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In growth marketing interviews, they don't ask for your CV or what kind of marketing courses you've taken. They may hit you with questions like, "What if your budget got slashed by 80%? How would you still drive growth for us?"
I've been to dozens of marketing interviews in the last 10 years. I'm being recruited. I've hired marketers myself a lot. In this video, I'll break down the hardest growth marketing interview questions you'll face in your next interview. I'll explain why hiring managers ask them and how you can possibly answer. And the first question is, if we cut your monthly budget by 80%, how would you still drive growth?
So, why do hiring managers actually ask this? Now, you have to understand that they are here not to entirely let you down or to make sure that you have a sleepless night. They are as stressed as you are and they just want to close this position as soon as possible and they are tired of tons of interviews they ran before. So they need specific answers.
So the reason number one why they may ask this: first of all, it might be very close to the reality in today's crazy economy, a lot of budgets get cut and most likely something like this has happened to them earlier. Now, the second thing, obviously, they want to see how you deal under a lot of stress and uh, this is what a lot of marketers face almost on a daily basis. And finally, they want to see how you can actually deal with budgets because whenever you'll be running any growth marketing experiments, whenever you'll be working with performance channels, they want to understand if they're confident to allocate you certain budgets.
Now, here's how you can possibly answer. An important disclaimer, this is not a copy-paste answer. This is just for your inspiration. So, obviously, you have to adapt to a specific case. In any case, first things first, you can mention that you'll dig deeper into the historical performance. You have to understand what kind of geographies, products, channels, audiences have driven growth earlier and most likely you're going to freeze the rest and double down on what has worked earlier.
Now, secondly, you have to let them know that you'll align on the new KPIs and targets with your manager. And this way you let them know that you're really, you know, target-driven person and you're not just doing mindless growth marketing tactics here and there. You work towards a specific goal all the time. Finally, you can give a specific example. You can mention that most likely you'll focus on increasing your top-level conversions.
If you are preparing for your next growth marketing interview, I've put together this free checklist with the top questions you'll face, the frameworks to answer them, and sample responses you can actually adapt to your own experience. It's like having a playbook to stand out in interviews. You can grab your copy. The link is in the description.
Now, the question number two, if you had to 10x our user base in six months, what would you do? First of all, everyone is looking for a hungry and an ambitious person. That's the reality of today's job market. So, they want to see if you're exactly a fit for them. Secondly, it might be an investor expectation and most likely it's not even their desire to do so. They are told, your hiring manager is actually told to deliver this result. So, they're looking for a possible answer. And the reason number three is they simply want to see how you can plan ahead and think long-term.
So here's how you can possibly answer. First of all, you have to let them know that you'll analyze whether this is actually realistic. Is the market actually growing? Have other players or competitors achieved the same in the market? Obviously, do your homework and run some even the basic competitor analysis before jumping on a call with them. A very basic example, of course, if you work with an AI tool, then it's kind of obvious the market is growing like there is no tomorrow, but let's say it could be some, what would I put it here, some kind of online school for junior software developers, the market is clearly sinking, so growing your user base by 10x. Also, we don't really know within which time frame they're looking to achieve this. This is not really realistic.
Now secondly, you are completely free to challenge them. Again, we are opening up our ugly sheet and trying to run some very basic calculations in front of their eyes. So let's say that currently they have 100k users. The average deal size is 10,000. So this means that their revenue is currently 1 billion. So they want to grow the number of users by 10x. And if they do so, the revenue would grow to 10 billion, right? But let's see what if instead we just grow our average deal size by five times. So this is not 10 times, right? And yes, it might seem a bit crazy, but if we take into account some kind of enterprise software, this is more than doable. So with the same number of users, we are at 5 billion in terms of revenue. And if we grow our user base by just two times in this case, we're going to achieve exactly the same revenue.
And thirdly, you can say that again, you'll dig deeper into their numbers. You'll see what kind of product or maybe what kind of audience has proven to work in the past and you'll double down on that. This will show that you can really set priorities, dig deeper into the root of the problem and identifying the trends that are worth scaling.
And number three, what metrics would you track if you could only choose three? Why do they ask this? First of all, they obviously want to see how you actually analyze the impact of your work and how you measure performance. They also want to see if you look at vanity metrics such as, you know, traffic or the number of clicks, or if you look at a real business impact. And finally, they're simply looking for a revenue-driven person. That's the reality of today's market. People hire every single candidate to close a specific gap and to drive revenue for businesses.
Here's how you can answer. Now, you can say that I'll be focusing on looking at the number of qualified leads and whether we are hitting a desired cost per lead. Now, I know that they asked for three specific metrics in their question, but you can expand your answer by adding a few more points. You can say that obviously, you don't just want to generate any leads, but you're interested in qualified opportunities for your team. And on top of that, you can mention that obviously, you'll be looking at the revenue that you generate with your marketing campaigns. But you take one step back and by looking at the number of qualified opportunities, you'll see the kind of upcoming trend and you'll see if you're going to hit the desired revenue number in the next couple of months. And by looking at cost per lead, you will analyze whether this revenue will actually be profitable for businesses in the long run. Because for example, if your cost per lead, you know, is about, I don't know, a million. If it costs a fortune to drive every single lead. So, at the end of the day, when the business is going to deduct all of the costs from your revenue, they're not going to be profitable. So, by saying this, you'll imply that the budget that'll be put on your table is not going to be wasted.
I have an entire playlist with other videos about growth marketing interviews, so feel free to watch them after this one. Remember to subscribe to this channel if you haven't yet because here you'll get more growth marketing tips for your career and for your business. [Music]