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'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. 

This one is going to be simple. Focus on being close to the numbers and be ready to be creative! I do think there are some foundational pieces to building a demand generation engine. The first is having a balanced program mix, make sure are bringing names in a consistent and steady flow. Being close to the numbers helps understanding what channels are working, which channels to invest more time & money in, and making sure these are the programs that convert to meetings and closed won. Once you have that foundational piece, focus on getting creative. At the end of the day, most demand gen teams are running the same types of programs—webinars, emails, etc. It's up to you as the leader of your team to think out of the box. Tip: Look at those programs that are converting well and see how you can hypercharge them by adding a gift card incentive for taking a meeting!

1. Communication! Shared Slack channels, meet regularly and ask your sales team for input so they feel engaged and involved in decisions. Be transparent about how the marketing budget is spent and what is working and what isn't. 2. Shared KPIs. The biggest mistake is disconnected goals. Having a marketing goal of driving leads and a sales goal of driving revenue rarely works out, in my experience. At a minimum, Demand Gen/Marketing needs a sales-qualified pipeline target to fill the top of the funnel. At best, it's a shared revenue target. 3. Having marketing champions on the sales team can make a big difference. A sales leader who advocates for and voices their appreciation for marketing sets the tone for the rest of the sales organisation. Invest time in building those relationships. 4. Listen back to sales calls and hear the types of objections and discussions they are having. It can often give you ideas for new pieces of content that will resonate well and that your sales team will appreciate. 5. Avoid jumping in to fulfil every request of the sales teams. In all likelihood, you will become much more tactical than strategic and ultimately deprioritise things from your plan that may have had a greater impact. It's always better to provide a rational explanation as to why you believe their suggestion isn't the right thing to do. For example, with event suggestions, I usually find that the target ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) isn't quite right. 6. Have fun! Lunch chats, socialising together, connecting over the coffee machine, finding shared interests. All help build up a more personal relationship that ultimately builds a deeper connection and better working relationship.

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.

The move from Manager to Director is about transitioning from someone who is told what to do and "pulls the levers." In someone who can own a strategy and help execute it. Before you can build a strategy, you need to be an expert on the execution side of the work. Dive into every channel, and understand how they work and when they are leveraged. Additionally, always be looking at how others market. Look at your competitor's digital ads, read their blog, sign-up for a newsletter, and immerse yourself in their content. And step outside competitors as well. Find those brands you respect and learn everything you can about how their teams work and build programs. From a strategy perspective, look at areas within your business and think about how you could improve them. Then, bring your ideas to your managers and leaders. Getting feedback on those ideas can help you understand their thoughts, and you'll pick up some strategic guidance along the way. And don't be afraid to ask questions!

This question has a lot to unpack. Influencing change takes a LOT of time, but I would recommend starting with first principles. 3 things I would start with: * I gotta say marketing sure did a good job of marketing ourselves! However, “ABM” is not a marketing thing; it’s a holistic revenue strategy. The first thing I usually do is internally rebrand “Accunt-Based Marketing” to be a target account strategy. * “Seek first to understand.” That will mean building relationships cross-functionally to establish trust and credibility. You’ll need key stakeholders to advocate for this strategy when you’re not in the room. Understand what’s important to those teams first: whether sales, e-staff, revenue ops, customer success, and product. * With Sales & Customer Success: Learn how they are approaching their accounts today. What’s working well for them, what do they need help with? What account insights can you surface that they wouldn’t otherwise have? * With Product / Product Marketing: How does the voice of the customer inform product development? What market trends are you seeing from your ICP? * With revenue ops: Depending on the maturity of the organization, you’ll need their alignment to identify ICP criteria to build out target account lists and partner on campaign measurement. This account-centric view will require a different way of measuring traditional lead > opportunity reporting. Can we measure account engagement today? * For Finance: You’ll need their support for any new budget, which means you’ll need to do some math to speak their language. Can you show them customer acquisition costs (CAC) for target accounts vs. non-target accounts? * Then, you’ll likely need to show results before you tell. Introduce an experiment that you can manage without fancy technology. Start with a hypothesis around a very crisply defined account list, brainstorm with others around a mix of tactics / messages / channels that you can measure, and chip away to learn what works. Share progress often.

