The key responsibilities of a VP Marketing are:

• Finding, attracting, and delivering qualified leads and/or customers
• Managing company brand and public perception
• Finding and iterating on product market fit
• Equipping sales teams with training and materials to successfully message value
• Hiring and motivating a team of individual contributors and managers to accomplish objectives on time
• Collaborating with management team to achieve company objectives

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Hiring and Management

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How do they create a strong pipeline of candidates and maximize close rates? Do they have people that would follow them to a new company?

• Ownership of the hiring pipeline from end to end, especially closing.
• Should articulate the specific techniques for closing (e.g. team lunches, building empathy, connection with candidate, etc.).
• Should dedicate a substantial amount of time to hiring.

What do they look for in the marketers they hire?

• Intellectual horsepower, competitiveness, coachability, desire to learn, teamwork, grit. Can be a variety of answers but should know exactly what they look for.
• How do they evaluate candidates on those dimensions?

How have they structured their teams, and how many people were in those orgs?

• Should walk through how and why they structured the marketing team the way they did. Where did the responsibilities of positioning, brand, events, sales enablement, etc. sit?

Can they manage across geographies? Have you done so in the past?

• If this is or will be applicable for your role, ask for examples of managing remote teams or individuals. Candid description of challenges and what they learned.
• How do they ensure remote teams have ability and support to be successful?

Can they give you an example of a time they had a difficult conversation/issue with an employee and how they handled it?

• Clear communication and concrete milestones.
• Holding the person accountable for meeting those milestones and making the hard call in the case the employee doesn’t succeed.

How do they motivate a team, retain top performers, and foster a strong culture?

• Looking for empathy and the deliberate creation of an environment where the team feels supported, invested in, and safe to learn from their failures.

How do they manage up, and how does it compare to how they manage down?

• Looking for a balance between the two. Responsibility for the team they manage, but not friends first. Understand the same relationship for their managers.

Have they successfully mentored people? Can they share stories?

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Marketing

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What were they hired to do in their roles and did they succeed?

• This is an important distinction - did they successfully deliver on the specifics of what they were hired for, or did they ride the wave of a successful company?
• Were they hired on as a Brand Director and then promoted to VP Marketing 6 months before they left? Understand the arc of their career and tenure.

What was the state of the marketing org and process at their last company when they joined? How did they prioritize assessing their challenges?

• Should be able to give a holistic view of what was working and what wasn’t, and why their changes made valuable improvements.
• Bad answers will blame product or sales or CEO/Board decisions for their challenges, good answers will focus on what they did to improve the company’s marketing, regardless of what problems they were faced with.

Did they inherit their team? Hire it themselves? Restructure it or fire people?

• How much of their time was spent in front of customers in their last few roles?
• They should understand how their time breakdown reflected the needs of the business at that time, and how that relates to the role they’re interviewing for. If you sell a large, complex product, you’ll likely need a VPM who spends lots of time with customers, learning their challenges, and translating that into their message and to other teams.

What did ACV and sales cycle look like at their last few companies?

• Marketing a self-service, high-velocity, lightweight product that people are buying with a credit card is vastly different than marketing a product with a multi-month implementation cycle, senior decision makers, and a high price point.
• “Bottoms-up” marketing vs. account-based marketing.

How have they prioritized customer segments or verticals and why?

• Should be able to speak to the reasoning behind focusing on a segment or vertical, and the metrics that support that. CAC, LTV, deal size and product considerations should ideally play into their answer.

What industry or buyers have they marketed to?

• Has their focus been on getting the attention of IT, Engineering, Marketing etc.?
• If not, can you get comfortable that they can pick up the nuances and motion of marketing to developers, or learn the pain points of a marketer?
• How much technical acumen do you foresee them needing in order to represent your product successfully in the market?

What is their strong suit within marketing?

• Likely the most important distinction between marketers, make sure their experience matches your needs.
• Do you need a product marketer to help with positioning, messaging, pricing, sales enablement etc.? Or do you need someone demand focused who can generate leads and optimize the top of your funnel? Or someone to focus on branding, mass marketing, and communications? More below.

How have they typically been evaluated?

• What metrics were attached to their role? Closely tied to the previous question.
• Should have quantitative data available to point to customer count, ACV, revenue, etc., particularly demand marketers.

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Marketing Subcategories

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Product Marketing:

• What do their current customers care most about in their product?
• How did they define the target audience for their messaging?
• What is their primary differentiator vs. competitors?
• What challenges or flaws do they see in messaging/positioning for this role?
• How did they create or modify the pricing plan at their last company? Why?
• How have they supported Sales and other GTM functions to showcase the value of their product?
• Have they worked closely with Sales leadership on enablement? How do they prioritize requests from Sales?
• What part of the funnel did their work primarily augment?
• What tools do they value most in building and circulating enablement materials?
• What do they see as the most valuable content they’ve produced?
• What role does data play in their decision making?

Demand Generation:

• What role does Sales, Customer Success, and/or other orgs play in their strategy?
• Have they owned the Sales/Biz Development org?
• What customer segments do they have experience targeting?
• What technology do they utilize? How much experience do they have with predictive analytics, post-sales tracking, other tools they will be using? Have they built a MarTech stack from the ground up?
• What role does data play in their decision making?
• What qualifiers did they prioritize in their demand generation efforts in their last roles? Quality? Scale? How did it change over time?
• What were their growth targets in their last role, and how did they perform against them?
• What algorithms or qualifiers did they utilize to identify an ideal prospect?
• What budgets have they operated with?
• Have they been hands-on with Web/Digital?
• What was their paid acquisition strategy?

Comms/Branding:

• How does marketing’s approach to brand change over a company’s lifecycle?
• How do they define the optimal channels for company communications?
• Have they managed a PR crisis? How was it resolved?
• How have they worked with journalists? Who specifically?
• Have they owned advertising, or have they owned the relationship with an outside ad firm?
• Have they worked with evangelists? How did they identify, approach, incentivize, and maintain their relationship with them?

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Management Team Success
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What were the keys to success in working with the management team at their last company?

• Building relationships with each of the key executives, especially the ones that they’re working with frequently (Sales, Product, Customer Success)
• Communicating clear expectations and forecasting for what the marketing team can and cannot deliver
• Standing firm on things that don’t make sense for their team but working to collaborate whenever possible

How do they assess their peers and the company landscape when joining something new? How would they do that in this role?