11 Questions To Ask When Hiring Marketing Operations (MOPS)

One of the hardest roles to hire for in marketing is Marketing Operations. The other two roles that are hard to hire for are Demand Generation and Product Marketing. 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. As a CMO at any company, you need to have your Marketing Ops in order otherwise it’s difficult to make accurate business decisions. Afterall, decisions made on bad data are just bad decisions.

I am one of those marketers who crossed over from the dark side of ops after 15 years and went into marketing. I know a lot about systems, operationalizing programs, and business requirements.

HIRING

When I look to hire a marketing ops person (mops) here are the key questions I ask, what I am focused on is not having to do it myself. I don’t want to be involved in the day to day.

So here is what I ask in an interview:

1. In an operations role, what industries have you worked in? You want to know if their industry coincides with mine. This will tell me if they know how to set things up from scratch.
2. 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.
3. 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, their most likely a newbie.
4. Have you ever set up a prospect nurture? If so, how? You are looking to understand if they have and how they approach a prospect nurture. This also shows you how mature they are in understanding the marketing funnel. Have them explain the phases of the nurture.
5. 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 to.
6. How do you monitor, measure and analyze the effectiveness of marketing programs? For example, how do they know if the customer 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Have you ever implemented scoring at a company? If so, can you walk me through it? How did you set it up? 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 MQL?
11. 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.