Laura Hart
Laura Hart
Figma Senior Director, Growth MarketingJuly 27
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.
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13498 Views
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Matt Hummel
Matt Hummel
Pipeline360 Vice President of MarketingFebruary 1
Walk me through your favorite campaign. I love this question but it's pretty open-ended and can reveal a lot about the way in which a candidate thinks. Did they understand their audience? Did they design their program in a way to achieve the goals? Did it even have established goals? Was in creative in the sense that it ultimately achieved what it set out to achieve? It enables a candidate to demonstrate how they think about strategy, planning, and execution without leading the witness!
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1457 Views
Abhishek GP
Abhishek GP
Freshworks Inbound GrowthJuly 29
Strategies usually get defined bi-annually or annually and most of us don't have complete influence and control on what gets defined. So allow me to stray a bit and take this opportunity to share some 'tactics' that have worked for me. 1. Do you use common vocabulary? You will be surprised how many salespeople in your organization don't understand the difference between an 'acquired contact' and a 'marketing qualified lead'. Many times, this could be attributed to a combination of a lack of commonly agreed definition and lazy communication from Demand gen 2. Are you measuring the same thing? Acknowledge that solving their problem is your problem. Your success and reputation depend on whether your programs are planned to help them achieve their goals. In the PLG world, it could be a commonly agreed definition of what is a PQL. In the ABM world, it could be the definition of 'Engaged accounts'. 3. You know their 'stated position' but do you have a pulse on their 'interest'? A stated position from sales is usually concrete and explicit. For example, it could be 'I want more leads'. But look for the underlying interests, which are usually unexpressed. For example, it could be 'I need better quality leads - leads that display engagement on the website or inside the product or both'. When you appeal to the 'real interests' of your sales teams and succeed at meeting them, you will build trust and emerge as stronger partners. 4. You need to be okay with not being able to resolve 'all' issues. There will always be a few 'open' questions and opinions about the other team that might never get resolved. For example, as a Demand gen marketer, you'd want a multi-touch attribution model to be instituted but sales might never refer to it. In fact, they could vouch for the clarity provided by a last or a first-touch attribution model. Another one - Sales might have feedback on why marketing needs to do more of a certain kind of content (because the competition does) and deep down, you know that it is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. 6. Divide and conquer. collaborate with your counterpart in Product marketing who can help ease off the pressure on you by helping sales win and keeping up the momentum. They make sure Sales are engaged and are enabled with a winning message, collaterals, and direction. 7. Cultivate a champion in the sales team. Do you have someone from Sales who helps validate your Campaign theme and messaging, and vet prospect emails so they don't read marketing(y)? This is the person who will stand up and speak on your behalf when things get tough for you (which they do occasionally). 8. Identify opportunities to build alignment. Invite champions from your sales team to build the buyer journey and the persona map along with you. Collaborate with them when you conceptualize the PQL logic for your PLG motion or define the segmentation strategy for your next campaign. 8. Build an Always-on feedback loop - given the nature of the roles, it is possible that the Sales-Demand generation relationship could get transactional very fast. Avoid this at any cost. As Demand gen marketers, the onus is on us to elevate the discussion (and our relationship) and ask higher-order questions from a place of curiosity (I know this is super difficult and I'm also learning). One way to do this is to find the right opportunity to pose strategic questions such as 'what is good for the business' and 'do we need to revisit our Ideal Customer Profile' as against 'You are not touching these leads fast enough'. Strive, as much as possible, to attain the right balance in every conversation.
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3042 Views
Sierra Summers
Sierra Summers
Albertsons Companies Director of B2B MarketingJanuary 19
Marketing cannot close business without sales. Sales is the most important partner to marketing, ABM or not. While you can gain the support of the leadership teams, sales ops, etc, if you don't have your sales team onboard with your plans, you will not succeed. Bring your sales team into the process early and keep them informed ia regular status updates (bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Highlight your wins and your losses.
