The 1st Question to Ask Before Hiring A Marketing Director
- Mar 20, 2015
- admin
- Business, Entrepreneur, Investing
The marketing director. Perhaps the single most important hiring decision you’ll make as CEO of your start-up. Hire the right marketing director and you’ll look like a genius. Hire the wrong one and you won’t even know what hit you.
A good marketing director will almost make it look easy. Prospects will become customers, customers will become repeat customers and some of those repeat customers will even become “evangelists.” And evangelists, customers who buy every product you sell and publicly swear by your company, are the name of the game.
Find a marketing director who is able to systematically convert prospects into evangelists and you’ll make more money than you know what to do with. With that money you’ll be able to rent the loyalty of your employees. Everyone will talk about how oh-so-clever you are.
Hire a bad marketing director and the exact opposite will happen. You’ll burn through money fast. Horrifyingly fast. Everyone will talk about how stupid you are. But the worst of it is the pressure. Dante’s Inferno type pressure. The kind of pressure that comes from never being able to satisfy a need. A critical need. That kind of pressure is immense. Fetal-position immense.
(Since it is simply not possible to have a good business plan that doesn’t include a strong marketing plan, I strongly advise CEO’s to write the business plan with their marketing director).
The only benefit to being in the bad-marketing-director-fetal-position is that you’ll have plenty of time to think. And if you think long enough and hard enough you may have a moment of clarity. Of course, by then it may be too late to save what you’ve started. But that moment of clarity can give you great insight for when you get the courage to start your next one, and that’s a good thing. At least it was for me.
That insight has led me to the first question I always ask before I meet – let alone interview – any prospective marketing director:
How Much Will it Cost to Acquire A Customer?
It’s simple, really. If you can answer this one exceedingly clear question we can talk about the position. Anyone who cannot answer it will hopefully become the marketing director for my biggest competitor.
The reason this question is so revealing is because to answer this one question the candidate will have to have answers for a series of other, yet critically important smaller questions. And whether they can answer these questions or not will tell you as clear as day if they will know exactly where to “drive” once you hand them the keys to the car.
To begin, your candidate must first know your Cost Per Lead (CPL), or the price it costs you to get one lead.
For example, let’s say it costs you $50 to send a dedicated email to 1,000 people. And of the 1,000 people who see your email advertisement, 10 of them sign up to learn more about your product. Since you’ve spent $50 to get 10 leads that means you’ve spent $5 per lead ($50/10 = $5).
The example above assumes the candidate sends a dedicated email to a rented list. But that, of course, assumes the candidate can articulate why renting a list is a better way to target your prospects than the alternatives, such as advertising on Google Adwords or Facebook to target prospective customers.
The ideal candidate will be able to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of all your best lead-generation options. For example, they may tell you that sending dedicated emails to rented lists will bring you a $5 CPL but you can only attract 7,000 new leads a month because scale is limited. In contrast, when you use Google you may pay a $7 CPL but its scale is so large you can attract over 13,000 new leads each month, allowing you to grow your business much faster.
From Prospects to Customers
No leads, no customers. But a lead-generation expert does not a marketing director make (although it is a good start). When it comes to finding a qualified marketing director you have to dig a little deeper here.
Using the example from above: Let us assume that 1 out of every 10 leads you sign up becomes a customer. Since you spent $50 on those 10 leads and 1 of them has become a customer that means it cost you $50 to get one customer. Therefore your customer-acquisition-cost (CAC) is $50.
A good candidate will have a strong grasp on the subtle but very important variables you must consider when converting prospects into customers.
For example, some lead sources have different conversion times than others. At my last company, leads we got from sending dedicated emails converted into customers faster than leads we got from Google Adwords, an average of 36 days versus 48 days, respectively. And time, in business, is critical. The faster you generate cash flow, the more cash flow you will generate.
In addition, we often found that different copy worked best for different online channels. For example, sales copy that worked best when sending dedicated emails didn’t perform as well on Google Adwords. To get the best performance we often had to tailor specific copy for specific channels.
Furthermore, the ideal candidate will have great insight into how to price your product. They will know the optimal price at which the most leads become customers in the fastest possible time. And the only way to know that – to really know that – is to have learned it by testing.
(A great candidate will understand that advertising, when done properly, is a scientific process. And like all scientific endeavors, a lot of testing is required to find the optimal solution.)
Of course, hiring a good marketing director takes more than just asking him or her one question. But what it can tell you is just as important – whether the person you’re talking to is even qualified for the role.