How does the ideal Marketing analyst look like? Which are the skills you want to check before hiring this key member of the team?
The dream of every marketer is to have developers just working for their team, product managers just working for them and of course a Business Intelligence Analyst just doing Marketing stuff. We, marketers, want to be as independent as possible because we want to iterate super fast. Only in bigger organizations, Marketing teams have dedicated analyst/s to support the team with analytics. Sadly analysts have tactical impact rather than strategical impact. It is rare to see that analysts strongly impact the business direction. There are many reasons why this is happening: analysts reporting to leaders who have very low analytical skills, wrong KPIs set by CMOs, team culture promoting small goals rather than big one.
Having saying that, what can you do to make sure you get the right Marketing analyst in your team? Be careful when hiring! It often happens that analysts are chosen by their ability to run SQL queries or accomplish complex regression analysis. Well, those skills are a must, a given, a conditio sine qua non you should not hire this person.
Which are the top qualities you want to check when hiring your Marketing Analysts?
Simplify complexity: your analyst should be absolutely able to tell a story through data. He/she should simply processes, data visualizations etc..
Critical thinking: you want to get someone who is skeptical, who questions data, who challenges the status quo.
Outstanding statistical skills: please please please, assess if the analyst knows fundamentals of statistics to avoid that he/she is building up report and draws conclusions based on a very limited data set. Can your analyst explain in simple words concepts like p-value, percentiles, median? If he/she is not able, do not proceed with hiring.
Capacity to split the noise from the signal: in other words, the analyst must have great logical thinking and be able to distinguish between cause and consequences. Believe me when I say that it is not a given. I have seen analysis where the consequences were mixed up with the causes.
Don't get paralyzed if the data is not perfect: it is extremely rare to have the perfectly clean data set. You want to get an analyst who is aware of the imperfection but still moves forward without getting stuck into small details.
Long story short: you should assess the raw analytical capability of the potential new team member. How sexy is that?
There is also another component you would like to take into consideration. You want to hire someone who is also self-driven, who can find satisfaction in driving change based on data analysis. Data never changed the world. People change the world. The dream-analyst should be able to take a stand and drive innovation after looking at the data. You want to have someone who gives a voice to the data, who speaks loud data.
Analysts should be seen as people who drive changes and innovation within the company. Analysts must understand business strategy, possess independent view on data (more than other people from C-level), be able to stand-up against other leaders who might be interested to keep the status quo. Analysts must have the capacity to tear down walls that create obstacles for people, processes and structure.
Hire smart or go home.
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