BEST PRACTICE: Creating the right marketing team

Marketing, as all readers will surely agree, is one of the critical business functions. Its success or failure is integrally linked to the success or failure of the organisation as a whole, and therefore it is essential that a company can call upon the best possible resources with which to conduct marketing responsibilities. But in this context, 'resources' does not just mean money or data; it also means people. If companies want to get the best out of their marketing, either on a tactical or strategic level, they must ensure that they have the brightest and the best marketing personnel at their disposal.

Herein lies the problem for B2B companies: the traditional and most visible marketing recruitment medium of advertising in weekly trade press is expensive, often unresponsive and heavily biased towards consumer marketers. Whilst in the immediate term this may be annoying for B2B marketers, its potential ultimate consequences are far more serious and worrying: the best candidates are siphoned off by consumer brands, and B2B is starved of marketing talent. This would have massive repercussions for the B2B sector, and would only serve to deepen disparity between B2B and B2C. It would also cement B2B's place as the poor relation of marketing.

However, B2B companies of all sizes and specialisms – and both clients and agencies – have dealt with this challenge in a typically resourceful and pragmatic way. As a result, they have come to rely on a variety of different routes to find suitable marketing candidates.