EAB Interview Prep

Tell me about a campaign start to finish

A lot of existing users were editing their profiles in April and May, which made sense given the academic hiring schedule. Second, those who uploaded a profile photo were more likely to complete the sections I needed them to complete to meet my goals. I didn't know if this was causal and photos weren't one of my goals in and of themselves, but I figured I'd try that angle among others. CAMPAIGN So we created a campaign which would launch in April, focused on encouraging our users to complete or update their profiles with a "spring cleaning" theme. The campaign combined social media, site tagging and pop ups and a drip email campaign. Everything was based around the content we created for email; tips about how to create a profile that stands out to recruiters. To meet my KPIs I needed users to fill out the about, education and experience sections of their profiles. But I also had run analytics to find out the best predictors of profile completion, and one of them was that those who uploaded a profile photo were more likely to complete all three sections. I couldn't tell whether that was causal or not and had strong suspicions that it wasn't, but vanity makes for a juicy email topic so one of the emails focused on taking and choosing a good photo for your online presence, including but not limited to your Vitae profile. We made two versions of the first email and adjusted language depending on how much of your profile was filled out. The photo email had one version that went to everyone. Then we sent emails specifically focused on the about, education, and experience sections. The campaign was sophisticated, so that those who had already completed these sections did not receive those emails. Sure enough, the photo email had the highest open and click through rates and resulted in the most completed profiles. We did some work to pull testimonials for this campaign, and we were able to reuse those and a lot of the copy we created in a lot of other places.

What have you been doing?

A lot of networking A little bit of freelance copywriting I got to speak on a podcast about product marketing, which was cool I went to Europe for two weeks - to prague, to a wedding just outside of vienna and then to different parts of slovenia (ljubljana, kobarid and lake bled) And I spent some time exploring a variety of career paths including moving into customer success and working in advocacy, but I found myself returning to the edtech and research space because I don't think I'm done here yet.

What does thought leadership mean to you?

A thought leader is someone whose word is heard and trusted. Sometimes this comes from being in-the-know, sharing information before others have it. But it can also be built by being careful and reliable or even just consistent and thorough. There are a lot of paths to get there; you just have to find the one that works best for you as a person and a brand.

Remember these things! :)

Breathe and pause before answering. People are drawn to you. Let your personality shine. Ask questions that show your interest. Do not worry about coming up with profound examples. Focus on selling them.

Give examples of decisions you made based on strategy over technical concerns.

Elevating jobs-focused content

Greatest strength?

Empathy. I like people, and I spend time getting to know people to understand what they care about and what motivates them. I look for opportunities to leverage people's strengths, but their interests are just as important. If I know Gabby in editorial who usually just writes for us has an interest in PR and social media, or if I know Matt in Engineering really wants to find a way to leverage Google notifications, I factor in these things. I won't stray from business goals, but often times the best strategy I can come up with aligns with employee interests and then I know I have buy in and enthusiasm from these people. I think all the best businesses are built on really strong relationships.

What questions do you have for me?

How could someone in this role best support you in your role? What should someone in this role accomplish in their first 90 days? What type of people are most successful at (company)? How would you describe communication between departments?

What is something you've learned recently?

How to play a scale in the phrygian mode on the guitar.

Something you do differently than you used to

I edit with a light pen and I accept a lot more editing from others. At MRA I worked for a CEO who came from a journalism background and I did a ton of writing for that job. I know that he's very particular about words, but his edits were light and rare. This had a huge impact on me as a writer. I felt ownership of the pieces I'd worked on. Now when I edit others' writing, I do so with a much lighter pen.

Tell me about a time you had a difficult relationship with a co-worker and how you handled it.

I had a coworker who I actually really liked as a person, but who had no problem speaking up in meetings of 20+ people if there was something he didn't like about a campaign or strategy or piece of research I was presenting. He wasn't someone I would have considered a stakeholder, but I did respect his opinion. So before every meeting where I gave one of those presentations I made sure to schedule time with him. He gave me a lot of great feedback and he appreciated being asked and he was equally vocal in meetings after that—but now as one of my strongest advocates.

What does EAB do? Tell me specifically about their projects and studies.

I know there are 3 areas focused on Enrollment, Student success and Operations and revenue growth. Under enrollment I know one service you offer is application marketing, which helps universities leverage branding opportunities in the application itself. Financial aid optimization to help make sure aid and enrollment are aligned so that aid helps to boost enrollment as much as possible. You use predictive analytics to determine the likelihood that students plan to enroll once they're accepted. I know you have a student success management system which is a product that allows schools to identify problem areas and serve students better in real time.

