If you’re hiring a new employee to run the marketing automation platform for your business, outside of the qualities that make people a good candidate for any position at a company (work ethic, enthusiasm, culture fit, etc) and the general ability to navigate a technical web based interface, the focus should not necessarily be on:
- specific platform experience or certifications
- HTML/CSS, or design skills (especially if you have these skills somewhere else on staff)
but instead:
Finding someone who can prioritize inefficiencies in the marketing/sales processes and look to alleviate or solve them within the marketing automation ecosystem.
A good marketing automation specialist doesn’t care what platform they’re using (hell, they may even end up advising you change platforms), they’ll figure out how to navigate the interface, build a drip campaign, and build an email template that is responsive. Some may take longer than others to get the hang of things, but the value of a marketing automation specialist is not just in how many emails can get built and launched in a week, but rather, it’s in their ability to solve the problems that require more strategic thinking from a business operations standpoint.
Here are some questions to ask someone in an interview, along with some examples of the types of responses you should be looking for:
Q. If the Sales Team is spending too much time talking to unqualified leads, what can they do within a marketing automation platform to better filter them out before wasting the Sales Teams’ time?
A. Work with the Sales Team to implement a Lead Scoring model, with sales determining the criteria in which a lead is qualified (a Sales Qualified Lead, SQL for short). Nurture the exsting pipeline until leads are either disqualified, or do reach the qualification status, a point in which Sales should be looped in.
Q. If there’s a poor conversion rate of free trial users into paid customers, what can they do within a marketing automation platform to educate, nurture, and train a new user during the free trial period?
A. Create an onboarding email series to give free trial user tips and tricks about the service or platform. Giving your organization a chance to help guide them through (hold their hand) the free trial period and increase your chances of winning the deal. Ensure sales and customer support are notified which areas of the platform they were engaged with.
If you’ve found someone who is curious about those kinds of questions and has the moxie to use the functionality of marketing automation to solve them, then that’s who you want to hire. You’re going to want to pay them well too 🙂
Can’t find that person? Don’t have the time to train someone on the capaibilities or nuances of marketing automation platforms? Don’t have the resources to devote a full time employee to marketing automation? Having trouble wrapping your head around the problems and potential solutions to begin with?