Hiring for Insights
Finding the right talent to turn data into content
Last week we covered why you should consider building an Insights team.
And you agreed! You (as the CMO or other high-ranking marketer) made the case to the CEO and got the green light. Insights is on the roadmap for H2 2023.
But how do you find the right people to do the building? Which team structures are most conducive to insights done well? and where should those teams live within the broader context of the company?
Let’s dig in.
The first Insights hire
Remember the goal of an Insights team: to systematize the creation of valuable content from a pool of proprietary data.
Ideally, your first hire for this team can prove out the thesis for both bolded aspects of the program above. They will be responsible for creating a system that takes cleaned, modeled data from your product and turns it into various forms of content for public consumption. Here’s what the first 2 months of their tenure may look like:
First 30 days
Immediately begin speaking with customers in social comments, listening on recorded sales calls, reviewing with current marketers to understand the most common questions your data can answer.
Understand (from collaboration with data team) where data lives, how it’s stored, and the level of transformation needed to produce data graphics.
Establish (with legal) guidelines on public data production, what is acceptable, and what level of customer privacy is demanded from contracts and expected from the market.
Review the current Insights tech stack and make adjustments as needed (visualization tool, design tool, web publishing as a start).
Produce 1-3 initial graphics.
Fist 60 days
Publish minimum of 2 pieces per month of content on company and personal social (this will ramp up quickly).
Create a weekly measurement cadence (aggregate views and actions from published graphics, tag with themes/customer profiles/etc).
Rinse and repeat for other datasets across the business (if your company has more than one core product).
That’s a lot of stuff!
When you boil it down, though, three key skillsets emerge. This ideal first hire for Insights would have enough technical chops to pull data and visualize it. They would have the content marketing toolkit to write compelling narratives and publish the content in the right way for the right audiences. And they would have the influence-building mindset to build rapport cross-functionally in advance of the many requests for help they are sure to make in the future.
If you can find all three aspects in a single person, done, that’s your first hire. But what if you can’t?
Is it easier to teach a data analyst to become an excellent content marketer or a great content marketer to visualize data?
Perhaps this is spicy but: in all likelihood, you’ll want to teach the marketer how to visualize data (or find one that will teach themselves).
Many data analysts want to grow up to be data scientists, data engineers, or perhaps these days ML engineers. The marketing aspects of the Insights job may not appeal to them, nor fit neatly with their career goals.
A data-curious marketer, by contrast, should be willing to dive into data visualization. While the role benefits from more technical skills like SQL, even someone who is simply decent at Tableau or other BI tools can make a real impact. Search for marketers with BI experience in your outreach.
Insights team building
Okay, you’ve got your first Insights hire in the door. They are producing content at regular cadences, they’ve ingratiated themselves with your data science team, and your ecosystem has begun to notice your data content.
Time to scale, right?
Probably not.
A major portion of Insights done correctly is building internal systems to produce data answer at scale without using more people. So resist the urge to add headcount to the tiny team even after the content starts to resonate.
Your initial hire will probably have a backlog list that gets longer by the day - this is a good thing! Being a single point of ingestion for all the requests across the company will allow them to have better visibility into what really needs to be built and what can wait.
Eventually, however, you’ll need to expand. I personally believe that hiring a team of generalists (those that can visualize data themselves and could step into the initial hire’s role without too much trouble) is a better approach than specializing the work into graphics creation, writing, and distribution. So your job description for hire #2 is essentially identical to hire #1! In fact, let’s sketch out that JD together now:
Insights Manager, Company XYZ
San Francisco, CA or Remote
The Problem You’ll Solve
You will create XYZ’s Insights practice, a part of the marketing organization. Insights at XYZ will be focused on turning all the proprietary data XYZ has amassed through our game-changing products into valuable content for our customers, prospects, and ecosystem. Your role will build affinity for XYZ through data.
Qualifications
Excellent storytelling skills, with experience translating complex data topics into understandable narratives for a broad audience.
Adept in Tableau, Power BI, Looker, or other data visualization tools (or willingness to learn).
Adept in Figma, Sketch, or other design tools (or willingness to learn).
Experience driving cross-functional projects end-to-end and managing stakeholders. Ability to negotiate and influence priorities across organizations at all levels.
Delight in ambiguity and excited to build a new function with very little established playbook.
Demonstrated ability to iterate quickly and document learnings.
Next person up
One final point - if you have a marketer already on staff who would jump at the chance to build data content, that’s nearly always the best route. Data viz is important but a deep understanding of your customers is even more so.
As a reminder, if you’d like to begin an Insights practice at your company, shoot me a note. I’ve coached more than a dozen marketers over the past 6 months on the right way to get started.
Hope this was insightfull - would deeply appreciate if you could share this article with 1 marketer who you think would benefit from the content. Next week, we’ll look at the exact process we take to create a social data graphic at Carta.
Great post. Love this.