracle or somebody. I have no clue. I don't remember so long ago. They had some very strong, powerful, successful sales reps. They even had this elite team. So keep in mind, and this is when I first got into recruiting, that their salespeople were again on a plan of like a 55 base and a 110 OTE. Their top performers, and there were only four of them, and there were four in the region, but they overlaid the organization, and these were the best of the best. They were all making four exit. They were making $400,000 a year consistently, and it's because of their performance and their ability. So put that into today's world. The average OTE for sales rep now is about, you know, 300 or 400, depending. At 400, that's $1.6 million a year. Think about that. Think about sales reps that consistently today produce $1.6 million. So they possessed this trait. And so I'm talking with the sales manager that manages these four individuals. And he said, Yeah, he says, these guys are really good. He says, I have to manage them though. And I said, What do you mean? He goes, Well, one of them is so good at this, he will pick up the phone and call the C, and this company, Software 2000, sold financial applications primarily on AS400 and at mid-range IBM equipment, but they were a financial application software vendor for the mid-range. And so this one individual, he said, he will pick up the phone and call the CFO and say, listen, before I get in the car and come see you, I need to know, do you have the money or budget? And if if I show you this, are you going to spend it with me? And I said, he said that he goes, yeah. He says he gets away with it. But this guy is so focused on right. And I happen to talk, I know that I've stayed in touch with this particular sales rep over the years. And I think he may be retired now, slowed down. But uh, I was talking to him about several years ago, and I said, Jay, that's his name. I said, Jay, I said, what was behind that? Why did you do that? And you know, I've told this story probably once a month for 30 years. He goes, well, he said, Huff, he said, I realized in the beginning of my career that my most valuable asset was my time. And I wasn't going to waste my time with anybody that was kicking tires or wanted to go through a long evaluation process. I want to know if you're ready to do business. Now, that's an extreme example. The way that plays out with executives, not still necessarily salespeople, and this is what remains constant, is they're very good and very diplomatic about qualifying up front, whether it's a deal, a merger, you know, talking to investors, whatever the case may be. So they're very good at doing that. And that's why I'm so big when I coach people on interviewing, as you know, I do that, that it's actually the questions you ask that will say much more about you. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

So I'm very focused on asking questions, asking them up front, and asking the right ones. He can control the interview, even though you're the one being interviewed. But you don't make it feel like control. You don't make it feel that way. Right. Right. And it comes out of not just the knowledge or the tactics on how to do that, it comes out of a passion right here in your heart where listen, I need to understand. I want to, I don't want to waste your time, I don't want to waste my time, but I need to really be clear. What are you looking for? Why is that important? How is that impacting you? What have you done in the past? What do you, if you could wave your magic wand, what do you want to see? Right. If you and I were to, let's say we decide to get married and you hire me, right? And we go to lunch and it's 90 days. I've been there 90 days, and you look at me and you say, Huff, you absolutely got the three most important things done that had to get done in the first 90 days. What would that be?

SPEAKER_00 35:29

What would they be? Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Top one percent right there. Okay. You can tell it in the first five minutes. They're asking and probing, and they're getting down to business. The ones that ramble and you know, it's it's low odds that they're a top one percenter.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Okay. So along the questions uh train here, as a CEO, what kinds of questions should you expect from uh maybe not the top one percent, let's say top five percent marketing talent. What kind of questions should you be looking for?

SPEAKER_01 36:06

If I'm a CEO that's hiring a marketing executive, what questions should I be asking? Okay. I'm gonna give you some more generic types of answers, not necessarily specific. And I heard this years ago and it just made sense to me, but I think one of the number one questions that a CEO should be asking is Hey, Justin, tell me what are you passionate about? Yeah, where are your passions? What are you passionate about? And the theory behind that is if you're not passionate about anything, why are you gonna be passionate about something here? Sure. I want people that are passionate. That and the other question is tell me why you would want to work here. Help me understand. Why would you want to work here? And there's really a follow-up question that's sort of hidden behind that. What I'm really getting at is what is your personal why? Why do you do what you do? What's whoa?