Give an example of a time you led a project

I led an initiative to improve job alert sign ups which included site changes followed by an integrated marketing campaign. I worked with a ton of players for that project, including the product manager, the engineering lead and some work directly with the engineers, the UX director and the communications team. I held a kick off meeting to describe the goals of the project for those who weren't already informed and to share my suggested timeline. The engineers weren't able to squeeze me in on the timeline I'd hoped for so it's good that I shared my ideas with the group--i was able to take something off the communications team's immediate to do list, which was already full. In the meantime I worked closely with UX. I had already laid out every single stage of the sign up process, but I wanted to collaborate to determine the specific improvements. This included site design and copy, but also automated emails sent immediately and again after a 15 days if the job alert didn't return any relevant results. I also created a segmented email marketing campaign which served related Qualtrics popovers on the site. The result of all of this was a big bump in job alerts, both immediately and over time. That email campaign is evergreen and is reused three times a year as well as in our welcome series.

Detail a time that you had to take data and make strategic decisions

I ran a few reports trying to figure out which behaviors were most closely linked to completion of the three profile sections I needed users to complete. Users who had photos uploaded were much more likely to have complete profiles. Which isn't necessarily causal, but I had a hypothesis that 1) it would be relatively easy to get people interested in their profile photos and 2) if we could get them in with the profile photo we could get them through the whole profile. This is an interview answer, so you know I was right about this one. We ran a campaign that began with tips for a great profile photo and the campaign resulted in over two thousand completed profiles in one day up from our usual 300-400 profiles.

When was a time you failed? What did you learn from it?

I was really successful with PPC at MRA and so it was one of the first things I wanted to do in my new role at The Chronicle. It was a huge miss. The ROI just wasn't there. I learned not to let myself be driven by tactics, but to always lead with strategy.

Tell me about your SaaS experience.

I worked with one SaaS client as a freelancer and helped teach them about pathing and conversion optimization and helped them with their pricing and benefit pages. A lot of the same best practices apply to non saas businesses, though -- pretty much anything you purchase online will need an optimized pricing page and conversion path, so I had a lot of clients who needed this kind of help. Then in my full time role at MRA selling membership again was something that was typically purchased online and we used benefit tables and pricing models that aren't very different from SaaS either.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I'm interested in business strategy, leadership, coaching and personal development. I love working in the tech space. I'm looking for public speaking opportunities in 2018. In my free time I play guitar, I read a lot, I paint watercolors and I'm teaching myself SQL. I also see a lot of live music and spend a lot of time with friends.

What salary are you looking for?

I'm interviewing for positions that pay around 100. My floor is 85.

How has your writing changed over time?

I'm much more willing to accept edits and kill my darlings.

What is your proudest accomplishment?

I'm proud any time I can teach someone to do something on their own. I love empowering people. I probably got to do that with the most regularity at A Different Feather because we built it right into our business model: we were focusing on building websites and marketing strategies people could maintain on their own, so I'd get them set up with an initial strategy, sometimes I'd build their editorial calendar or set up goals in google analytics, but the bulk of my work was focused on teaching them how to maintain their websites or the strategies we developed for SEO, social media, pay per click ads, content marketing and so on by themselves.

What was your best working relationship with a manager?

I've been pretty lucky on the manager front, but I was remarkably lucky with Lisa, my boss at The Chronicle. I took a course in situational leadership last year and it gave me a whole new appreciation for the skills she employed as a manager. She always recognized where I was. If I was in a situation where I could use my skills and relationships and creativity to really thrive, she heard about it and gave me high fives and that was about it. And when I was stuck, she was right there to help me get unstuck. I think it's easy to categorize people as needing different types of leadership, but the truth is that every person has moments when they're strong and when they struggle and a good manager stays close enough to know where they're needed and jump in.

Tell me about your strategic leadership experience

In my most recent role I made the case for focusing on job seekers explicitly and for rebranding and I reworked our value propositions both for the brand and for individual products. In my role as lead marketer for the marketing research association, I led the push toward focusing on non-dues revenue. At A Different Feather I helped solidify our niche as a philosophy and brand statement. We were focusing specifically on training and creating low-maintenance products for clients who want to manage their own websites, social media and SEO but just need help getting started. And at Hanover I helped shift us to a content-driven lead gen strategy, leveraging Salesforce and automation.

How do you stay organized?

