From: InterviewQuestionsAndAnswers.biz
Marketing and sales manager interview questions and answers
You can use Marketing and sales manager interview questions below to ask candidates or self-answer in a job interview for Marketing and sales manager.
1. Tips to answer Marketing and sales manager interview questions
• Identify key duties, tasks, job specs, job standards of Marketing and sales manager positions then ask question: How to do, how to become, how to measure performance, how to monitor, how to control…
• Always ask by yourself : what are things related to your position field in this interview questions before answering.
• Research the company and its business carefully: company history, organization structure, your division structure, product/service list, competitive advantages and disadvantages..
• Always ask by yourself: What are proofs that are needed for this interview questions/this job?
You can use free interview questions samples of Marketing and sales manager as below:
• Please tell me a little about yourself?
• What have you learned from your past jobs that related to Marketing and sales manager?
• Why did you leave your last job?
• Tell me about your last position and what you did?
• Where would you like to be in 3 years? 5 years?
• What made you choose to apply to Marketing and sales manager?
• What are key tasks for Marketing and sales manager?
• How to do each Marketing and sales manager position task/function?
• How to control each task/function of Marketing and sales manager? Etc
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What are top top 3 skills for Marketing and sales manager?
• How to measure job performance of your position: Marketing and sales manager?
• What do you know about this company?
• What do you know about the position of your Marketing and sales manager position?
• Describe two or three major trends in your did you choose this profession/field?
• What tertiary qualifications have you attained that related to Marketing and sales manager?
• What is the most recent skill you have learned that related to Marketing and sales manager?
• What tertiary qualifications have you attained that related to your Marketing and sales manager position?
• What is the most recent skill you have learned that related to your Marketing and sales manager position?
3. Job titles related
The above interview questions also can be used for job titles related to Marketing and sales manager as follows:
• Marketing advisor
• Marketing coordinator
• Marketing consultant
• Marketing director
• Marketing executive
• Marketing manager
• Marketing officer
• Marketing specialist
By: Cindy Hazen
Does your resume read something like this? If so, please keep reading this post because this may be why you are NOT getting call backs. ABC Company 2009- current
Focused on new business selling only targeted commercial accounts Among the top leaders in generating monthly revenue Introduced Gorilla Marketing and event planning to solicit new prospects Maintained loyal customer base and received many referrals from base.
DEF Company 2005- 2009
Prospecting and developing new business Consultant for both online Yellow Pages and Local Directories Targeted small and mid size prospects in a diverse marketplace.Pinpointed benefits of being included in the online version of Yellow Pages.Excelled at preparing and making presentations to individuals and mid size corporate accounts.
We receive hundreds of resumes each month and many read like this. What’s missing? Specifics! “Among top leaders”- where exactly? Were you #1, 2 or 10? Out of how many? “Focused on new business”- how many new accounts did you bring in? How much monthly revenue? “Developing new business”- again, how many new accounts did you bring in? The current resume has job descriptions with no specificity at all. There is no call to action for the hiring manager to pick up the phone and call you. CREATE that call to action by HIGHLIGHTING your accomplishments. Otherwise, it’s just one of a hundred generic sales resumes that never make it to the “call pile”.
By: Glenn Engler
The CMO has a hard job. We know the reality. She has to deal with more pressure than ever before from the executive team to drive results. The CMO role has also expanded to require integration with finance, procurement, legal, customer service, IT and corporate communications, to name a few. And the CMO needs to establish her presence and “brand” in the marketplace to attract partners, media properties and talent. And finally, the CMO also controls the creative agencies, usually either a single lead agency or a group of agencies defined more for some specialization. Adding to the pressure? I believe the latest surveys show that the average tenure of a CMO is something around 20 months.
Given the pace of change in every industry, you would expect CMOs to constantly experiment, adapt, innovate and implement. But my experience is just the opposite — too many CMOs are caught in the middle. Short-term pressures to drive this quarter’s numbers result in a go-to-market plan that is familiar, tried-and-true and cautious. Take 10% of your budget and try something new, and you run the risk of missing a number, and getting chastised for being careless. Pull ahead some spending to make a bigger impact, and you run the risk of not having enough impact and then facing a lower level the next quarter — and questions from your boss. Don’t get approval for deviating from the safe plan and run the risk of getting creamed afterwards.
So what defines risk? I worked with a major automotive manufacturer for years and during a planning effort with the strategy board it became apparent that building a $2 billion plant was deemed low risk, because it was familiar; but allocating $50 million to launch a web-based marketing initiative was deemed high risk, because they had never done it before. So it was killed. As were several other “different” initiatives. Chief financial officers demand an ROI, procurement looks at costs through a common lens, chief operating officers want to know the path to risk mitigation, and corporate communications wants to brace for negative backlash. The CMO, despite a brief moment of courage, gets beaten down and ultimately falls into the trap of incremental changes.
