The way that Customer Marketing teams and functions should be staffed and organized will vary greatly from company to company, especially when looking at more traditional B2B or sales-led organizations vs Product-led organizations. In my experience, though, the best way to orient the team is around three core responsibilities: * Activation & Engagement: Measurement of activation metrics and time to activation, often in the form of lifecycle marketing. Driving customer education and programmatic communication that support enterprise onboarding, end-user training materials, and aircover to gain as much traction within paying accounts as possible. * Upsells & Expansion: Driven through targeted programs that aim to increase revenue from existing enterprise accounts through targeting new teams, referrals, and surfacing new MQLs to account managers. Can be done through Customer Advisory Boards, 1:1 Account Events, Customer Webinars, and account-based acquisition campaigns. * Advocacy: Measurement of output-based programs that develop champions and put your customers on a stage like case studies, referencable logos, and customer stories across channels (webinars, events, content). When first starting out or when you have a lean team, I've found starting with an account-based customer marketing approach is the best way to drive meaningful impact and quick wins for your CSMs and on your company's bottom-line. Identify the top renewals or any accounts at risk of churning and create targeted account plans to save and expand each. This will provide the frameworks and structures to scale as the team grows.

This is where using Account Based Marketing and Demand Unit Waterfall (DUW) comes into play, especially for B2B Mid-market and Enterprise segments. Integrating a solution like Demandbase into your tech stack will help you identify accounts based on how they engage with your campaigns and execute channel tactics based on the DUW stages * Target Demand * This stage is all about sizing the market and identifying your Total Addressable Market or TAM based on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). * Which accounts are most likely to buy your products/solutions/services? * Pro Tip: Execute TOF (top of funnel) campaigns on paid social and third-party media partners * Active Demand * Of the TAM, how many accounts are in-market to buy in the near future * Pro Tip: Present TOF and MOF (middle of funnel) content via paid social and email * Engaged Demand * How many accounts have interacted with your website, campaigns or content? * Pro Tip: Continue the buyer’s journey with MOF content served up by paid social, email nurture and webinars * Prioritized Demand * In this stage, you’ll take all the target accounts that have engaged with you and prioritize them by Account Score. * Pro Tip: Build dedicated Outreach sequences for Sales Development teams / SDRs to use * Qualified Demand * SDRs have to start multi-threading to key contacts within the account. * Pro Tip: Work with SDRs to execute a targeted, high-touch direct mail campaign via solutions like Alyce or Sendoso * Pipeline Opportunity * More and more marketers are getting involved at this stage * Pro Tip: Execute brand campaigns on paid social, YouTube and display to stay top of mind

As a Demand Gen Marketer, you need to make sure that your 30/60/90 day plan is skewed towards learning about the company/space. The more time you can devote to understanding the business/space/customer, the better you'll be at your job in the long run. That said, I do sprinkle these "quick wins" into my 30/60/90 plan to ensure I'm moving performance in the right direction. I find the campaigns below to be low-effort yet impactful. 1. Run an a/b test on your website's pricing page. Chances are this is one of your best-performing pages when it comes to traffic and impact on conversion. Test something above the fold and you should come to statistical significance within ~45 days. 2. Send out a closed-lost/expired MQL survey. Ask every MQL that didn't convert in the last 3 months to complete a survey in exchange for a $20 Amazon/Starbucks gift card. The questions should be geared towards learning what initially made them interested in your product and why they didn't end up purchasing. Make sure you ask them if they went with a competitor and if so who. If they didn't purchase another product, re-route them to the sales team with their survey answers. If they did, tag them in your CRM to follow up in 9 months. 3. Run an email campaign that generates new reviews. Determine your business's most important keyword that you currently don't rank on page 1 for. Identify the review site (G2, Sofware Advice, etc) that is ranking the highest for that term and ask your customers to write a review on that site. Pull a list of customers with NPS scores of 9/10 and send them an email prompting them to review in exchange for a gift card. While you might not currently rank for that important search term, you can be visible on the website that ranks for it. 

