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.

The key to a successful marketing campaign is segmenting your target audience correctly and being customer-obsessed. But your job is not just to drive people to websites and have them fill out a form to become a lead; it’s to be responsible for the entire customer journey. In fact, 56% of high-performing marketers actively map the customer journey across their company. To successfully join this effort, you need to properly nurture customers. THE TOP-OF-MIND NURTURE B2C companies are experts at the top-of-mind nurture. My local wine shop sends me a weekly update of their tasting events and featured recipes on food and wine pairing. Nordstrom sends me daily reminders about exclusive sales “just for me.” These brands know it’s possible to stay in touch with a prospect who may be a good fit, but is not yet sales-ready. To create a top-of-mind nurture campaign, your small business should use educational and research-based content that establishes your company as a trusted advisor. You can include offers like webinars that explore trending topics in your industry, or content that shows how others are using your product. Don’t have the time or talent to make a webinar or demo? No worries — any free resource, whether an ebook, blog post, or how-to guide, can work. All you have to do is think of what free content your audience will find valuable. At Salesforce, we sometimes share thought-leadership content to help our audience become better at their jobs or in their industry. Once you feed your customers content that’s helpful and not salesy, create this drip nurture and sprinkle in secondary or tertiary call-to-actions (CTAs) like demos or trials to entice them to want more. Then, send an email every 7-9 days — an email every week is too frequent and every two weeks might not be enough. THE IN-TRIAL NURTURE, TRIGGERED BY PRODUCT ACTIONS Most B2B companies have a trial period so users can take a test drive before making their customers buy their actual “car.” For example, at Salesforce, we have a 14-day free trial for small businesses to use our CRM, Salesforce Essentials. Before our team creates content for an in-trial nurture, we did a ton of research. As a marketer, you want your product’s action triggers to connect to your marketing automation. This will help you send triggered emails based on users’ actions versus a time-based email journey. Here’s how we ensured we had a successful in-trial nurture campaign: 1. Consulted our data science team: * We learned that by performing an X action, the user will have an X% higher probability to buy * We learned our users are more likely to convert if they login more than once in their first two days of the trial 2. Collaborated with our support team: * We found what blockers prevent users from taking a specific action These learnings helped us adjust our email cadence, our content, and hone in on creating videos, how-to articles, and content to feed our in-trial nurture. If you don’t have a data science team or a customer support team, don’t fret! You can easily gather customer feedback by setting up focus groups with customers. Talk to your trialists. Talk to people who have never bought from you. Get on live chat. You get the point — talk to your customers! In addition to finding high “propensity to convert” actions, make sure you’re looking for features that create habit loops for your customers. Which features will make users want to login more frequently? How do you use emails or even in-app messaging to encourage those actions? Asking yourself these questions will help you craft a successful in-trial nurture triggered by product actions. THE UPSELL OR CROSS-SELL NURTURE Want to improve your customer’s lifetime value? Upsell and cross-sell nurtures can help. All you have to do is create a nurture campaign targeted to existing customers, then provide them with information and incentives to expand the list of products they currently use. With upsell and cross-sell nurtures, your goal should be to inspire and show (not tell!) customers how to reach maximum potential with your company’s products and services. The best part about this type of nurture? You’re already at an advantage because you’re talking to your biggest fans — not cold leads. Make sure you’re intentional with your content, send relevant information on specific products or services that would be beneficial to a specific segment of clients. Personalized recommendations within this nurture type are the key to success — use variable tags or dynamic content to ensure the right customers receive the right content. Also, make sure you explain the value of a new or existing unused product without being overly aggressive. Since your target list will include current customers, the timing for this program can be less aggressive — you can space emails out between 10-15 days.

Marketing cannot close business without sales. Sales is the most important partner to marketing, ABM or not. While you can gain the support of the leadership teams, sales ops, etc, if you don't have your sales team onboard with your plans, you will not succeed. Bring your sales team into the process early and keep them informed ia regular status updates (bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Highlight your wins and your losses.

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)."

* 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?

In any strategy, it's not just about how much you measure but also what you’re measure and why. It's about setting the barometer for what success looks like and how KPIs are monitored, discussed, and leveraged to drive improvements. It's beneficial to break your KPIs into Operational North Stars – these are the Key Results (KRs) that every GTM TEAM should strive for. They are the metrics on your CEO's daily dashboard. Remember, ABM is about targeting specific audiences and accounts with more specific and relevant marketing tactics that focus on who they are, the problems they have and how your solution is differentiated in solving for their problems. Therefore, your company's KPIs should align with this approach: * Percentage of target accounts in your marketing database * Percentage of target personas generating MQLs * Percentage of pipeline originating from named accounts * Percentage of target personas as the primary contact * Percentage of expansion pipeline from named accounts * Percentage of revenue from named accounts * ACV (Average Contract Value) from named accounts * Average Deal Cycles from named accounts All of these should have quarterly goals set.

Buyer personas and segmentation is a crucial part of any demand generation strategy to understand who to market to and what messages to deliver to that person. However, I find that the most difficult part of the strategy isn't defining the persona(s) themselves. Rather, making sure you have the correct data to label personas in your systems ends up being the more difficult part of executing and sustaining your strategy. To answer the question directly, I focus on the following so I can build sets of customers/prospects that either are trying to solve a similar problem, are using a product in a similar way, or are the buyer in purchasing solutions: * What problem the person deals with (use cases) * Whether the person is directly involved with the purchase (end user, influencer, decision maker, etc.) * What the person does (job function and level, job title, team or department, etc.) * Additional insights (industry, revenue potential, current satisfaction level, etc.) As I mentioned, the difficulty usually is with the actual data itself to be able to segment using the above criteria. As part of your overall segmentation and buyer persona strategy, make sure that you have processes, tools, and systems that enable continuous data enrichment and data cleansing to make sure that you not only have the persona data but are constantly making sure it is accurate.

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.

Demand Gen is such a fun role (I know, I'm biased) because of the split because art and science. DG provides a unique opportunity to get creative and strategic in crafting new campaigns and programs, while also definitively measuring impact and analyzing results. As such, some of the best Demand Gen marketers I've hired and worked with contain a true passion for that combination, and with that, a deep sense of accountability and ownership over the success of those programs.

Honing your craft and being able to share insights and recommendations (based on data) is a great start. Managers often don't have time to get into the weeds, but if they get insights they don't know or recommendations on how to do something differently, this is a good first step in becoming influential. Being concise in your delivery is also important. If you're putting together a written proposal, it's always recommended to start with a brief summary of the expected outcomes/key findings at the start. More generally, the more you understand the business, the better. For example, if you're aiming to be more influential with sales, understanding their challenges, having shared KPIs, talking their language and really knowing the customer will help you gain respect and become more influential. Finally, being a good person to work with naturally drives this. Being a good listener, giving others a voice, taking ownership, avoiding blame, and keeping everyone focussed on what matters.