12 Interview Questions to Ask When Hiring Marketing Ops
Have you ever wanted to just rip out your Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo instance and re-install it because the data was such a mess?
Four years ago I wanted to rip out Salesforce and re-install it. I seriously contemplated it, hard.
I inherited a MOPS person who was in charge of every system, including Salesforce. They were extremely nice, a really good salt of the earth human, but they were out of their depth and were in denial about their skillset. It was hurting the company and it was hurting my brain.
Over the years I have done MOPS, SOPS, REVOPS, ran a BI (business intelligence) unit, and have done more data analysis and implemented more software, not to mention ERP systems than I care to count.
One thing I know for sure is when it’s quiet and nothing is broken, marketing ops is working, and that’s a good thing.
So when it comes to interviewing and selecting a MOPS person, here are some questions I ask:
In an operations role, what industries have you worked in? You want to know if their industry coincides with yours, even if just a little. For example, you’re not going to hire someone from SaaS to setup Ops in retail. This is probably the one area in marketing where industry knowledge matters.
In an operations role, have you ever worked at a startup? What size was the company and what were your responsibilities? This will tell you if they know how to set things up from scratch.
What tech stacks have you currently worked with hands-on in the past three years? This is important because you want to understand what they’ve actually worked hands-on with, the recency of their hands-on experience, and what their teams have worked with. I usually dig in here depending on their answers. Things I validate are: does their tech stack align with ours, or will they have a learning curve? Not all tools need to be know to hire someone. I have hired certified, diehard, HubSpot folks and converted them to Marketo admins in a matter of a few months. If you’ve used Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, Eloqua, you basically get the idea and the learning curve is not all that steep.
What certifications do you have? If they’ve said they work with Salesforce or Marketo or HubSpot, etc, you want to know if they are certified and ask when they completed their certification. If it was recent, they’re most likely a newbie.
Have you ever set up a prospect nurture? If so, how? You are looking to understand if they understand email and how they approach a prospect nurture sequence. This also shows you how mature they are in understanding the marketing funnel. Have them explain the phases/streams of the nurture. If it was only one stream, then probably not all that sophisticated.
Have you ever set up an email preference center? If yes, what did it look like? What problems, if any, did you run into when setting this up? This also shows you their level of expertise and what they considered for what people would want to subscribe tom and if they understand privacy and opt outs.
How do you monitor, measure and analyze the effectiveness of marketing programs? For example, how do they know if the prospect nurture is working or not? This allows you to further dig and understand how they set things up and whether or not they pay attention to detail. It also helps you understand if they know how to not only report on the data but understand what it means and how to interpret it.
How do you work with Sales Ops? This question is open ended because you want to understand how they work with sales and if they understand the marketing and sales relationship.
What’s your methodology for setting up campaigns in your marketing automation system? Most MOPS folks have nomenclature or an architecture they like to use when setting up campaigns. If they don’t have one, they are not that experienced.
What do you think of multi-touch attribution (MTA)? Have you ever implemented a platform? How have you tracked that at previous companies? This tells you if they’ve ever implemented MTA before, which tool they’ve used (Bizible, Ramp Metrics, Full Circle, etc.), and if they haven’t, how they’ve tracked MTA at different stage companies. (If attribution isn’t important to your company then skip this question).
Have you ever implemented scoring at a company? If so, can you walk me through it? How did you set it up? What types of data did you score? What you’re looking for here is not only whether or not they’ve done it, but how they’ve set it up and who they worked with to set it up. Was it all behavioral? Was it a mix of demographic + behavioral? Who did they work with to set it up? What qualified someone to become an MQL?
Do you have experience with any BI tools such as Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, or Domo? What you’re looking for here is if they have data analyst skills as well as operational skills. I have often found that these do not live within the same person, but on rare occasion they do. 💎
This is just a start.
There are many more questions you can ask that are specific to your industry and your need or the seniority of the role you are hiring.
Such as, what do they know about cookie consent and how do they handle email when it comes to GDPR, CCPA, and CASL?
Depending on your needs you’ll want to dive into these areas as well.
Have any “must ask” questions for MOPS you always ask that you don’t see here? Let me know in the comments.
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