SPEAKER_00 37:01

All right, let's let's hold the phone here. So you want the CEO to ask the candidate why you want to work here, but shouldn't the candidate be assessing whether or not they want to work there in the first place? What's if they don't know? What's if they're there and there to do to figure out whether they want to work there?

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Yeah, well, it's a two-way street. Okay. And the key here is that people that are really good at what they do, and they're performers and top performers, is they have high clarity and high self-awareness. They know who they are, why they do what they do, and what they want to accomplish. And so those people naturally are going to, and listen, with the amount of information you can get with, you know, just one prompt on anything you want, if you don't know a lot about going into a company before even deciding to spend time to talk to them, if you haven't done that, you're not an A player. Yeah. You're just interviewing.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

Right. And so think about this. Why is that so important? Is if people have high self-awareness, and you and I have talked about this before, things like Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, the 12 steps, right? It all starts with step one, which is acknowledgement and awareness. I have a problem. Yes, yeah. I have a problem. Yeah. Right. Emotional intelligence, EQ, in the five phases of EQ, five steps of EQ. The first one is self-awareness. And when we use the psychometric assessment, that part that I mentioned that sounded fancy, like cognitive structure and how people think, value, and judge, we're actually measuring how clearly they see things. And you have to first see it before you can do it. If I can't see and understand physics, I'm not going to be able to explain it to you. And I'm darn sure not going to be able to do it. So you have to have high clarity and high awareness. So that's why I think those questions are very powerful. Keep in mind you're asking about the CEO asking these questions. So the only reason that person is talking to the CEO is because somewhere along the line, interviewing the peers or through the recruiter or whatever the case may be, that we already know they're a fit experientially. They wouldn't be at this level if they didn't have something, right? You wouldn't be invited back. I'm making the assumption that you fit the requirement. Now I need to know about do you fit the company? So here's another riddle I want to throw this in there. I've said before is that a hiring executive has two questions on their mind. They're rarely vocalized, but you can always tell when they've been answered.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Let me see if I can answer this.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

How are you going to make my job easier? And am I going to like working with you?

SPEAKER_01 39:42

Number two is correct, and there's nothing wrong with number one. But what I typically say is they're looking at you with sort of this inquisitive curiosity. Is Justin a fit for this role? And we can do the checklist and check off, and I'm going, and I'll ask some questions. You'll give me some examples. Okay, yeah, Justin can do that, right? And the second question they're asking is are they a fit for me? They fit for me. And that's where the real fits takes place. And this is the secret to being competitively differentiated from people that have the exact same experience as you.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

What should some of the questions that the CMO or the marketing leader what questions should you be looking for coming from the candidate themselves?

SPEAKER_01 40:30

Yeah, I think relevancy is the first thing I would say. You know, are they asking questions that are relevant to what we're talking about for this role and that are relevant marketing-related questions? For example, tell me a little bit more about your marketplace and who you compete with and what market share you have and what's working in marketing right now or not? Or what's the differentiator? Where can you guys go toe-to-toe with your competition where you always win or lose? What's the biggest reason the company loses? How is the messaging working? What messaging are you using? Is sales actually delivering and actually talking about the messaging and the strategy that we've created here? What does the team look like? How is the team functioning? How does marketing interface with sales and with customer success and so forth? What has worked in this role before? What has not worked in this role? I like that. And then and so you're when you're asking questions in general, whether it's marketing or anything like that, you're really trying to find out questions about three buckets questions about the company, questions about the role within the company, and questions about the person or individual in front of you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

That's where they fall. Okay. So let's say that the candidate took the psychometric evaluation and is a fit. How do you identify red flags in said candidate? Through the assessment results or let's say after the assessment. Let's say they've already taken the assessment.

