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.

1. Sales Leadership If you're in the B2B SaaS space, you'll know that marketing alone does not generate deals. We engage prospects and customers, bring them to the surface, and rely on AEs and sales development to mature that relationship, converting them to meetings and subsequently, deals. If your target account list is not aligned with Sales, the efforts get largely wasted. ABM works when Sales is ready and excited for each of those accounts to engage. Ultimately all accounts on the ABM list should either be assigned to an AE or on a target list, ensuring strong alignment between teams. 2. Sales Development Digging deeper on the above, it's imperative that Sales Development is also bought into the ABM strategy. It could have a major impact on their workflow, from lead assignments, qualification thresholds, and follow up SLAs. In my experience, I've found the best partner here to be the outbound SDR team, as they're incentivized to work the same accounts in the ABM list. Also, it's important to consistently surface the efforts being made to warm these accounts, as well as to analyze and prove that a warm account has a higher likelihood of converting than a cold one. If you do run the numbers and don't find that trend, it's likely that something is broken, or your thresholds for account activation are set too low. 3. Business Development / Partners Partners can make a huge difference when trying to break into major accounts. The BD team can be an excellent partner to provide inputs from partner organizations as to which accounts may be more susceptible to purchase new technology, as well as which ones have strong partners involved already.

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".

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.

In order to become a demand gen leader, you need to understand how to empower your team to execute to the best of their ability, and also forge a professional development path for every team member. Sure, there are skills like effective budgeting, managing cost efficiencies of channels, and typical manager-level skills such as performance management and coaching. But ultimately, a demand gen leader has many similarities to a CMO: the people that are on a demand gen team have many disparate disciplines, and you need to at least understand the key success drivers of each of those disciplines. It's common for medium-sized (~10+ full time people) demand gen teams to require smaller sub-teams for marketing operations, campaign management, paid media, events and field marketing. Understanding how to grow each function to meet the needs of the business is table stakes for a demand gen leader. What helps teams get to the next level is being a demand gen leader that focuses on the professional development and growth of everyone on your team. Ensuring that everyone has clarity into where they want to go next in their career, and giving them the resources they need to create their own specific path from the role they are in today to where they want to go next.

My favorite question to ask is "What is a program/campaign you are proud of and why?" I feel passionate about some of my past campaigns and I want to work with people who are also excited to do what we do. I also get to see if they value. Is it creativity? Is it growth hacking? Also they get share the value of the campaign through numbers and creative story telling. Also a fun perk is maybe walking away with some inspiration for future campaigns! 

When you are coming in new to a role, your first month should involve getting a lay of the land. Understanding and reviewing past metrics, meeting with stakeholders, learning your team and company's strengths and weaknesses, OKRs, etc. Once you have identified the above, you should then start building a 6-month roadmap. In this roadmap make sure you are kicking off multi-channel programs and campaigns. Start with the easiest to execute and continue to build on it. A great example of this is starting with a solid eBook. From that eBook you can create a blog, design an infographic, create an email/BDR campaign and then run a larger-scale webinar on the topic. Build your hero asset and then launch multiple variations. Make the squeeze worth the juice. 

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 think the relationship with Sales should be seen as a Partnership where both sides have insights to deliver to one another (not just a one-way relatinoship where Marketing delivers Leads). This partnership should be built on trust and understanding. I was lucky to have done a Field Marketing role prior to leading Global Campaigns when I was at Google, and what I learned during that initial role is that Sales knows the field better than anyone. They understand what content resonates with prospects/customers, what competitors are doing to appease these audiences and what our brand's key differentiators can be, and what a target audiences' true painpoints are. Some best practices I found in striking a strong relationship with Sales are: * Have common goals: At the end of the day, Marketing and Sales all have the same goal -- increase revenue for the company. How each team goes about that is where we differ. Ensuring there's a strong handoff from Marketing Qualified Lead to a Sales Accepted Lead is critical. Also making sure Marketing is providing the right tools for Sales to take that Lead to the finish line is where the Marketing/Sales partnership can either fall flat or succeed. * Educate them & Make them a co-partner in your work: I co-created a Sales Council that met monthly where it was a two-fold experience: 1) educating Sales on what Marketing did so they understood we did more than just Events and 2) gathering their feedback on messaging, upcoming campaigns, and more. * Lean on their expertise to improve meessaging: I was charged with building Sales scripts for Inside Sales teams as a first touch for a Marketing Qualified Lead. I was the expert in the campaign but not necessarily the expert in the ideal length of a LinkedIn InMail or a first-touch email. So I often went to Sales colleagues I had a strong relationship with and would ask for them to review the messaging and gather tips on how to improve it. * Keep them in the loop: I would often meet with Sales Directors and other Sales Specialists to share campaign reporting and where we were looking to pilot or optimize the flow. Often times, Sales does not fully understand the Marketing funnel or how it works. So it's great to educate them on general reporting and areas that need improvement. Sometimes I would find myself brainstorming tactics with them that we employed in the campaign as a pilot and they would show success.