Interview in progress

Marketing has always been about more than organising brochures and updating the social media accounts, but now more than ever it is about demand generation: a constant process of identifying prospects and moving them through the sales funnel.

If you are thinking about employing a Marketing Director and want him or her to be at the heart of the growth of your business, here are some questions that you should ask during interview.

Targeting

1. How will you make sure we can be found consistently by businesses looking for the services that we offer?
2. How will you actively identify and target the businesses we would most like to help?

Nurturing

1. How will you engage an increasing number of prospects over time and nurture them towards becoming a paying customer - in a way that is measurable and scalable?
2. How will you help an SME to educate itself before it feels comfortable to make contact?
3. How will you provide proof points to our claims of being the fastest, cheapest, most flexible (or anything else that might be in your value proposition)?
4. How easy do you make it for the prospect to find out more or apply - 24/7?
5. How near to a one-click application can we get?

Scaling

1. How will you make sure that our marketing is metronomic and 'always on'?
2. How can you automate the nurturing process to make it scalable?
3. How will you avoid constant process re-engineering as we outgrow early technology choices?

Marketing and sales alignment

1. How will you connect marketing and sales so that they work together as an efficient and effective business development unit?
2. How will you maximise productivity by focusing valuable and expensive sales resources on only the warmest opportunities?
3. How will you know which prospects need to be fast-tracked into sales and which need further nurturing by the marketing process?
4. How will you differentiate between implicit buying cycles such as return visits to the website and increased interest in our content, and the explicit signals like completed contact forms?
5. How will you know whether those implicit signals indicate active interest (viewing demos, visiting pricing pages etc) or early curiosity (e.g. clicked links in emails, read a blog post)?
6. How will you create a feedback loop so that the definition and quality of a warm lead constantly improves?

Measurement

1. How will you monitor both the lagging and leading indicators of business performance?
2. How will you visualise our sales funnel so we know which prospects, and how many, are at each stage?
3. How will you value our sales pipeline and sanity check it against known conversion ratios?

Here at The Marketing Eye, we can support the interviewing process or we can act as your Marketing Director ourselves and provide the answers to all of these questions and more. We are equally happy supporting in-house marketing teams filling any gaps that might exist in experience or capacity. Please contact us to find out more.