SPEAKER_02 42:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

And they're there because they have the experience and they I don't want to say pass, but they took the psychometric and cleared that hurdle. I want a CEO identified potential red flags in addition.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Yeah. Okay. Well, if they've got me, they've got a great coach helping them. Okay. Because I can see things that they do not see. And part of that is what's that? I knew you were gonna say that. Well, no, it's my ego's not that big, I promise. But seriously speaking, for the CEO, if the CEO is in tune with what the assessment results reflect, and they're very in tune with a strong qualifying interview process, right? So behavior doesn't lie. So let's just talk about that. Let's remove the assessment and the psychometric data, because it is scientific data, remove that from the picture for a moment. Let's talk about what people typically do with the interaction, right? And so you're observing, you're reading, you're understanding. And I look for character-related issues. If you look at the top executives in the marketplace that end up like Enron or pick one of the pick one of the old stories where the executives, you know, crashed and burned, it wasn't because they couldn't do their job or they weren't really good. It was because of a character flaw. They weren't ethical, yeah. They weren't ethical. And so I think when you hire people that have high values, high standards, high character, there's a trust factor. And so relationships are based on two things trust and respect. Trust and respect. Those are the foundational items that any relationship works on. Those are the two rails that relationship has strengthened. And so those are key things. If there's any hint of character, and character may not necessarily be some evil deceptive. Lie, cheating, dishonesty, thing like that. It can be something as much as reliability, dependability, confidence. You know, if people say they're going to follow up with you and they don't, or they don't follow up when they say they do, or you know, there's just a lot of signals, that's really a topic for a whole other discussion to get into that. Now let's talk about the scientific data and bring the psychometric assessment tool back into the picture. What I didn't share with you is when the team initially generates their psychometric assessment results. So we've got the scores on the 55 attributes that fall into behaviors, motivators, competencies, and acumen. When we find a candidate that does have the right knowledge, skills, and experience, that checklist of things, we give the candidate the same concentric assessment. And we take their assessment, we overlay it on the company's benchmark assessment, and we create a third report. We create a gap analysis. So now I can tell you in advance how well this person fits or doesn't fit. And we convert that into a coaching report. Now I can tell you what their greatest strengths are. I can tell you where they're going to struggle. I can tell you how well they fit the job or don't fit the job. I can tell you if they're a leader or a doer. I can tell you if they have high clarity about who they are. I can tell you if they are going to be trainable or moldable. I can give you a lot of information and data. Here's a good example. I was working with a CEO and she was looking to hire a CFO. And this CFO, turns out, had done some contract work for her years before. So when I presented the candidate, she goes, Oh, I know this guy. He's done some work for me. He'd be a good candidate. And we did the benchmark, got her results back. I knew about what was important for them in terms of the fit. And then I give this candidate this assessment. And it comes back and there's a red flag. It shows that not only is this guy extremely confident in his abilities, that he's already arrived, that he doesn't need to learn anymore. It also had a factor because we look at it, that he wasn't willing to learn anymore, that he wasn't trainable, coachable. So guess what happened? Now, let me share with you. This guy was six foot six, two thousand dollar suit, scratch golfer, Harvard MBA. Right? Who doesn't want that for your CFO? Right? He gets on board, and 30 days into it, I get a call and he calls me up. He's down in Miami, and he said, Hey, I just want to let you know, I'm down here in Miami. I took an extra day off to play golf while I'm down here. And the CEO had the audacity to call me and give me a to-do list of things to do. Like, I don't know what I need to do. She let him go. Yeah. Right? It was just even an attitudinal thing. Yeah. But I told her when I saw this result, I said, I'm telling you that he's not ready. Yeah. You know what she told me? She goes, I know him, I can handle him. I said, Okay, but you're aware.

