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.

One of the great things about Demand Gen is that there isn't a set path into it. For example, I started my career in sales and account management before transitioning over to marketing. While somewhat atypical, I've found having a sales background to be beneficial as I've grown my career in DG because it gave me a first hand look into what the sales and marketing relationship looks like from the other perspective, and a deep empathy for being quota carrying. I've worked with incredible DG marketers who have come to DG from different fields (both from other functions in marketing and fields outside of marketing) and landed on Demand Gen. My recommendation would be to think about how your skills in another field can transfer over to a Demand Gen role. Chances are they are transferable and will provide you with a differentiated view point because of them. Use that to your advantage!

I believe that all integrated campaigns should exist to drive pipeline & revenue (there is an exception though: when this is not true is when you are creating a category). The biggest difference between these two goals is the volume and the type of buyers you choose to ignore or add to your campaign strategy. For example, an integrated campaign strategy that is focused on meeting pipe goals (assuming limited funds) is focused (more) on two buyer stages - Consideration & Intent. It therefore already assumes that the majority of buyers are aware of the product category and the existence of possible solutions in the market. * Your biggest leverage point here is to make yourself known in specific buying situations (eg. 'we are an affordable alternative to XYZ', 'we are easier to use compared to ABC'). Think of these as inputs to your ad creatives, content assets, etc. * You contain these seemingly disparate buying situations into a 'Campaign theme', a singular go-to-market messaging that focuses the collective energy of all GTM teams in your organization * You now create the right mix of offers that get your buyers to self-select themselves into the demand funnel. What is the type and number of webinars, owned vs 3rd party events, content assets, Demos, Free Trials, Free for forever plan, etc? * You develop a media plan that lays out these offers in a certain sequence, and the time period and is promoted using specific tactics. Since your focus is pipe-gen, it's important to have an educated pov on gated vs ungated content strategy. This, usually, is not as big a concern area in a Brand marketing campaign.

If you're still on an inbound (MQL) model, I would start by pivoting every report through the lens of "target account vs. non-target account". * # of campaign responses * # of opportunities generated * $ pipeline generated * ACV * # closed won * $ closed won What matters gets measured. Over time, (ideally) it will reflect that target accounts drive the biggest impact to the business. (If not, it likely means that you'll need to take another look at the target account / ICP criteria.) In my experience, that usually is the catalyst to change how can we drive more "target account" pipeline? To do that, we'll need to think differently about engaging with an account & identify more of those leading indicators. Then, you can start thinking about the KPIs and what it means for an Account to be "Qualified".

If you are the first demand generation hire at a company, chances are you are going to need to advocate for some immediate changes to your funnel. They probably hired a demand generator because something needs to be addressed. However, question everything and confirm what needs to be addressed yourself. Start by mapping out the funnel in detail. Figure out every entrance into your website and then map out each following step. In addition to the mapping, record the conversion rates for each one of those steps. Then schedule a meeting with senior leadership across the company and walk them through the funnel. Highlight all the areas where the conversion drops the most and then recommend process changes, fixes, and tests to address them. This exercise not only helps you work out your 30/60/90-day plan but also generates unanimous buy-in from the team. 

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. 

This is another question that is highly dependent on the needs of an organization, the current state of their growth team, and what resources they have today, etc. When I start the build, or rebuild, of a team the first thing I do is get to know the current players. I have learned through the years that too often teams that aren't working well have talented people doing the wrong job. I like the old analogy of the team being a bus, you have to know who belongs on the bus and in what seat they'll do best, then you help those who don't fit transition, then you begin rebuilding. For me it's less about the specific roles and more about the types of folks in those roles. Though of course roles do play a role. Here's some thoughts to consider. 1. A balance of veteran and early career folks. As Andy Jassy is fond of saying "there is no compression algorithm for experience." While I love having folks looking to grow their early stage careers they can't get the support they need in doing so if they don't have experienced people around them. 2. Balance out strengths / weaknesses. This applies to myself and everyone on the team. I like to think about longer horizons and bigger ideas and I look to build teams that have others who are good at making those ideas doable, those who can define the first steps. If I have folks who are highly analytical I look to hire folks who like to get stuff done. Whether we're talking team of two or team of 50 be really thoughtful about this, educate your folks on their personality types, use tools like Strength Finder or Meyers Briggs. 3. Cover the foundational needs. In a smaller team you need breadth of capabilities to cover your critical roles, SEM, social marketing, content, brand/design, etc. There are unicorns out there who can do more than one of these relatively well and get you out to the next phase. You don't have to have industry experts in each, just talented folks who can get you from here to there. 4. Don't get overspecialized. As orgs grow we want to hire people to focus on just one thing. This is great from a responsibilities perspective but it does begin to limit your agility over time. So when possible I like to ensure there's cross training and sharing of projects across functions. Not only do you usually get a better result but then the team also builds a mutual understanding of each others roles, and a stronger bond. I've done this even in teams of 30+ with great effect. You asked for org structure but this is hard to do without context. Here are some common roles/teams I see in growth orgs. These can be filled by people or agencies. * Content marketing * SEO * Customer engagement / Lifecycle marketing * SEM * Web - Engineering (Front end, back end, QA) * Web - Conversion rate optimization * Web - Product Management (someone absolutely needs to think of your website as a product) * Technical product management (think martech admins) * Paid Advertising (all non SEM spend) * Social * Brand Marketing (less often, usually this is sperate from DG/Growth) * PM / PMO (this is often an underrated role, so much more gets done when it's managed well) * Product Marketing (in larger orgs this also tends to be separate but highly connected to growth) There's so much more I'm leaving off, I don't want to just spout off every marketing role that exists but that covers my most common list.

It can be incredibly frustrating when other teams lack respect for the time and effort it takes to execute a demand gen program. Sales teams and others can sometimes take the effort for granted and expect opportunities to flow in. And when things aren't going as expected, they are quick to blame the team without understanding the underlying factors at play or the work that happens daily. Your friend here is to educate your teammates and departments on your work and how it ultimately impacts the bottom line.

I don't think ABM at its core is all that different from landing net new vs cross/upsell/expansion. If you boil it down, you are taking a set of channels and tactics and deploying campaigns to get your prospects or customers to take a desired action or behavior. I will argue that you have more room for error when going into new prospects or markets where you might not have as much data or evidence to support your messaging, positioning and campaign strategy. When marketing to current customers, you better know what you're talking about. There is nothing worse that being an existing customer of a brand and receiving messaging and campaigns as if you had never worked with that brand in your life. With cross/upsell/expansion, you not only have to know your customer, but you better make sure you let your customer know you know them. For example, if you're already in at Amazon and looking to upsell, you better be able to discuss pain points that came up at prior QBRs, understand their org chart, tech stack, and review how you can help them achieve their goals,

This is a great question! Always use the metrics to support the story you are telling. You can get creative with this one and honestly— the world is your oyster when it comes to telling a story with metrics. So firstly, share your qualitative story. "Since I joined the team, we have diversified our programs and channels where we have been bringing in a bigger of volumes of names" Then you need to support that with a quantative story. - Where are your MQLs coming from? Are a majority coming from a new channel that you implemented? Look at the MoM change of this percentage and the volume of MQLs that have come from this one program (and share QoQ metrics). Some other metrics you could use: - Growth of the percentage of marketing sourced leads that turned into closed won deals/meetings with the sales team. (Ex. Did marketing originally infleunce 30% of sales qualified leads/or meetings and now it's 55% since you implemented your programs) - MoM growth of MQLs and other top of funnel metrics (like new names) since you joined the team or made a change