Confidential Dual Search Fills Two Senior Roles

This engagement involved a Swiss-based public company with a photogrammetry platform that converts drone imagery into accurate 3D models for engineering and construction professionals. Its Americas hub is in Denver and accounts for almost half of the company’s global revenue.

Both senior roles were held by people who were either leaving or underperforming at the beginning of the search. The idea was to have somebody running the Denver team and driving the business to create more of its own sales pipeline. The marketing role needed someone to generate e-commerce revenue across the Americas while the incumbent, based in Madrid, was still in post.

The company name could not be shared with candidates during the sales search, so sourcing had to be run entirely through direct outreach. 

Bilingualism in both Spanish and English was strongly preferred, and at least ten years of sales leadership experience was necessary. The team had relied on inbound for years, and it was hard to tell from a resume if someone had experience changing that kind of team.

The current marketing employee was still in place in Madrid when the search for a replacement began. The search had to be conducted without anyone internally knowing about it, and the role was presented as a reinforcement to the team to keep the cover. The title of the job was less important than the position: The real benchmark was eight to ten years of experience in digital marketing and e-commerce.

From the beginning, candidates with experience in SaaS or technical hardware sales throughout the Americas were the focus of direct outreach. Each sales candidate was asked to point to teams they had turned around, and what the numbers showed afterwards. Final interviews with the CEO were conducted face-to-face in a neutral location, away from the company office to protect the search.

The Swiss hiring manager assessed candidates for the marketing position first, and then forwarded them to the CEO if they advanced. Every interview with marketing candidates asked what digital revenue they had personally owned and what changed. Both searches were run simultaneously through Keller Executive Search, with each search on its own schedule and its own candidate track.

The two positions were filled through the same engagement: the Regional Sales Manager and the Strategic Growth Marketing Specialist. The marketing hire signed her offer letter and was set to start mid-December, and the sales hire was scheduled to start in January. Both hires were confirmed before January, and the searches that led to them had never been on the open market.