what skills and abilities are required to be head of industries marketing? how do candidates set themselves apart during an interview?

At Salesforce I’ve worked for 7 different executives in just over 6 years. Each of these leaders had a different mixture of leadership characteristics, and what I try to always look for is their ‘killer app’ - the leadership behaviors, and skills that they brought with them that were differentiated. New tools I could add to my personal leadership “tool box”.  Here are a few that I strive to master: A leader who builds a coalition of influential stakeholders around their vision, who proactively s ...Read More

Know the customer DEEPLY, each industry is so different. You need to know their specific pain points and how to speak their language. For example, Having built the industry/vertical muscle at Iterable from the ground up, here are some things that I believe made me successful in that role: Industry POV: A sharp, defensible point-of-view per vertical (problems, trends, regulation, budget flows). Know your stuff! Commercial outcomes: Pipeline, ACV, win rate, cycle time by industry. Marketing that s ...Read More

A "head of role" is a very different focus. Before we can talk about standing out in the interview, I think it's important to define what a leader in marketing can and should be.  Rule #1.#1. You are no longer a marketer. Not really. Your real focus is twofold: building the team, and strengthening the company. At this point in your career, you already know how to do the job. The pivot now is to build a team that can do the job better than you and at larger scale. And then you have to leverage yo ...Read More

A firm grasp on the market, understanding sales, empathy, great copywriting, amazing storytelling, understanding of campaign operations, an entreprenurial spirit, and leading with solution marketing is key to being a succesful industry marketer.  In my opinion, a great marketer is an ex-salesman. Marketers should always be trying to sell and close, this allows them to create the best possible collateral and pitches for sales teams.  You must be keen on directing and developing target markets, se ...Read More

It depends on what the charter of the industry marketing team is at your company, but in my case I came up as a product marketer and went on to build and lead product marketing teams, which is a pretty good proxy for industry marketing. The traits are all fundamentally the same, starting with the ability to quickly and repeatedly synthesize lots of complex information into a simple, compelling message that people understand and remember. Being able to not only formulate that message and indentif ...Read More