Get answers from demand generation leaders
Laura Hart
Figma Senior Director, Growth Marketing • July 27
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.
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Keara Cho
Salesforce Sr. Director, Field Marketing • August 17
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.
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Sam Clarke
Second Nature VP of Marketing • March 15
As a Demand Gen Marketer, you need to make sure that your 30/60/90 day plan is skewed towards learning about the company/space. The more time you can devote to understanding the business/space/customer, the better you'll be at your job in the long run. That said, I do sprinkle these "quick wins" into my 30/60/90 plan to ensure I'm moving performance in the right direction. I find the campaigns below to be low-effort yet impactful. 1. Run an a/b test on your website's pricing page. Chances are this is one of your best-performing pages when it comes to traffic and impact on conversion. Test something above the fold and you should come to statistical significance within ~45 days. 2. Send out a closed-lost/expired MQL survey. Ask every MQL that didn't convert in the last 3 months to complete a survey in exchange for a $20 Amazon/Starbucks gift card. The questions should be geared towards learning what initially made them interested in your product and why they didn't end up purchasing. Make sure you ask them if they went with a competitor and if so who. If they didn't purchase another product, re-route them to the sales team with their survey answers. If they did, tag them in your CRM to follow up in 9 months. 3. Run an email campaign that generates new reviews. Determine your business's most important keyword that you currently don't rank on page 1 for. Identify the review site (G2, Sofware Advice, etc) that is ranking the highest for that term and ask your customers to write a review on that site. Pull a list of customers with NPS scores of 9/10 and send them an email prompting them to review in exchange for a gift card. While you might not currently rank for that important search term, you can be visible on the website that ranks for it.
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Carlos Mario Tobon Camacho
Eightfold Senior Director of Demand Generation • April 19
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.
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Monica Myers
Lattice Director of Demand Generation | Formerly Gusto, Qualia, AdRoll • August 25
My number one tip when building or scaling a Demand Gen function and team is to ensure that there is a clear path to measureable outcomes and impact across the DG team. While understanding impact and building a sense of accountability is important for all marketing functions, it's critical for Demand Gen. Regardless of how your company is structured, every Demand Generation member should have a set of tangible metrics and business outcomes that they are working towards. This is generally a pipeline target, but may vary. For example, if your company sets different pipeline targets across industries or product lines, you want to ensure that you have 100% coverage over those targets through the structure of your team, which requires mapping all team members to targets. While the metrics and goals will differ depending on scope of the role, all should be connecting back up to key goals and objectives for the broader business.
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Tamara Niesen
WooCommerce CMO | Formerly Shopify, D2L, BlackBerry • December 6
I am focused on B2B marketing to create, drive and capture demand with the end goal of creating a pipeline for sales teams (well, ultimately to acquire customers!). From my perspective, the pillars that feed into the strategy for driving pipeline include: * Knowing our target audience * Creating compelling narratives, value propositions, and messaging * Developing best in class point of view content to educate the market while establishing our brand as trusted thought leader in the space * Integrated campaigns and multi-channel strategy: getting our message to the right audience at the right time, in the right place (buying journey is complex and requires multiple messages, solutions, tailored to multiple personas at different stages, at any given time, via multiple channels- from digital, to in person events, to social and more) Aligning stakeholders in these processes is typically done by following an established framework I mentioned in a previous question. In summary- a single project or campaign champion would create a proposal for the project/campaign in the form of a brief that is circulated amongst stakeholders. Alignment and approvals take place with the right decision makers, from there, workstream owners or channel owners are identified and brought into a project/campaign kick off. Shared goals, metrics, targets are established, timelines and workback schedules created, and regular check ins/status updates to ensure we are on track, or to remove roadblocks. Once the project/campaign is complete, a retro is conducted with all stakeholders- this can help ensure best practices are identified, key learnings are addressed, or failed initiatives are deprecated ;)
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Jessica Gilmartin
Calendly Chief Marketing Officer • August 19
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.
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Abhishek GP
Freshworks Inbound Growth • December 2
Let's first define an 'integrated campaign' approach. * At its core, the 'Integrated' approach implies three things - knowing and using the buyer's journey as the premise to building the marketing strategy, aiming for consistency in marketing across touchpoints & sequencing your messaging across these touchpoints * A 'campaign' is nothing but a coordinated set of assets & tactics to help your buyers progress from Awareness to Consideration to Decision. The other underrated impact of a campaign is its ability to corral organizational focus, time, and efforts toward a single goal and theme (sales, product, customer success, marketing) An Integrated Campaign strategy is an amalgam of these concepts. So do all businesses need an integrated campaign strategy? Yes. But does an integrated campaign strategy look the same for all businesses? No. The need for a Series A startup to craft an integrated campaign strategy is as much as it is for a Series C & Post-IPO business. The nature and scope of integration, however, vary significantly. These factors might help as you think through this. 1. Have you achieved Product-Channel(s) fit? * If are a Seed stage startup and have reliably managed to scale one or two acquisition channels, you have other things on your mind than 'integrating' these two channels. That is because, today, you do not have the channel width to capture a large part of the buyer's journey (community, email, in-app, review sites). * If you have a larger business, you might already have the channel width that covers a large proportion of your buyer's journey. This is the right time to think about an 'integrated campaign' strategy. Some of the questions to ask are - a) Do I know my buyer's journey with a fair degree of confidence b) Are they experiencing the same 'messaging theme' across touchpoints c) How can I sequence my tactics & messaging based on the demand funnel 2. What is your GTM motion? * Are you PLG or Sales-led or both? If you are PLG, you focus on specific channels that drive inbound demand - SEO, Paid Search, Content, In-app virality, Community, Review sites & Emails. If you have a Sales-led motion, you (mostly) focus on channels that go beyond these to also include Webinars, Events, SDR messaging, & Content. In both scenarios, your buyers want to experience your business in a way that is consistent across these touchpoints and takes them through a journey (sequencing in messaging) irrespective of whichever touchpoint they are in. 3. Do you have an established Brand marketing strategy within your organization? * If your org runs brand marketing campaigns, you'll need to redefine the architecture of your demand-gen-led integrated campaigns. In this new scenario, you'll have to view the buyer's journey together and build out common areas of leverage. For example, a Brand marketing campaign usually targets a large proportion of 'Problem unaware' buyers. So how can your demand-gen team nudge these buyers down the funnel via an integrated approach? Here, the role of demand-gen shifts to nudging these buyers to the 'Consideration' & 'Decision' stages using the same messaging theme and leveraging tactics (such as collecting a retargeting pool of qualified intent, etc.) that capture their engagement and intent for your category or business.
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Bhavisha Oza
Gong Performance Marketing Lead | Formerly Genesys, Instapage, Red Hat • March 21
A demand gen strategy should be a mix of campaigns tied to funnel stages. Content must be created to align with each of these stages 1. Brand Awareness 2. Top of Funnel campaigns 3. Middle of Funnel campaigns 4. Bottom of Funnel campaigns Also see the answer to How do awareness stages influence your demand generation strategies?
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Eric Martin
Stack Overflow Vice President, Demand Generation • September 7
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.
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