1. Sales Leadership If you're in the B2B SaaS space, you'll know that marketing alone does not generate deals. We engage prospects and customers, bring them to the surface, and rely on AEs and sales development to mature that relationship, converting them to meetings and subsequently, deals. If your target account list is not aligned with Sales, the efforts get largely wasted. ABM works when Sales is ready and excited for each of those accounts to engage. Ultimately all accounts on the ABM list should either be assigned to an AE or on a target list, ensuring strong alignment between teams. 2. Sales Development Digging deeper on the above, it's imperative that Sales Development is also bought into the ABM strategy. It could have a major impact on their workflow, from lead assignments, qualification thresholds, and follow up SLAs. In my experience, I've found the best partner here to be the outbound SDR team, as they're incentivized to work the same accounts in the ABM list. Also, it's important to consistently surface the efforts being made to warm these accounts, as well as to analyze and prove that a warm account has a higher likelihood of converting than a cold one. If you do run the numbers and don't find that trend, it's likely that something is broken, or your thresholds for account activation are set too low. 3. Business Development / Partners Partners can make a huge difference when trying to break into major accounts. The BD team can be an excellent partner to provide inputs from partner organizations as to which accounts may be more susceptible to purchase new technology, as well as which ones have strong partners involved already.

As a first demand generation hire at a startup, some KPIs that you could own are: 1. Lead generation: This KPI measures the number of leads generated through marketing campaigns, events, or other channels. Depending on your market and industry, you may want to consider measuring results from your target account list. 2. Conversion rates: This KPI measures how many leads are converted into paying customers, or at different stages of the funnel. 3. Cost per lead: This KPI measures the cost of acquiring each lead, which helps you optimize your marketing spend and allocate resources more efficiently. 4. Website traffic: This KPI measures the number of visitors to your website and can indicate the effectiveness of your SEO, content marketing, and other inbound marketing efforts. 5. Social media engagement: This KPI measures the level of engagement on your social media platforms, including likes, comments, and shares. Remember that the specific KPIs you own may vary depending on your company's goals and the resources available to you. 

* Metrics are the data points you are measuring the success of the campaign around (either leading or lagging indicators). This can be # of meetings from your account list, # of campaign responses per account, # of impressions or CTR by account, # of opportunities, $ pipeline generated, etc. Any goal you’re measuring yourself on. * Analytics is the process of acquiring Insights from the data. Why should the team care about these metrics? * How are those metrics driving the business? * What action items can we take from here? * How will we apply these learnings to future campaigns?

I wish I had a rosier outlook, but I think demand gen is actually going to get gradually more challenging as time goes on. I think that the profession itself is going to need to move away from things like PII exchange through gated forms, and focus more on value delivery to the viewer/reader/consumer. Global digital privacy regulation is more likely to expand than contract at this point. I think the way companies measure demand generation is going to need to evolve as well - with broader full-funnel attribution being more socialized, accepted and understood at the highest levels in the company. One area where many demand gen leaders underinvest is strengthening finance and marketing alignment. Everyone talks about sales and marketing alignment - that's just a must to have a functional revenue team. How to strengthen that bond with finance? Educate them on marketing's broader contribution, and demonstrate that you have the respect and feel the responsibility for what is usually a large portion of variable company spend.

In the Demand Generation world, KPI's are ever-evolving but one always remains consistent - "to drive marketing pipeline for the business." When starting out your career in DG, KPI's will be decided by your MLT team and assigned dependent on the annual, bi-annual or quarterly goals. Some of the most common may be dependent on: - a low performing product line needing a boost - a regional team needing pipeline assistance - or a channel needing support As you grow into DG leadership, additional KPI's come into play around driving better ROIs on campaigns, driving down business costs, while delivering additional pipeline, as well as employee development for your team.

When I think about measurement gone wrong, my first question is typically about the marketer, not the KPI. All KPIs can be useful, assuming your measurement is scalable (i.e., it doesn’t take a week to do the analysis) and you are using them appropriately (i.e., context is everything). That said, here are some metrics that I generally find less material to understanding the health of the business: 1. Impressions/Followers/Engagement: In a world overrun by bots, ad impressions, social media followers, and engagement metrics have become less relevant. You’d be surprised how many companies with massive social media followings built their audiences by purchasing cheap likes from engagement farms. 2. Frontend Email Metrics: Between email preview panes skewing results and well-documented issues stemming from privacy updates introduced in iOS 15, open rates have become far less relevant in recent years and are no longer sufficient to understand if your message is resonating. 3. CPL & Raw Lead Metrics Without Context: Lots of marketers fall into the trap of driving down CPL at the expense of lead quality. There's no faster way to lose the trust of your sales colleagues than flooding them with low-quality leads & expecting them to convert.

My favorite question to ask is "What is a program/campaign you are proud of and why?" I feel passionate about some of my past campaigns and I want to work with people who are also excited to do what we do. I also get to see if they value. Is it creativity? Is it growth hacking? Also they get share the value of the campaign through numbers and creative story telling. Also a fun perk is maybe walking away with some inspiration for future campaigns!