The 5 Shocking Reasons Senior & Strategic Marketing Leaders Are Leaving Your Tech Company

Hiring the right people is key to making your business a success but retaining them is equally as important. When your senior and strategic marketing leaders start deserting the company, it’s a sure sign that something’s going wrong, somewhere along the line. It’s at this point that many businesses start to panic and begin searching for replacements, only to experience the same cycle in a matter of months.

By understanding why your senior team isn’t staying with the company long, you can get an insight into how candidates and employees think. From there, you’ll have the knowledge you need to enhance your corporate culture, maximise retention rates, and get increased value from your team.

With this in mind, take a look at the five shocking reasons senior and strategic marketing leaders are leaving your tech company:

1. Lack of Vision

Tech is an exciting industry and one which offers unlimited growth potential. Whether you’re developing new software solutions, creating innovative hardware, or writing next-generation machine learning algorithms, senior staff will want to know where the company is headed.

If your company doesn’t have an established growth plan, you’re going to miss out on opportunities and potentially underperform. Conversely, implementing a strategy for the future encourages you to examine the market and uncover hidden opportunities that can lead to exciting developments.

Once you have a company vision in place, be sure to convey this to your senior and strategic team leaders and the workforce as a whole. When people can connect their day-to-day activities with the company’s overarching objectives, you’ll get more buy-in and the workforce will be happier and more productive.

2. Limited Freedom

Nobody likes to be micromanaged, so don’t make the mistake of restricting your leadership team too much. After all, you’re hiring senior and strategic marketing professionals because you want them to use their expertise and experience to drive your company forward, so why hold them back?

As people rise through the ranks and reach the C-suite, they’re looking for opportunities that will allow them to flex their muscles and show what they’re capable of. Without the chance to instigate change, introduce new processes, and help the business evolve, senior managers are likely to feel stifled and unfulfilled. As well as contributing to an unhappy working environment, this is highly likely to increase employee turnover rates and it could be a prime reason that leaders are leaving your tech company.

3. Lack of Flexibility

Technology has drastically altered the way we work and given us the potential to connect with colleagues and peers in a whole new way. Now, your staff don’t need to be in the same location in order to collaborate effectively with one another. In fact, remote working arrangements ensure that distributed teams can thrive, even when they consist of employees from all over the world.

Since COVID-19, companies have been more flexible in terms of working arrangements and employees are expecting this to continue. For senior marketers, hybrid working arrangements and the chance to create a better work-life balance really are dealbreakers when it comes to finding the right role.

Providing your teams with a flexible work-life doesn’t just benefit individuals; it can have many advantages for the company too. A happy employee will be more motivated and have more company loyalty, so you’ll certainly benefit from increased flexibility too.

However, it’s important to remember that introducing hybrid working arrangements isn’t solely about rolling out updated tech infrastructures to facilitate distributed teams. In addition to this, you need to work hard to foster a sense of camaraderie and ensure that every member of the workforce is recognised as a valuable member of the team. With new management styles, you can ensure that hybrid working provides a long-term solution that keeps your senior staff happy and benefits your business.

4. Salary Rises in the Industry

Understandably, people want to earn a salary that’s commensurate with their abilities and experience. If you’re offering a remuneration package that’s significantly lower than your competitors, don’t be surprised when people jump ship and seek out new roles with other firms.

On the other hand, you don’t necessarily need to be the highest paying firm in your sector in order to attract top talent. When senior strategists and marketers are looking for their dream role, they consider more than just the salary that’s on offer. By offering a competitive salary and ensuring regular increases to correspond with market changes and providing a fulfilling work environment, freedom, and flexibility, you can attract and retain the best candidates in your sector.

5. Company Interest and Attachment

Employees need the company to perform well to retain their roles but, aside from this, corporate performance has relatively little impact on their overall job satisfaction. As employees rise through the ranks and take on more responsibility, however, they become more accountable for company performance and their attachment grows.

To maximise the level of attachment that a senior member of staff has to the company, you need to increase their interest in the firm. Giving senior leaders the opportunity to purchase company shares or even gifting shares in the form of a bonus is one way to do this. When your senior and strategic marketing leaders own shares in the company, they essentially have ‘skin in the game’. Then, leaving the firm becomes a much less attractive prospect.

Understanding Your Candidates and New Hires

Getting an accurate insight into what your candidates and employees think will help you to become a more attractive employer and have a positive impact on retention rates. At Acquire, we take the time to gain market intelligence from niche talent pools. This enables us to identify and understand how senior marketers see the industry, what they’re being offered by competitors, what factors are most important to them in a professional role, and much, much more.

To learn more about the specialist services we can provide when you’re searching for senior and strategic marketing leaders & executives, get in touch with Alex Marriner, Founder & Leadership Search Consultant at Alex@AcquireDigitalTalent.com.