The Story and Challenge
Restaurant Technologies (RT) is a noteworthy player in the national food services technology industry who sells their products and services primarily into three main channels. The RT leadership team recognized a need to focus their efforts specifically on deeper penetration of the Key National Accounts channel in order to accomplish their strategic growth goals. In light of the desire to rapidly execute on this strategy, their Chief People Officer reached out to our team for an organizational design discussion, specifically of the marketing function. We quickly recognized that a revision of the organization structure was required including bringing in an additional marketing leader capable of driving a thoughtful and targeted communications strategy that would successfully resonate with all the key players within the complex structure of their National Accounts customer base. These customers have varied levels of decision makers which presents a unique challenge in that RT finds it necessary to reach both the franchise-level executives as well as further penetration downstream to the individual business managers with compelling product messaging. It was also important to our client to identify an up-and-coming marketing leader capable of inheriting a lean team of 6 reports and supporting recent efforts to increase effective cross functional collaboration spearheaded by the hiring manager, our previous placement and Senior Director of Product Management and Engineering, who after only one year in his role, has made such a strong impact that he was promoted to lead the Marketing function as well.
Our Approach
Our Cultura team spent several hours in discovery with key stakeholders from the RT team including the Chief People Officer, Senior Director of Strategic Human Resources, as well as the Head of Product, Engineering and Marketing. Based on our deep understanding of the RT hiring team's goals, our principals spent a full week and a half conducting a comprehensive research and sourcing process. Knowing that RT was interested in a marketing communications repositioning to ensure growth of the National Accounts channel, we mapped out top players in industrial markets locally to ultimately identify leaders with robust experience in enterprise B2B marketing. We coupled that with a targeted effort to find relatively early-career marketing leaders on the rise who would be ready to jump in and take a hands-on leadership role with the potential to succeed into higher levels of executive leadership given the succession planning considerations the RT team discussed. We spent many hours with prospects assessing their cultural fit, grittiness, and willingness to collaborate effectively cross functionally, as well as their expertise working in a highly technical environment, particularly in the mechanical engineering industrial markets.
The Results
After 4 weeks of thorough outreach engaging with hundreds of top leaders in this space sharing the story around RT’s history and marketing needs to drive their channel-specific growth vision, our team met with the hiring team to present a fully assessed short list of 8 promising top candidate prospects. Following our presentation, 5 of the prospects were selected to move forward in a formal and intensive interview process consisting of 3 separate rounds with 8 key stakeholders, inclusive of their CEO and an original founder. Throughout the interview process, our team supported coordination of key stakeholder interviews while also prioritizing efforts to create an unparalleled and positive candidate experience. Ultimately, 1 of the talented finalists was unanimously selected by the leadership team as the best fit. An offer was made and their top candidate happily accepted to join the RT family.