Now CMOs are faced with “risk” questions around social media. Does it drive leads and sales right now? What is the ROI? How does it translate to brand metrics right now? How does it compare to money spent on our TV spots, or a radio promotion? These are important questions to address, and efforts in social media need to be measured and, ultimately, linked to business results. Otherwise it will always be a small channel on the periphery to too many organizations. My agency focuses aggressively on measuring social media around three dimensions: social pulse (metrics like engagement, activity, sharing, etc.); purchase funnel metrics (awareness, consideration, preference, etc); and business results (leads, trial, sales, loyalty, etc.).
But if you step back, the best CMOs are powered by innovative and forward-thinking CEOs. And if you believe that there are more individuals shaping your brand outside of your four walls than in it; and if you believe that social search is going to transform the search model; and if you believe the reports that show that consumers trust friends and family the most, perfect strangers second, and brands third; and if you believe that understanding the ecosystem around your customers and potential customers (the individual, their influencers, the brands they love, how and where they spend their time, what their passions are) is paramount to creating a successful marketing machine — then the innovative CMO will embrace the social space as a “gotta have” core component.
So what do you do?
Listen: Follow your customer. How does she spend her time? If your target is a Mom, make sure you know how some of the 4 million mommy bloggers are influencing purchase decisions. If your target is a doctor, make sure you understand how the mobile web is changing the dynamics of information gathering, research and consultation. Look at how Pampers engaged with Moms, or American Express added value to small business with Open.
Fast Pilot: Get started. Try something. Don’t mortgage your third-quarter numbers, but place a solid bet on a product or service, or a customer segment, or a geography. If your customer is heavily engaged in the space, you have to be. Delta piloted ticket sales in distributed places like Facebook and small business hubs. Sony engaged book group bloggers for its e-reader products.
Learn: Be clear whether the program is focused on driving brand perception or leads. Make sure your metrics and measurement efforts are aligned accordingly. Nothing will kill a pilot faster than setting up the initiative to test for pre- and post-brand perception while telling the C-Suite that it will drive sampling and near-term sales.
Keep Innovating: Put the next program in market. Measure the impact. Roll it out, adapt it or kill it, but keep innovating. Ford is a master at trying different ways to connect with its core audience, placing bets and learning from them.
The organizational immune system may kick in to blanket your effort as “risky.” But as a marketer, I would suggest that not engaging where the customer is spending her time; not adding value to the discussions; not identifying and partnering with their key influencers — now that is the true definition of “risk.”
By: David Kemmelman
You are looking for a job, your resume is posted on several job boards and you have a LinkedIn profile among others as well. It’s chum for recruiter infested waters! So, how do you choose between a good headhunter and a bad headhunter, and what should you know about the internal recruiters at companies you are targeting?
Let’s start with headhunters (they hate this name by the way). Many headhunters out there are bottom feeders that are scouring the internet for resumes that can possibly lead them to a fee. It’s a numbers game for many that the more candidates/jobseekers they speak to, the more likely they will make placements regardless of how good or bad a particular candidate may be. These types of recruiters will sound like they are talking at you from a playbook to gather some amount of information (bare minimum) so they can send your resume to wherever they think they can get a fee, and it won’t truly matter to them what you think. When you are contacted by a headhunter you really want to feel like they are listening and responding to your comments and that they are putting your best interests first, before their own. Also, tell them they must contact you about a position prior to submitting your resume in the event you are already into that company through a referral or otherwise.
Okay, that’s some of the bad side of headhunters. There are good ones too, but they can be far and few between. So, how do you indentify the better and/or excellent headhunters?
Good headhunters will actually take an interest in you, your career, your professional aspirations and be seriously interested building a mutually beneficial and sustainable relationship. They know that if they spend valuable time with you in an effort to get to know you, that not only might you become a placement fee, but because they went the extra lengths to take an interest in all that you are, there is a strong likely likelihood that you will refer them to other people you know. Remember, it’s all about networking and who you know. And, bad news travels much faster and greater distances than good news, so negative feedback takes ages to overcome, and good headhunters know that.
Also, when being contacted by a headhunter you should always want to meet them face-face in their office. Making eye contact, shaking someone’s hand and seeing that they are a real professional with a professional establishment versus just a voice on the phone is essential for you to feel confident about anyone that is representing you and your brand to prospective employers.
Finally we come to the internal recruiter that works for the company you are applying to. This is not dissimilar to the people above, however there are few differentiators between good and bad. For example:
- Did the recruiter sound scripted or were they engaging on the phone?
