Marketing Managers are responsible for developing, implementing, and executing marketing plans and marketing campaigns for a company - by leading market reasearch, setting marketing budgets, overseeing the creation of marketing material across channels, and creating and managing marketing teams.
Let's take a brief look at the key job duties, success traits, and job skills of Marketing Managers - which will help you to prepare for and answer your marketing manager interview questions in a more impactful way.
Marketing Manager Job Duties - Marketing Managers set short-term and long-term marketing budgets; lead market analysis and allocate the budget to different marketing channels; oversees the creation of marketing materials and Ads; reviews the performance of Ads using analytical tools; builds relationships with marketing and Ad agenies, leads the marketing team, etc.
Marketing Manager Success Traits - Marketing Managers require good leadership skills, creative skills, strategy and analytical skills, organization skills, negotiation skills, presentation skills, customer management skills, team management skills, etc.
Marketing Manager Job skills - Marketing Managers require experience with - setting short-term and long-term marketing budgets, creating strategic marketing plans, managing and driving marketing teams, Ad platforms such as Google AdWords; analytical tools such as Google Analytics, WebTrends, NetInsights, Omniture etc.
By asking this question, the interviewer wants to see if you have the passion, skill set and experience required to be a successful Sales Manager.
Best way to answer this question is to briefly talk about yourself and highlight the following four points in sequence.
1. Your education.
2. Your previous experience - Highlight the job duties from your previous jobs that match the requirements for this job.
3. Your strengths and passions - Highlight the success traits required for a sales manager - leadership skills, communication skills, negotiation skills, presentation skills, and customer management skills etc.
4. Your job specific skills - Highlight your experience as a sales manager - setting sales targets, creating sales strategies, creating sales processes, customer and industry presentations, following-up on leads, closing deals, etc.
Important - Do not specify your hobbies, personal details, or family details unless specifically asked for.
Sample answer - 'I have a bachelor's degree in management from ABC university (shows that you have relevant qualification). I have ten years of experience in sales, including last five years for company XYZ as a sales manager where I was responsible for overseeing the sales for the west region. (shows that you have relevant experience). I have excellent leadership skills, have managed multiple sales teams, am passionate about creating sales targets and driving sales teams to achieve those targets, love presenting in industry conferences and giving sales pitches etc.(Shows that you are passionate about being a sales manager). In my previous job, my sales strategies have resulted in a net revenue growth of more than 200%, brought about a 10% increase in net new customers, put in processes that increased the sales growth of every individual sales representative in our team, presented in industry conferences which generated focused leads - many of which we successfully closed. (shows that you have the right job related skills.).'