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.

Everything starts with a great organic strategy and an SEO friendly website. When I ran demand gen at a very small company, the sales team was just starting to ramp up and I didn’t have a budget so website/content was where I focused on first. In parallel, if you have a direct sales team outside of a product led selling motion, I would align with your sales leader and all the regional managers and individual AEs. Demand generation is an extension of your sales team and tight alignment between sales and marketing is a key ingrediant to your and your company's revenue goal success. More tactically speaking, this is how I think about the foundation of my demand gen strategy in priority order: * Organic & Paid Channels: Organic is your website. It's a place where your prospects and customers learn about your brand, servces and offerings. It is also a place where you already have existing traffic. SEO is your friend. Often times we get stuck on talking about our products and we fail to do research on the terms our users use to search to get to our website. Keyword research is important because it allows you to do more with less. Make content for high search volume topics. If you have budget, that’s great! Paid digital tactics and SEM, where you can bid on competitors and keywords. Get reviews from customers on G2 Crowd and Capterra, and of course relevant content is always essential. Partnerships can also expand your reach. * Website optimization: An easy way to optimize your website is to start running A/B tests. Here at Salesforce we run a lot of A/B test on form pages, campaign pages, and different types of ads (message and copy) — to ensure we are using the best message and on-page functionality that is the most optimal for the conversion path. * Email: If you are just starting out, think of your demand gen strategy as these 3 lifecycles: pre-purchase (prospecting), in-trial/evaluation (purchase), and post sales (retention, loyalty, cross-sell, upsell, upgrades). You can start of with building 1 nurture for each of these stages and get more sophisticated once you understand your target audience and their buying behavior more. I would also consider having a different nurture for different selling motion, for example, a nurture for self-service/product led and a separate one for direct sales. * Outbound Campaigns & prospecting - One way to get help your sales team with outbound motion is to target top prospect accounts, use data science & lead scoring to pinpoint high quality leads. Send direct mailers to high propensity prospects and personalized 1:1 direct mailers. Keeping tabs on the competition is important, set up Competitive plays and review sites for compete signals. * A personalized experience - create this with real time customer interactions across all touchpoints. Connect digital interactions to online/office channels and functions. Design personalized journey’s based on prospects and industries. Use data science and give sales a recommendation action (i.e talk track, assets, data sheets, webinars, etc) to help with their selling cycle. 

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!

Here are some examples of good OKRs for a Demand Generation team: 1. Objective: Increase qualified leads by X% Key Results: * Increase website traffic by Y% * Increase conversion rates on landing pages by Z% * Increase the number of demo requests by Y% * Implement a new lead scoring model to prioritize leads for sales team follow-up 2. Objective: Improve marketing funnel efficiency Key Results: * Reduce customer acquisition cost by X% * Increase conversion rates at each stage of the funnel by Y% * Implement new email nurturing campaigns to engage leads who are not yet ready to purchase 3. Objective: Expand market reach Key Results: * Increase website traffic from target industries by X% * Develop a content marketing plan to target new buyer personas * Expand social media presence to increase brand awareness in new markets * Add to your database a number of new contacts/account from a new audience 4. Objective: Drive revenue growth through demand generation Key Results: * Increase marketing-sourced revenue by X% * Implement new ABM (Account-Based Marketing) campaigns to target high-value accounts * Optimize the sales funnel to reduce sales cycle time and increase deal velocity OKRs should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). By setting goals that are aligned with the company's overall objectives, the Demand Generation team can help drive growth and success for the business.

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.

I'd recommending focusing a lot more on engagement and less on lead generation or MQLs. In general, you should know the people you want to engage in each account, and you'll have them already populated in your CRM. This completely eliminates the need for any "lead source" tracking to prove effectiveness. Additionally, you'll want your team to keep engaging the important few until they're ready to take the next step with your company, so measuring actual engagement with marketing materials/programs is key. Several tools out there help with this such as Demandbase and 6Sense, but it can also be homegrown if you have the appetite for it. If I were to oversimplify a lot, assign points based on activities, roll them up to the account level, ensure they decay over time, and then set thresholds based on what matters most for your business. Maybe you need a lot of engagement within a few key contacts, maybe you need the whole village to get activated! If you're not sure, start somewhere, backtest, measure, and iterate. 

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)."

The audience I target are primarily Fortune 500 C-Suite. In this case, we take an account first approach and weigh events more heavily than digital in our marketing plans. For integrated marketing plans, bringing in the functional experts to inform the strategy from the start is critical. Generally I recommend having a clearly articulated goal/vision with clearly articulated outcomes of success. Then opening the space for ideation to build the strategy jointly helps create the initial alignment needed for your demand gen strategy.

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.

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.