- Was the recruiter capable of explaining what the company does and what the job you’re applying for will be doing?
- Was the recruiter open to answering questions and were they capable of answering the majority of them in detail?
- Was the recruiter able to give you a feel for the culture of the company?
- Did the recruiter ask you meaningful questions that were on point and relevant to the job and your experience?
- Did the recruiter give you ample time to answer questions and ask questions without making you feel like they were doing you a favor?
- Were they respectful?
We could go on and on, but these are some good things to be aware of when working with recruiters either inside a company or outside. Not everything has to be warm and fuzzy, but you certainly want to know that the individual you are dealing with is focused on a Win-Win outcome for everyone, not just themselves. And you should never be made to feel like you are just another candidate, but if you do feel that way, is that really the person or company you want to be working with?
By: Robert Samuelson
One puzzle of this somber economy is the existence of unfilled jobs in the midst of mass unemployment. You might think (I did) that with almost 14 million Americans unemployed — and nearly half those for more than six months — that companies could fill almost any opening quickly. Not so. Somehow, there’s a mismatch between idle workers and open jobs. Economists call this “structural unemployment.”
Just how many jobs are affected is unclear; there are no definitive statistics. Economist Harry Holzer of Georgetown University thinks the unemployment rate might be closer to 8 percent than today’s 9.1 percent if most of these jobs were filled. That implies up to 1.5 million more jobs. Economist Prakash Loungani of the International Monetary Fund estimates that 25 percent of unemployment is structural; that’s more than 3 million jobs. A recent survey of 2,000 firms by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research group, found that 40 percent had positions open at least six months because they couldn’t find suitable candidates.
Let’s acknowledge two realities. First, though structural joblessness is important, the main cause of high unemployment remains the deep slump. In the recession, jobs dropped 20 percent in construction, 15 percent in manufacturing and 7 percent in retailing. Only a stronger economy can remedy this unemployment.
Second, a big economy like ours always has some vacancies. People quit or get fired. Hiring procedures grind slowly. Some highly specialized jobs are inherently hard to fill: say, a transportation engineer fluent in both Chinese and English (a real-life example).
Still, the job mismatch hobbles recovery and bodes ill. The harder it is for workers to find jobs, the longer they stay unemployed — and this, in turn, worsens their prospects. “Long-term unemployment sends a negative signal to employers: What’s wrong with this person?” says Holzer. Some jobs lost in the recession and the associated skills won’t return. “Workers’ networks [contacts] atrophy,” he adds. “Their skills look more obsolete.”
As more workers become less employable, some economists are raising their estimates of “full employment” — the unemployment rate consistent with stable inflation. It could be 6 percent compared with 5 percent before the recession, says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics. Trying to push unemployment below 6 percent with easy credit would risk higher inflation.
Carl Camden, head of the temporary-employment company Kelly Services, says that skill shortages span a wide array of jobs, from electricians to CAD/CAM operators (computer-aided design and manufacturing) to PhD scientists for clinical drug tests.
“You can’t find engineers to take jobs in many cities,” says Camden. “We have three jobs for every candidate.”
In any dynamic economy, constant changes in technologies, products and companies naturally create gaps between skills available and skills wanted. But today’s gaps seem to transcend this. A survey for the National Association of Manufacturers in 2009, near the recession’s nadir, found that a third of companies still faced shortages. These were largest for engineers and scientists and among aerospace, defense and biotechnology firms.
Theories abound as to what’s gone wrong. For skilled blue-collar jobs, high schools have de-emphasized vocational training, community colleges often aren’t well-connected to local job markets and union apprenticeship programs have withered, says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Another theory is that Americans are less willing to move to take jobs. The McKinsey study reports that, in the 1950s, one in five Americans moved every year; now it’s one in 10. “Work is more mobile than workers,” says Camden.
Companies traditionally provided much training, but that may also have changed. Loyalties have weakened. Companies are more willing to fire; workers are more willing to jump ship. Training may seem a poor investment because workers won’t stay long enough to earn a return. In the McKinsey survey, companies denied cutting training budgets. But Carnevale and others think the training has altered. Before, firms provided more basic training in business or technology skills; now, firms expect workers to come with these skills and focus training on firm-specific practices and systems.
“Employers are looking for people with proven skills in the right fields,” says the McKinsey study. “The number one cause for difficulty in filling positions (cited by 45 percent of companies) is lack of sufficient experience.”
So it’s a Catch-22: You can’t get hired unless you have experience; but you can’t get experience unless you’re hired. With technology changing rapidly, workers need to know more, even as their skills-support systems weaken. There is no instant cure for today’s job mismatch, but it might ease if America’s largest companies were a little bolder. Surely many of them — enjoying strong profits — could make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.