My best tool is really simple -- I keep a list of 5 things, 2 things I'm working on, 2 things on deck, 1 think I'm actively not doing. I also use Trello, google sheets, and google calendars.

Tell me about a time your hypothesis was wrong

My boss at the research association came from a journalism background. He hired me because of my writing experience and he really wanted me to write long emails for our marketing campaigns—emails that were as long as our blogs. I kept pushing that this wasn't best practice, but he was insistent. So I ran an A/B test. And the long email won. I actually tested a whole series of emails because I wasn't convinced, and the long email won 9 out of 10 times. (only if asked) I modified our member welcome campaigns pretty dramatically as a result and did see a positive bump after I did. I guess our researchers liked to read.

Walk me through your resume/Tell me about your lead gen experience

My most recent role was focused on membership growth and member engagement, which ran a lot like my previous lead gen work; many of our initial members came through technical partnerships and were just barely above a cold lead, so I took them through the customer journey, prioritizing different types of engagement based on our current business priorities, their level of engagement and their personas. In roles before that, I worked much more closely with sales. At the Marketing Research Association a huge part of my job was to build leads for conference sponsorships and expo slots; this included developing the website as a lead generating machine and combining that seamlessly with our pay per click and email campaigns. In my role at Hanover Research I built their content marketing strategy from the ground up, including four blogs, four Twitter handles, six email newsletters and email automation triggered by website behaviors. This strategy tripled their inbound leads.

What's a project that you were put in charge of?

Redesigning the Vitae homepage.

What is one thing you would praise your school for?

School spirit. Everybody who goes to Virginia Tech loves it.

How would you help universities increase the donations they receive from alumni?

Since marketing is my lens, I'd set up some sort of social campaign. This is the only way I've fundraised -- either via social media or through events or both.

Tell me about your leadership experience

Sure. So, I think leadership can be divided up into three categories: strategic leadership, team leadership and coaching. So to answer each: I've held strategic leadership roles throughout my career. In my most recent role I made the case for focusing on job seekers explicitly and for rebranding and I reworked our value propositions both for the brand and for individual products. As far as teams, I've been fortunate to lead some really incredible people on cross functional teams, including smaller projects like redesigning our login process to increase conversions or improving our job alert sign up process, to larger projects like redesigning the homepage. I've also been lucky to coach and train a variety of employees. I worked with an incredibly talented community manager in my recent role at The Chronicle. She knew everything that's harder to teach; she has the human side of community management down, but she lacked structure and that made her inconsistent. Through coaching she was able to identify this need herself and she built her own strategies and processes to improve. I also taught our sales staff email best practices and I've had similar roles in previous positions.

What would your past employers say about you?

That I'm smart, reliable and a strong leader. That I'm smart with my time. I don't reinvent the wheel for no reason, but I do fix processes that need fixing.

Tell me about a time you overcame a challenge

The first time we hosted a webinar, we underestimated the interest and our go2webinar account was too small. And worse - the upgrade we needed wasn't even on the same platform, it moved us over to go2webcast - which meant those who had already signed up would no longer be registered once we switched platforms. This is a really technical story so let me try to distill it as much as I can. So the solution had a few parts. -Sign up for new contract -Recreate event -Downloaded the list of those who had registered so far -I figured out that I could set up registration so that it was actually redundant which fixed a major UX problem we were facing. When you went to view the webinar, you had to enter your name and email and then it would immediately give you access to the webinar. This way those who clicked our original confirmation email wouldn't run into a roadblock, which they would have if we'd coded a requirement that they access via confirmation only. So we preserved a good UX and we got the contact info we needed. -As far as our continued marketing was concerned, we took advantage of the fact that people had been locked out and we used an image from jaws that said, We're gonna need a bigger boat! Explaining that we'd expanded our platform and now there was room for more people to register.

What best practices and processes could you bring to EAB?

The main role of product marketing is to serve as voice of the customer. So operationalizing feedback is the first step there. It's really easy to continue operating on old data without even realizing it, so building in check points can really help. For example, you will initially base your buyer personas on a lot of research and you may make incremental changes to those as new information comes in, but you also want to make sure to build in moments to step back and say, Are these personas still serving us? Is our segmentation still serving us? And if not, what else can we try or what else do we need to find out? I also think it's really important to build products that encourage and reward both positive and negative feedback. Most out of the box solutions focus on negative feedback, but learning what's working is just as important if not more important. Focusing on the negative you can end up playing whackamole, giving people random features that your competitors offer and so on. By spending at least equal energy on what is working, you discover where your competitive advantages are and you find opportunities to build on those and really differentiate. In addition to building in opportunities for educational feedback, build in opportunities to capture user stories and experiences for retelling. I'm big on the pareto principal--the 80/20 rule. Reflect regularly on where most of your time is going and where most of your value is coming from and make sure those two things are aligned as often as possible.

