Interview Questions for Hiring a Customer Marketing Manager
So you’re growing your customer marketing team and hiring a customer marketing manager. Congratulations!
This is an important role to your company, and it’s necessary to bring in the right candidate. How do you make sure you’re hiring the right fit?
Here are two guidelines to keep in mind—as well as 5 questions to ask during your interviews.
Guideline 1: Look For the Customer-Centric View
“I like to ask what problems someone has solved in the customer journey. What I’m looking for is a customer-centric view of things.
“For example: I solved a pain point in the onboarding funnel that improved conversion by X%.
“It also helps weed out folks who don’t have the customer-centric view of a journey: We had issues with customer payments so we improved the dunning process.
“While the second statement sounds like a great initiative, it’s looking at things from the company’s view, not the customer’s view.” – Tanya Littlefield, Head of Marketing at Wisq.
Guideline 2: Use Structured Interview Questions
There’s a tendency during interviews to ask candidates different questions based on their response to your first question. This creates a biased interview process, as candidates aren’t being assessed on the same questions.
Structured interview questions are a set of questions connected to job-related traits you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for someone who has the ability to manage multiple projects at once (as most customer marketing managers do), you might say, “Tell me about a time when you were responsible for multiple projects at once. What was the situation, how did you handle it, and what were the results?”
By creating this standardized set of interview questions, you remove the opportunity for biased decision-making in the hiring process.
5 Questions to Ask When Interviewing For a Customer Marketing Manager
Here are five great questions to ask in the interview process—as well as what to look for in the responses.
1. How do you go about learning about your customers?
A key part of the customer marketing role is a deep understanding of your customers. This question will help you understand how the candidate thinks about learning about and engaging with your customers.
2. How do you segment your customers for communications and notifications?
Customer marketing managers often work on segmenting communications to ensure customers get the right message at the right time. This question will help you see if 1) the candidate is currently segmenting their customers and 2) if so, how they think about segmentation.
3. How would you evaluate a specific program’s success?
What you’re looking for in response to this question is 1) Do they measure the success of their programs? And 2) Do they think about success in terms of activities or results? Many customer marketers measure activities (# of case studies, # of references, # of reviews) but fall short of tying those activities to business goals.
4. How do you prioritize customer marketing requests?
Customer marketing tends to be asked to do a lot with little resources, making prioritization paramount. This question will help you understand if the candidate prioritizes requests and, if so, how they make decisions around prioritization.
5. What are some customer marketing programs you like and what do you like about them?
Great customer marketing managers are looking at what other companies are doing to get ideas for future programs and how to do things better. This question will help you gauge whether a candidate is looking at what others are doing so they can bring those insights to your organization.
Are you in search of candidates but having trouble finding people with the right titles? Read this piece on what backgrounds to look for when Hiring a Customer Marketer.
