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.

There will likely be a crossover in a few KPIs between DG and PMM. This however is not a bad thing, it ensures your PMM counterparts are invested in making sure GTM activities are successful. For example both groups might take an opportunity target. For DG this is our bread butter. For PMM it helps drive behavior around not just putting assets and programs into market but marking sure they are helping to drive quality leads all the way through the funnel. PMM will likely focus on, to name a few: * Delivering customer references and case studies * driving product adoption and enablement * site visitors or web traffic to specific pages or within a target audience * execute product launches * various thought leadership items like favorable AR endorsements DG will likely focus on: * Funnel performance * Responses/form fills * MQLs (quality/quantity) * Opportunities (count/ $ value) * Upsell/cross sell

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. 

* 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.

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,

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.

Here are the four most important parameters that determine your Channel strategy when designing an Integrated Campaign. 1. Who? - Audience * Are you talking to developers, end-users, or decision-makers? * How large is the buying group for your product? * Is your product a single or multi-department purchase? 2. Why? - Marketing objective Is your campaign objective creating awareness, building pipeline, or accelerating pipeline? Each objective dictates the count of audience you have available to target which in turn informs the decision to choose channels. For example, if your objective is to accelerate pipeline, you might be limited to using targeted Social (custom audience), emails, closed-door events, and direct mail. However, if your objective is to create awareness, your channel coverage needs to expand dramatically because you are now trying to reach a broader audience to inform them of your existence. Now you are thinking Display, Content syndication, 3rd party tradeshows & publishers, etc. 3. What? - Average Contract Value (ACV) or ARPA What kind of product do you sell? Typically, it's safe to assume that a product with a higher ACV needs consideration and involvement from senior decision-makers across LoBs. Note that the same decision-makers are not easily accessible via conventional channels such as Paid social, email, Paid search, etc. Therefore your channel mix needs to evolve to match where they pay attention to. In this scenario, your channel mix might include direct mail, exclusive invites to 3rd party events, etc. 4. How much? - Available budget If you are well-funded, go ahead and explore multiple channels until you have a mix that delivers predictable lead volume and Qualified Pipe. If funds are tight, you might want to prioritize channels based on 3 factors - - Does that channel have your buyer's attention? (qualitative assessment) - What is the Cost per reach per channel? - Based on rough funnel math, can this Cost per reach ultimately deliver a respectable Pipe per $ spent over the duration of your sales cycle? Overall, two variables determine the effectiveness of this strategy - 1. Do you have a sufficient volume of buyers who you can target? 2. Are you able to effectively and efficiently access those channels to reach them?

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.

My biggest frustration is the fact that sometimes programs work really well and then two months later, that same program will just not work. It's tough when you forecast a certain volume of new names or registrants coming in and it doesn't hit. There are some factors that influence this like seasonality (summer time or holiday months can influence the effectiveness of a program) or world events like a pandemic. While this is a frustration, it is the reason why demand gen leaders should have a good mix of programs every month/quarter in order to hit their pipeline goals, because that program you are banking on just may not hit.