What questions do you have for me?

The stories your clients are telling are really powerful. How do you go about gathering those stories? When SCS refers to giving personalized care to students, are there specific actions that advisors or others are taking based on predictive modeling? What will this person do in the first 100 days?

Describe a time when you struggled to build a relationship with someone important. How did you eventually overcome that?

There's this guy Tim Froemling that I worked with at The Chronicle who was the product manager. He really intimidated me at first and we were in a couple early meetings where I felt like we were working against each other a little bit. We were in a lot of group meetings together but I thought it would help to have a meeting just the two of us. So I scheduled a weekly meeting with him—just 30 minutes to make sure we were aligned on our priorities. It really, really did. I thought of him as really serious, but when it was just the two of us he opened up about more personal things like his kids and his travels and we also found we were really aligned strategically. We both had a background in both marketing and tech, so it was easy to find common ground. I went from thinking of him as someone I couldn't crack to thinking of him as one of my strongest allies.

Tell me what you know about this position

This role was described as focusing on helping universities graduate more students so I assume that means I'd be focusing on the student success offerings. So that includes the student success management systems software which is part of the student success collaborative. It uses predictive modeling to identify students showing risk factors and helps advisors know how and when to get involved to improve retention rates. • Lead campaign strategy and development for suite of higher education products • Develop integrated marketing campaigns to move prospects through the sales funnel • Manage team of 2-3 Product Marketing Managers (PMMs) responsible for execution and measurement of plans; partner with digital, content, events, PR, and research on the production and measurement of campaigns • Leverage and monitor data to drive insights on optimizing and nurturing leads • Responsible for team reporting utilizing Salesforce and marketing automation platform • Overhaul internal list by creating rules of engagement and segments; develop nurture tracks to convert unengaged and newly acquired prospects • Develop product buyer personas and positioning/messaging based on competitive analysis, market factors and member feedback • Serve as the internal and external champion for higher education products • Ability to coach, mentor, and train junior level marketing staff on marketing best practices and foundations

The interviewer asked me to convince him of something-- anything-- and then, when I finished answering, he asked me to convince him of the opposite side of the argument.

West Wing is the best show on TV. The actors are incredible, Aaron Sorkin's writing is brilliant, there are strong female characters like the woman leading the NSA, CJ Craig the press secretary, the first lady played by the amazing Stockard Channing. Aaron Sorkin writes one dimensional female characters. Stockard Channing as the first lady is a total wet blanket every time the President is amped about something. CJ Craig is always portrayed as overly emotional. The relationship between Josh and Donna is problematic, with him constantly asking for too much of her and not giving her enough respect.

What is your experience developing product buyer personas and positioning/messaging based on competitive analysis, market factors and member feedback

When I came to The Chronicle they were primarily focused on segmentation by job type. And that segmentation is important, but for our purposes where they were in their job search--including whether they were hunting at all--was really much more important. We were able to use page tagging and action-based indicators to identify people who were actively job searching and those who were advisors to job seekers so that we could serve each relevant content. Our value proposition and all of our messaging was the result of a lot of research and member feedback. I got feedback in a lot of ways. One was to get on the phone as often as I could with members who used our platform. I also pulled a lot of language from our web forums, from the questions people asked during webinars - from which emails are opened and which ads are clicked. All of this info contributes to an understanding of the customer and an ability to speak their language.

Tell me about a time you improved a process

When I first started at Hanover the CEO really wanted us all to use Salesforce consistently, but a lot of people weren't and that made it tough for sales and marketing to work well together. This sounds silly now because everyone uses it, but I found an outlook integration for myself and shared it with my colleagues and that made a world of difference for us.

Have you ever been a supervisor?

While I have not traditionally held a supervisor's TITLE, I have held supervisory roles. The distinction is that I haven't completed performance reviews, although I have always contributed to them. I'd be happy to share with you my leadership experience.

tell me about a time that you had to juggle lots of competing priorities

conference prep

Describe an instance in which you improved a process/system.

lean search - got buy in by bringing people in earlier

A time when you went above and beyond to get results — what the situation was and what you did

writing mra keynote descriptions without anything to base it on