SPEAKER_00 46:57

I wasn't gonna ask this, but I'm gonna ask it because I had this conversation with someone recently, and I was talking about an inexperience with a CEO who is widely believed to have uh sociopathic or narcissistic tendencies. And the person said, Well, that fits the bill of most CEOs. Do you believe that? Do you believe that most good CEOs, maybe of large companies, uh, have sociopathic or narcissistic tendencies?

SPEAKER_01 47:30

No, I don't think I do. Yeah. No, I do think that they are a unique breed. Anybody that can pull themselves up by their bootstrap, be visionary, be resilient, deal with failure, because they all deal with failure, pick themselves up, grow, continue to move forward. You know, and there's you got to keep in mind there's different stages of a company and different types of CEOs. Ones that can launch a company an idea, ones that can really grow and push a pedal down, and others that are really good at that the maintenance and squeezing continued uh cash cow money out of it year after year. Do you hear this a lot? No, I actually don't. Well, let me back up because I hear it all the time. Founder and owner CEOs are dysfunctional. Yeah. In some way or another. They're visionaries, but they've earned it and they deserve a lot of it too. And listen, they're in control, right? Yeah, and but that's different because I was in uh Vistage for several years and I worked with a lot of non-private equity back, non-official board. You want to describe what vista is? Vistage is a peer-to-peer CEO group that's been around since the late 50s. It started out as I think called tech or TEC, not associated with technology. And then somewhere along the line, they changed it to Vistage. So based out of San Diego, they have 21,000 members worldwide, and they have cell groups of about 12 CEOs that get together and meet once a month to work on the business, not in the business. So it's peer-to-peer professional and personal support, training, education. The address, not being lonely at the top. So they tend to get non-private equity backed companies of homegrown founder CEO companies that need help and sounding boards and guidance and accountability.

SPEAKER_02 49:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:16

But can't tell you how many times there are dysfunctional CEOs that are running the company. But with private equity has advanced in the last 20 years, it's become a totally different game than it was. And they have playbooks, they've seen the cycles and done this before. And they're bankers. Okay. Yeah. They're bankers, they're not entrepreneurs. So they're running the businesses by the numbers. They do a good job of it in terms of achieving their objectives. I'm not sure that is always the best fit for everyone out there, but you just have to know what you're dealing with. Yeah. Some people are fit for it, others are not. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 49:56

What do CEOs get wrong about marketing?

SPEAKER_01 49:59

I'm going to say something that I know 50% of the people are going to say, this guy didn't know what he's talking about. And yeah, they're going to say, finally, somebody said it. I have three majors, and one of them is marketing. And I've always believed that sales should report to marketing. And but that's not the way it is because there's this pressure for numbers. And so what you have is a sales engine. These are these uh cowboys and cowgirls, these are these mavericks that are out there, and they're good because they leap tall buildings in a single bound, they're faster than speeding bullet, they may break some glass along it, but they bring home the bacon. Well, they they can be, and some of them be strategic too and smart about what they do, but there's uh scripture that says if you just love people, you know, the Bible has a lot of do's and don'ts. Do this, don't do that, you know, all these rules, it feels like. But then there's this one scripture that says, you know what? If you just love people, it covers a multitude of sin. Just love, right? Well, in the business world, I say revenue. If you just have revenue, it covers a multitude of sin, right? And so sales engines tend to be the prima donnas of the organization for good reasons, right? You have to have revenue. The problem is when and where CEOs get it wrong or don't support marketing the way it should be, and there's a reason for that, is where the tail is wagging the dog. So are you looking for a CMO that's going to help you with strategy and differentiate you in position and disposition the market and competition? Or are you looking for someone that's just going to drive lead gen and demand, and you're looking for maybe a VP level or a director level person that's really good at Martech and demand gen and all that other stuff. And today's market, keep this in mind. When markets are growing and expanding and everything's good, you're focused a lot on revenue and market share and investing in the future. You're investing long term. When markets are shrinking or tough or struggling, you're focused more on cost and operational efficiency. And that's the market we're in today. Okay. So you only make money two ways. You either increase revenue or decrease cost. That's it. Okay. And so there's more pressure on the cost equation. There's also more pressure on I need to see an ROI like now. This whole branding and positioning that sounds good for the future, but it doesn't do anything today. And if we don't do anything today, I'm going to lose my job. Yeah.

unknown 52:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:27

So here's the tip: when you're interviewing and you're a marketing executive, and maybe you are that senior strategic marketing executive, yes, you can talk about that, but make sure you include, like you talked about being strategic and tactical, include how you quickly fix and generate the numbers.