This is a great question and a tough one to answer! Every org should develop this based on need. If I were to design a Demand Gen org for Global, it would look like this: * Demand Gen Strategy & Operations: You need one (or multiple people depending on the size of the org) to own the general Operations for the team. Meeting scheduling, global team interlocks, OKR setting, etc. * Demand Gen Analysts: This team will own the campaign data and so your focus can be on deriving insights and demand gen orchestration. * Global Interlock Lead: This person should own the relationships with the regions and the process of how assets get localized and delivered to the global teams. Is there a regular meeting cadence? How do you introduce new campaigns to the global teams so they are aware? * Campaign Leads/ Orchestrators: These are the Demand Gen warriors who own building their campaigns end to end. You can consider dividing this team up by segment type (Prospects vs. Customers, specific target audience segments, etc.). * Content Strategists: This team can own building the content and ensuring they are including global insights to make it relevant for global teams. Often the pitfall when building global demand gen teams is that the teams build for the region they are in and are not considerate of how to extend the message to be global. This team can own building assets such as infographics, webinars, etc. 

This could be an extremely long answer, but I'll condense it to having the ability to manage large cross-functional projects and finding a mentor (or two) to help guide you along your path. Managing cross-functional projects may seem like a boring answer, but it's absolutely critical to get things done in a revenue organization. Modern revenue teams in SaaS, for example, have many functions: Sales, marketing, customer success, revenue operations, and enablement are some of the key areas. In the beginning of my career, before I went into marketing, I was actually an IT consultant for large investment banks. I worked on large multi-million dollar data center projects that included at least ten different workgroups. This taught me the importance of creating a vision and inspiring follership, time management, efficient resource utilization, and holding cross-functional partners accountable when necessary in order to keep a project moving. A great example of applying this to demand gen is introducing enterprise (or account-based) marketing to an organization. This transforms not only how you serve the broader revenue team, but how you integrate a target account model to existing sales, CS and operations functions. The more predictable half of the answer is finding mentors that inspire you. Connecting with mentors that can help guide you through your career and make the tough choices about where to invest your time and energy are essential. Sometimes they're people you work for, sometimes they're people you've worked with, and sometimes they're just people you know. But identifying people to help you hold yourself accountable for your career growth will be essential to growing into a leader.

I am fortunate to be a part of a journey where both the span and the scope of what a Demand generation team does have evolved over time. In my experience, the role of what a Demand gen team does will and should change as the organization matures. In the early days, in most orgs, Demand gen manages all things that touch a buyer - SEO, Website, Performance marketing, and Content marketing. As the org evolves, the role gets elevated in a few areas but leaner in others. For example, the concept of Integrated Campaigns/storytelling gets introduced, which becomes the primary driver of marketing-sourced revenue. At the same time, the organization hires experts to lead Website experience & strategy, and this role could move out and live under a separate team (product management or brand marketing). Two good ways to approach these decisions: 1. Be aware of your place under the sun: It is important to know where your organization is (what's working and not; how is marketing perceived internally; what should change) and map this intelligence to your current role and how it needs to evolve so you are able to add more value to the organization while still being in the same role 2. Do not negotiate on 'positions': The standard method of approaching these discussions is usually based on a 'position' that you and the other team choose to take. The more extreme these positions, the longer the time and effort it will take to discover whether an agreement is possible. It could also put your relationship in danger. What's worked for me in the past is to insist on a 'common criteria' that defines success for the business. Let's say you define the 'common criteria' as improving website conversion by X% and engagement by Y%. Which is a better team to own this initiative, and has the bandwidth, the better team structure, and capable and experienced resources?