How to Hire a Chief Marketing Officer
Setting the Stage
In this interview series, we discuss how to avoid burning cash on your marketing strategies (or as we call it, the CMO Money Pit), by showing why it’s important to start with quality at the source; when you hire a Chief Marketing Officer. Our full Case-Study / Case-Interview featuring Darryl Praill and VanillaSoft can be found here.
When a group of inside sales reps needed a more efficient way to optimize their time and make more sales, they tried a number of existing lead routing software solutions to help. They found that nothing on the market focused on what they needed most – streamlining the call process and driving more sales – so they decided to build one themselves.
Presto! VanillaSoft.
Darryl Praill is a highly regarded marketing executive who had worked with industry giants like SAP, IBM, Airbus, Kinaxis and UBM – along with helping raise millions in funding and taking companies public – before starting his own boutique marketing firm.
By his own admission, Praill was very happy running his own shop. He wasn’t looking for a job. And although he’d been approached by recruiters countless times, Praill had always turned them down flat. “Every single time a recruiter had called me up, I’d actually said, ‘No, go away. I like my life,’” he says. “I had a good quality of life. I had a steady, predictable income. I had good relationships with my clients.”
But then executive recruiter David Perry came calling. He was looking to hire a chief marketing officer role at up-and-coming software firm VanillaSoft and knew Praill was the perfect candidate. At the time, VanillaSoft was a relatively small but successful sales engagement company with around 750 global clients and superior technology but was dwarfed by some of its competitors. The company needed a top-tier marketing mind like Praill’s to help get it on the map.
Little did Praill know at the time, but he also needed VanillaSoft. And even though he turned Perry-Martel down at first, he soon changed his mind. Because Perry-Martel’s entire approach to executive recruiting was different than anything he’d had ever experienced – and for all the right reasons.
