I’ve been given the opportunity to really learn from different departments at my last two jobs. At Buildium, I was seated with customer support, marketing and finance at different times. It’s been incredibly valuable in shaping how I think about my field – I like to steal whatever concepts or systems I can from my peers and apply them to people strategy. I’d like to talk more about what we can learn from other functions in this and future blogs because I think it helps raise the bar.
Today, a bit from my friend Geoff Roberts, co-founder of Outseta. I asked him to talk to me about a core concept of marketing:
“The 4 P’s of the “marketing mix” is a foundational concept in marketing that’s been popularized since the 1950’s. The first “P” stands for Product, which is the good or service that is being offered. Product should fulfill existing consumer demand, or be compelling enough to create demand on it’s own. The second “P” is for Price, which is the amount of money the consumer is willing to pay for the real or perceived benefits of the product. Price has the most direct implication on revenue. Place is the third P. Place describes where a product is sold and how it is delivered. This could mean specific stores or geographies where the product is offered, or even the specific displays used within a physical store or the positioning of a product within an online store. The final “P” is for Promotion, which is the mix of activities related to advertising, public relations, or direct marketing or sales promotions that are used to promote the product. There is significant interplay between the 4 P’s with each needing to be carefully considered to effectively marketing a product.”
I’ve spent some time before talking about applying marketing principles to recruiting, but not how it can be applied to your people strategy. Let’s “redefine” some of the 4 P’s first:
Product: Your culture as a whole. What and how you are building a product for a customer factor into what your culture is. Ask yourself, what are we going to try to deliver and how are we going to do it from a people and behavior perspective?
Price: How much you want to pay to the talent that will build and deliver services to your customers. The stage of company will really impact this (think bootstrapped versus well-funded).
Place: Easy peasy. Where are you trying to draw talent from and why.
Promotion: Once you understand the culture you want and how much you can pay people, it’s time to figure out how to drive interest in the company and roles to get well-qualified butts in the seat.
Now let’s put those four together into a couple of examples to show why I think we can use them to drive a sound people strategy.
Scenario #1
Ginger is starting a consulting company to advise tech companies on how to scale their businesses with as few headaches as possible. Instead of just focusing on one function, she’s going to have a boutique shop with industry experts to provide clients access to many areas of expertise under one roof. She’s got functional experts lined up in different cities around the US, but still needs to add several functions and find a way to build her clientele list. She’d also like to develop prospective clients in Boston, Austin and the Bay Area. She has a little money in the bank thanks to three clients, but want to be cognizant of costs. Let’s look at the Four P’s.
- Product: Her team is distributed, so openness and collaboration are key traits emphasized in the culture. Being spread across multiple timezones means they can’t share work hours easily; instead they establish a three hour “core-hour” window where everyone is expected to be online and responsive to the team. Otherwise, employees are able to set their own hours, so long as they are responsive to clients and hit their results. Ginger establishes generous vacation and leave policies to fight burnout.
- Price: While there is some money in the bank, she’d like to keep salaries lower to hedge against business being slow for a bit. Ginger establishes bonuses based on company performance so that if the business meets or exceeds expectations, everyone shares in the success. Realistically, though, they cannot pay market rate in the most competitive markets.
- Place: The business aims to penetrate tech markets in several areas, but will have a challenge paying market rate in those cities. Instead of looking for experts in those cities, she focuses on advertising on remote-focused boards. Not having critical mass in any one city also saves on real estate. One area where she sees a local presence as important is with the Business Development roles. For those roles, she posts only in the markets she’s trying to penetrate.
- Promotion: The job opens up doors to working with some really exciting companies. Everyone who joins will have autonomy and the flexibility to build their work life around their personal life (outside of core hours). Ginger decides to focus on the flexibility, ability to work from anywhere, balance and autonomy as selling points for the job in ads and company postings, then taps into her network for referrals (and offers a referral bonus).
Scenario #2
Josh’s passion project – an app with thousands of subscribers and a large potential market – is off the ground. he wants to add customer-requested features quickly. He just closed on a massive round to hire more developers to push product updates, and sales and support teams to help grow and support their base. The people that helped Josh launch are all in Boston and like working together, so they’d like to hire devs solely in Boston. Josh has been at failed start-ups before. While he believes they need to hire devs in Boston to be successful, he’s looking for other ways to save money.
- Product: The team puts in a lot of hours and wants their new office to have common space for collaboration and to let loose, but also quiet places to code. It’s clearly a “work hard/play hard” culture and they are investing in space, perks and benefits that make being in the office more enjoyable. Because they want to innovate, the team carves out time and development budget for all engineers to experiment with new technologies and take on pet projects. They want a performance culture and decide to have a quick hook with people not working out.
- Price: They have money and want experienced devs able to contribute immediately in a pricey market, so they are willing to aim for the 75th percentile for roles in the short term. They can’t afford to spend this level of money for all roles, so the team decides to get creative elsewhere.
- Place: While hiring the dev team in Boston is a no brainer, their investors suggest a different approach for sales and support – building out a team in Nevada or Utah where costs for real estate, salaries and business taxes are lower. This would allow the team to pay market rate for talent with favorable economics.
- Promotion: For dev roles, the team focuses on popular dev job boards, sites focused on tech in Boston, and show up at tech recruiting events. They have a PR firm working to get word out about their new HQ, the fundraise, culture and the market for the app. People like to work on the latest and greatest tech, so they just need a little brand recognition.
Making Sense of it All
It’s easy to miss an opportunity to look at all the components and levers available in people strategy. The Four P’s may not fit like a glove, but it is a good reminder to take a step back and look at the whole picture. What are you trying to do? What do you have in place now? How do you want to get there? What can you do to get there effectively? Like marketing, the right mix is critical. Change one thing in “product”, and you need to take a look at if and how the other P’s should be adjusted.
JaxonHR 