Product Marketing Interviews

In my opinion the effectiveness of sales enablement should be measured by reducing the customer acquisition costs over time and reducing the time it takes to close a deal. Having these in-process KPIs that you can track month over month will help you demonstrate how your enablement activities are helping sellers meet their quotas. 

I think there's a similar question above on measuring KPIs. Please refer to it. But essentially I'll look at 2 parts 

1. Whether sales has received the information

• Attendance rates, Tests/Quizzes to capture main points, engagement rates during the training, feedback post the training and % of sales force trained

2. Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer

• Adoption of product/recommendation 
• Revenue growth attributed to the product 
• No. of clients pitch to
• Higher win-rates

Create a quiz or set up role playing for your sales team on their understanding of the product features, capabilities and messaging. When you set aside time to observe how your sales teams are understanding and consuming your sales enablement, you create a better relationship with the team, and know which reps may need more help in what areas. By watching how well the reps could talk through the key messages in a role play, or through their quiz answers, I know what was working and what wasn’t.

As an industry marketer I am mostly concerned around the sales cycle, ASP, win rate, content performance, and rep productivity. Good enablement, marketing, and content, should shorten sales cycles and drive how things are leveraged ie case studies, whitepapers, solution briefs, and blogs.  

Often times good enablement will measure these variables continuously on a rolling basis and will work closely with industry and product marketers in understanding training gaps.

The ‘product marketing skills’ question has been answered really well by a lot of others on Sharebird already so I will focus my answer specifically to the interview itself: 

I always look for candidates who have a strategic mindset and who can articulate what success in their current role looks like. I interviewed one candidate once who really impressed me with her ability to paint ‘before and after’ pictures. It’s less common than you would expect and she completely differentiated herself because of it.

From my hiring experience there are typically there are a few key characteristics and examples I look out for

• Has to be a great storyteller - go beyond writing copy, and able to craft narratives
• Ability to take complex topics and translate them into value
• Customer-centric 
• Cross-functional / team players 
• Organized, ability to prioirtize and pull together disperate workstreams 

Perhaps this is controversial, but I would say there are zero pros and many, many cons.

MBAs can be useful if you're looking to switch fields. Otherwise, I'd much rather see two additional years of work experience. I've hired MBAs from top 15 schools and from a PMM perspective, I was basically starting from the same place as someone without a degree. 

MBAs are definitely great if you are switching fields. They are also great from a networking perspective.  

There are plenty of people who studied business or marketing as an undergrad who have gone on to have successful PMM careers.

Prep and practice! 

Prep your answers beforehand, have them on hand for reference if you need them. 

Practice by getting in more reps. Talking about yourself and your experience gets easier every time, and you get more insight into the types of questions that come up (so you can improve your prep). 

The best approach would be to ensure you have some great facing public content that you can attach to your CV when applying for a job. Post-MBA PMMs tend to be content workhorses. Leaders need PMMs that can write clearly, concisely, and relatably. 

I also recommend MBAs go out and get some practical demand gen marketing experience. Start a blog and then invest a few dollars to promote it. Try and get syndicated on a content hungry site like Business Insider, HuffPo, or Forbes. This will give you a great story in interviews marketing something that you're truly passionate about. 

1. Invest in a Linkedin Premium account

2. Create a list of companies you'd like to intern for

3. Inmail their Heads of PMM or VPs of Marketing. 

A good place to help build that list is Wealthfront's annual career building companies list: https://blog.wealthfront.com/announcing-2020-career-launching-companies/ 

Case studies and writing samples signal to me that you can do the job you are asked to do but they rarely make a candidate stand out (unless the content is really bad!) I do think long-form writing samples have their place - they should show that you can communicate well and that you can possess critical thinking skills.

But what makes a great candidate stand out for me, far more than anything, is a strategic mindset and an ability to provide evidence of outcomes during the interview. I'd focus on this more than on the portfolio. I go into how to do this in more detail in other questions.

The trifecta of short-form published writing, long-form writing, and enablement materials always does the trick for me. If I can see the candidate has written a great feature-related blog post or one-pager, a positioning and differentiation narrative, and slides that cue up best practices, then I'm a happy hiring manager.