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.

* I ran a training for my team on this earlier this year! Here's an abridged version (feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want the full deck): * What do we mean when we say “project-specific KPI”? * As we develop quarterly plans, or kick off specific strategies, we look for folks to outline a few things: * Context: What’s true today, or what got us here * Objective: What we are trying to achieve. Usually no more than 1-3. * Strategies: How we are going to hit our objective(s) * DACI: Who is involved (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) * KPIs: What we are going to measure to understand if we achieved our objective * Why does it matter to set KPIs for our projects? * Ability to measure your progress * Gives you a goal to hit * Allows you to understand how your work ladders into larger objectives * Allows you to calculate or understand return on investment * Tells you if you are aligned to your strategy, and if your strategy is working * "Meaningful KPIs or performance measures have a specific definition: A performance measure is a quantification that provides objective evidence of the degree to which a performance result is occurring over time." - https://www.staceybarr.com/questions/howtosetkpis/ * Ways to model & forecast your KPIs * Tops-down: * Top-down forecasting is a method of estimating a company's future performance by starting with high-level market data and working “down” to revenue. Ex. we want to double revenue next year, so that’s coming from the tops-down. * Great example: if the business looking to grow ARR by 30% next quarter, and you have a top of funnel marketing goal that maybe isn't perfectly tied to ARR, you could still use that 30% growth rate as a starting point for the metric you are looking to drive * Bottoms-up (or trends-based) * At a high level, bottom-up forecasting is a projection of micro-level inputs to assess revenue for a given year or set of years. Ex. rollup of individual sales quotas. Or, looking at our historical performance to predict future performance * Using a comparable effort or external benchmarks * Sometimes you are doing something new, and have no historicals. In these cases, I often refer to other similar projects, or find external benchmarks to be my guide * Pro tip: If you are building teams and launching programs or at a start up, it will be TOTALLY normal not to have existing benchmarks or historical data to go from. This is not an excuse not to set a KPI. As long as you show your rationale and logic for why you set your target a particular way, you'll get a lot of understanding and appreciation if your first efforts to benchmark are off. * How I use historical data to set targets (in this example, for a quarterly target): * Quarterly data: Last 8 quarters is ideal to give you a sense of how this quarter performed not just last year but the year after. Look at quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and year-over-year (YoY). * Monthly data: Quarters might hide monthly seasonality, so it is also good to look at monthly data. * Weekly data: Can use this if you think there are more recent weekly trends that will give you insight (ex. did you recently invest in an awareness campaign that will continue? Or, did you recently turn off a paid ad campaign that was driving traffic but no meaningful lead or MQL volume)? * General tips: * You don’t want to forecast too high and miss by a ton * Nor do you want to forecast too low and way over achieve * Aiming for a +/- 10% is a good idea * You won’t always get it right, especially if it is a brand new initiative * Look at broader trends to inform your stretch: Ex. if we are growing all SQLs 25% QoQ, look at what you are trying to do in your own channel or with your own project - is this a mature channel so we should plan for more incremental growth? Or is this an area where we have a ton of opportunity and can grow meaningfully in a short period of time? * Think about improving percentage rates CAREFULLY! Going from a 15% open rate to a 20% open rate is not a minor 5% improvement, it is actually a 33% improvement (20%/15% - 1 = 33%). This is the difference between percentage points and percentage change * My biggest secret to forecasting KPIs: It is not JUST math. There's a lot of judgement, art and rationale involved. You know the strategy, you know the levers, you know what you are investing in or pulling back from. If you partner with a finance or operational team to set targets, make sure that there's always a point where you can have inputs or negotiate based on what you know about your strategy, market trends, and how current investments are performing.

I have one question that I love to ask in all of my in-depth interviews: "What is the challenge you are looking for at your next opportunity to help you grow to the next level in your career?" The best answers are those that sound intentional, thoughtful and deliberate. "I want to grow in my ability to do (x), and through this role, I'll be able to take on challenge (y) to help me get to the next step on my career path to (z)."

* 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?

