The commercial director is one of the top managers of the company, who is responsible for profit and is the second person after the CEO. Therefore, his search must be approached with special responsibility.
Appeal to headhunters
When searching for a commercial director, many managers turn to headhunters. Before he starts negotiations with candidates, he needs to explain the positive aspects of working in the company. This will increase the likelihood of attracting a qualified and experienced employee. Three arguments are most effective: the organization's reputation, an interesting prospect (for example, large-scale and with independent decisions of the manager), favorable terms of payment (for example, the opportunity to receive an option). But headhunters take quite a lot of money for their work.
An example of headhunters' work.
One large trade and Reason to Choose Our Database Service manufacturing enterprise needed a commercial director for a new project. Its goal is to build a distribution network in Russia and the CIS countries from scratch.
Requirements: at least five years of experience in the industry, pro-Western thinking, stable business contacts in the industry. MBA degree is a plus. The company itself was looking for a suitable manager: 4 months did not bring the desired results.
When contacting the agency, the employee was found within 2 months. After another two months, he started working. The headhunters were helped by a carefully developed portrait of the ideal candidate. Experienced recruiters completed the task quite quickly, taking three months of the candidate's salary for it.
Recommendations from the immediate environment
You can try to find a commercial director among your acquaintances. Friends, relatives, colleagues, partners – it makes sense to ask everyone who makes up your immediate circle about a suitable candidate. If such a person is found, then most likely he or she is already working in the same or related industry.
Search for a Commercial Director
The advantage of searching among acquaintances is that the candidate may already know about the company and its field of activity. If the guarantor is an employee of the enterprise, then he will play the role of a coach for the new top manager.
An employee from the same industry
Finding a commercial director in this way is very difficult. It is unlikely that a company will be able to find a manager who has already worked in an enterprise from the same industry and with a similar business model. The fact is that such employees very rarely move to competing organizations. If this happens, then only under very favorable conditions.
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Employee from another industry
There are quite a few examples of how the position of commercial director was successfully occupied by a specialist from another field. For example, a top manager from the lighting industry who moved to the telecommunications industry. Another illustrative example is the jump of a manager from the automobile business to the banking industry. But why does the specialist need this? Many try to test their capabilities, gain new knowledge and skills.
As a rule, an understanding of the product and industry specifics is formed after 1.5 months of work in a new company. However, the employee must try hard to do this. At first, narrowly focused employees of the enterprise must explain various nuances related to the product to the commercial director. It will take another 1.5–2 months for the new specialist to understand the specifics of business processes, communications and the organizational structure of the company. During this time, the manager will build a system for managing the commercial block (or reorganize the existing structure). He will also need to develop a plan for the development of the commercial direction (or optimization of the existing one).