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2834 Views
Dan Ahmadi
Dan Ahmadi
Branch VP Demand Generation and International Marketing | Formerly Outreach, MuleSoftSeptember 9
I'd love to, but we have yet to find an intent vendor that has data rich enough for our specific segment that would indicate readiness to buy. For other companies, I've seen this to be really effective, especially when 10s or 100s of people might start researching something the moment a problem is faced. In my current role, our ABM approach is primarily successful in an outbound manner, and there's not a strong enough inbound signal to leverage to guide our efforts. 
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4247 Views
Kathy O'Donnell
Kathy O'Donnell
Gong Senior Director, EMEA MarketingDecember 21
Honing your craft and being able to share insights and recommendations (based on data) is a great start. Managers often don't have time to get into the weeds, but if they get insights they don't know or recommendations on how to do something differently, this is a good first step in becoming influential. Being concise in your delivery is also important. If you're putting together a written proposal, it's always recommended to start with a brief summary of the expected outcomes/key findings at the start. More generally, the more you understand the business, the better. For example, if you're aiming to be more influential with sales, understanding their challenges, having shared KPIs, talking their language and really knowing the customer will help you gain respect and become more influential. Finally, being a good person to work with naturally drives this. Being a good listener, giving others a voice, taking ownership, avoiding blame, and keeping everyone focussed on what matters.
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1904 Views
Carlos Mario Tobon Camacho
Carlos Mario Tobon Camacho
Eightfold Senior Director of Demand GenerationApril 19
ROI and marketing attribution is the most challenging KPIs for startups in the technology space; most of these companies do not measure CLV and instead, they measure results on an annual basis, depending on factors such as average sales cycle, average deal size and market maturity, reporting returns of marketing investment in the short term is challenging. One important KPI that demand generation teams may overlook in fast-growing technology companies is the customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is a metric that calculates the total amount of revenue a customer is expected to generate for a company over the course of their relationship. It takes into account factors such as customer acquisition cost, average purchase value, and customer retention rate, and provides a more accurate picture of a company's revenue potential than simply looking at short-term revenue or leads generated. By focusing on CLV, demand generation teams can prioritize their efforts on acquiring high-value customers who are more likely to generate long-term revenue for the company. They can also identify areas where they can improve customer retention and increase the overall value of each customer. Overall, CLV can provide a more comprehensive and strategic view of a company's revenue growth potential and help demand generation teams make more informed decisions about their marketing and sales strategies.
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1747 Views
Jordan Hwang
Jordan Hwang
OpenPhone VP of MarketingApril 21
Understand what's currently working when you come in, and accelerate it. If you're in an established business, they must be doing something right to be generating demand and revenue right now. Understanding what that is will help you from a prioritization and early impact standpoint. Over time, understanding why helps you identify other areas of impact that you can spin up that match where prospects are and the internal GTM flywheel.
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724 Views
Liz Bernardo
Liz Bernardo
SquareWorks Consulting Head of MarketingMarch 2
In my personal experience, it was best to expand the team by bringing in a marketing generalist with an interest in Demand Generation. Someone who had a solid base of entry-level marketing skills in multiple departments and that was eager to learn the role of Demand Generation, allowed me to have a starting point to expand and grow upon. A generalist has experience in all of the marketing basics and can be a "pinch hitter" for all aspects of your program. ie. If you need a content writer or editor, someone to assist with social media, events or basic SFDC/Marketing Automation platform skills, you have an asset that can fill the gaps. As time grows, you can teach DG basics and the "why" and how to run successful programs, then eventually the newest team member can branch out to develop and run smaller strategic programs for the business and also grow in their career.
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940 Views
Eric Martin
Eric Martin
Stack Overflow Vice President, Demand GenerationSeptember 7
The leap from manager-level to director-level demand gen leadership might be one of the biggest lifts in career development. Being a manager, coaching, and making sure your team is performing well and achieving goals are manager-level skills. Being able to develop a vision, strategy and creating a plan to executing on it is director-level. Directors are often given more substantial resources and budgets, and therefore held accountable at a higher level much more often. I think one of the most overlooked skills needed to leap from manager to director is effective executive-level communication. From a people development perspective, it's possible you'll also have direct reports with direct reports - so you'll need to help them guide and coach their own teams.
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804 Views