The most important thing around influence is clearly identifying and communicating how your work is contributing to sales success and ultimately having a positive impact on the business. Early on in my career, I learned that the most effective marketers are deeply committed to designing their goals around metrics sales teams actually care about. This essential insight is what inspired me to shift away from measuring leads to measuring marketing-generated pipeline. Changing metrics may be daunting at first but it’s ok to be uncomfortable. In my experience, it’s the best way to move away from a dynamic where marketing and sales blame other teams for standing in the way of their success. If you see this dynamic bubble up, consider it an invitation to reframe your work in the context of finding shared metrics that ladder up to a larger company goal. By measuring your success with metrics both stakeholders actually care about, you’re laying the foundation for a trusted partnership that has the potential to drive tremendous growth for your business. When you have that trusted partnership, the sales team should feel really excited about your roadmap and be asking how they can get more support because they find your work so valuable to them. This is a great opportunity for you to jointly present for additional resources - having sales and marketing both make the same budget or headcount request is much more powerful than marketing doing it alone.

For me, the best demand generation candidates are growth-oriented, have customer empathy, and have a strong quantitative bent. For growth-oriented, this means that they likely have some combination of the following: * Natural curiosity - What's working/not working? Why? What can I do differently? * Self-awareness - What could I/we have done differently? * Drive - A desire to make their numbers, regardless of the circumstances For customer empathy, this means that they understand who the customer is, and what their circumstances are. Demand generation is much more impactful if one can meet the customer where they are, both physically, mentally, and psychologically. Out of the three, nailing this produces the most outsized returns. I left the strong quantitative bent as the lowest priority because it's generally something that most candidates have, so it's the least differentiating. However, there's an aspect of this that's important, which is not only a comfort in working with numbers, but being able to meld the numbers with an understanding of what's happening. The cherry on top is experience. It's always great if they have it, on top of the above. However, I've generally found that folks who possess the above three qualities will be able to quickly make up any experience gaps versus someone who doesn't possess the above.

Work with your sales team! You can use a lot of different tech and methods to identify target accounts, but if your sales team isn't bought in, you won't be successful. I suggest using tools or conducting a TAM analysis to narrow down the list of potential accounts a tad small. Have the sales team participate in the account selection process. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is allowing their sales teams to pick companies like Verizon, ATT, Amazon etc. These companies are broken out into several lines of business and divisions. Sales should understand the account and where they'll break in. If you are going to use digital channels, ensure you have a list large enough to meet audience size requirements on your preferred media partners.

A start up without a demand gen manager has been relying either on organic leads or has been trying ad hoc tactics to boost the funnel. * Know the current environment: It is important to understand the full extent of the existing campaigns, processes and their effectiveness. Engage with the sales teams to understand their priorities and areas where they need help. * Understand the business objectives: The next step would be to understand the business objectives from the leadership and align accordingly. For example, if the need of the business is to boost top of the funnel, then the first 30 days would focus on setting up those campaigns. However, if the challenge is conversions, then the first 30 days should focus on the middle of the funnel with SDR/AE. * Execute: The 60 day plan should be about setting up processes and frameworks and the next 30 days should see launch of new campaigns in order to get those quick wins and monitoring their effectiveness with the help of the processes set in place.

Demand Gen is such a fun role (I know, I'm biased) because of the split because art and science. DG provides a unique opportunity to get creative and strategic in crafting new campaigns and programs, while also definitively measuring impact and analyzing results. As such, some of the best Demand Gen marketers I've hired and worked with contain a true passion for that combination, and with that, a deep sense of accountability and ownership over the success of those programs.

I start making a list of what I want in my next role during my current role. I don't wait until anything is bad or tough, I just start compiling the list when inspiration hits me. (ex. Own a pipeline number, or report straight into the CMO). For the role itself I look for some of the items I write on my list, opportunity for career growth, and managers that I can learn from. In terms of the company itself I look for product-market fit, opportunity for company growth, understanding their sales stats, and a product that I feel excited about/passionate about. Most importantly I also look for a team that I like, because let's be real—we spend so much time with our coworkers, I need to like them!