SPEAKER_02 52:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:46

Let me just say for the record that you said that sales should report into marketing. So thank you for saying that. Number one.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

The reason they should report into it is because I believe that your whole market strategy and your marketing strategy, right? The sales fits into that. Yeah. Sales fits into that. And yeah. Yeah. And what you have is you have salespeople that are biased. It's kind of like pharmaceutical companies. Why are they selling this drug now? Because they make money doing it. Is it the best thing for people? Maybe for some people, but it's probably a lot of abuse in that system, too.

SPEAKER_00 53:24

Yeah. We would say that there's ample industry evidence that shows that marketing teams that report to sales that their growth is substantially lower than their competitors who have independent marketing teams. And there's lots of data that shows that. I don't know about sales reporting into marketing, but if you're going to have one of them, I do think logically it seems like it should report to marketing and not the other way around. But thank you for saying that. Well, if you're marketing, do you really want to manage sales? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 53:56

No.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

No, but I'm kidding. Let me just say I've spent 50% of my time in the sales and marketing engine of companies. Yeah. Okay. So I'm very familiar with this. And there are a lot of really good strategic, smart sales leaders. Okay. And that I have a lot of admiration and respect for. But we're talking generally speaking.

SPEAKER_02 54:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:17

It's a job I wouldn't want to do, and I have a lot of respect for salespeople that could do it and do it effectively. I could not imagine making cold calls and getting turned down every day and being judged and graded on daily and weekly activities. That sounds very stressful to me. And I have a lot of respect for those people. Well, it's not your DNA. It's not.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

And that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 54:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:43

Do recruiters get a bad rap? Do recruiters get a bad rap? Yes. Yes. And a lot of times rightfully so. Okay. I will tell you that the recruiters out there and the reputation they have really make my job a lot easier. Because all I have to do is be ethical, trustworthy, give back, and help people. I'm a helper. I think you know that. I'll serve people. I'll spend more time with people. One of the most common feedback statements I get from candidates that have talked to me the first time is, wow, you spent more time with me than any recruiter. Yeah. Because I do take the time to understand, to empathize, to truly help them. And I'm also very direct. I think you know that too. If I see someone on a like, I'm going to tell you. But the intent is because I want you to get better. I want you to not make that mistake again. I don't want you to say it that way anymore. I want you to stand up for yourself, not discount yourself in a particular area. Right. And so people need encouragement. They need knowledge and information. And I enjoy that. That's why I do coaching now, also, not just recruiting. So I do a lot of coaching, as you know. Well, I believe it because I've seen it.

SPEAKER_00 55:58

And how can people uh reach you, Huff?

SPEAKER_01 56:03

Well, so let's start with my name. And uh it's H-U-F-F Logue L-O-G-U-E. And Logue is like Vogue magazine except with an L. I'm the only one on LinkedIn like that. So you just look me up. You can send me a connection request. It's a very easy name to remember. Yeah, I have a couple of different websites. One of them is execulinks.com, ex-e-c-u-l-in-k-s.com, and the other one is execulinks.co.

SPEAKER_00 56:29

I appreciate it, huh? It's been a very fun conversation. And uh, thanks again for being on high intent. I love it. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 56:37

Pleasure to be with you again. I think you're awesome. Keep doing what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 56:41

Thank you, sir.

SPEAKER_01 56:42

Ditto.