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. 

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.

Personally, I don't think there is a one single path for Demand Generation. I came into the role by surprise. I was interviewing for a Marketing Manager role at a company, almost 10 years ago and during the interview we were whiteboarding out pipeline funnels. I was talking through waterfall metrics and which type of assets I would place at each stage in the funnel. Then we went on to discuss global digital strategies and then lastly, my favorite, events and the campaigns that surround them. I had lots of experience in SFDC reporting, Pardot and over all dashboarding and my soon to be manager said, "Liz, you're not a Marketing Manager, you're a Demand Generation Manager" (shout out to one of my mentors Allen Johnson) He taught me how to mold all the different parts of marketing I loved into the Demand Generation role. Being a Sales driven marketer, who knows their data, how campaigns work and the best way to create growth quick was the trick. So, my advice as to career path ... Become passionate about all aspects of marketing and sales. Learn the numbers, ask questions to those who are in the roles you strive for. Connect with me on Linkedin (I'm always an open book), research - you've got this.

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. 

The intersection of digital and direct mail can be a powerful combination. I have run many direct mail campaigns (actually direct FedEx!), where a package is sent to a prospect, and the materials point them back to a website, where they are prompted to enter a PIN or other code. From there, you've identified who you've reached and can capture data (through surveys or other means) on their current challenges, tech stack, etc., and even offer an incentive to book a meeting with sales. In some of these campaigns, I've seen 50%+ response rates.

This depends on your product stage and goals. If your product is relatively new and has yet to achieve product-market fit, it is crucial to invest heavily in building awareness and generating demand. Paid channels (if budget allows), such as paid search and social, are often faster to scale and can have more direct impact in generating lower funnel conversions. For B2B, it is essential to prioritize lead quality alongside quantity. Monitoring metrics like LTV:CAC (customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost) is often a solid indicator to measure the efficiency of your paid marketing efforts. In addition to paid, it’s important to strike a balance by simultaneously developing owned channels, such content marketing and SEO, while continuously doing AB testing to optimize the full user journey will help boost conversions. On the other hand, if you already have sufficient demand, directing investment towards engagement and retention becomes crucial. Tactics such as personalized email journeys, upsell and cross-sell campaigns to increase repeat purchases and improve customer loyalty become more crucial for long term business growth. Again, growth marketing is an iterative and agile process which require continuous testing and learning.

I start making a list of what I want in my next role during my current role. I don't wait until anything is bad or tough, I just start compiling the list when inspiration hits me. (ex. Own a pipeline number, or report straight into the CMO). For the role itself I look for some of the items I write on my list, opportunity for career growth, and managers that I can learn from. In terms of the company itself I look for product-market fit, opportunity for company growth, understanding their sales stats, and a product that I feel excited about/passionate about. Most importantly I also look for a team that I like, because let's be real—we spend so much time with our coworkers, I need to like them!

I generally like to communicate through two types of vehicles: Weekly progress updates - this is meant to convey what's happening now * Performance metrics (absolute numbers, performance vs. goal, YoY %) * Drivers of above performance (i.e. what's causing it) * Adjustments that will be made given the drivers (i.e. what are we doing differently?) * Where we're stuck (i.e. how readers can assist) Monthly progress updates - this is meant to convey overall progress against a larger strategic plan * Performance (monthly to give context) * Initiatives that we committed to doing at the start of the plan (more context as to the what and the why) * Progress of those initiatives * Bottlenecks * Adjustments that we'll making based on what we learned (this reflects more against initiatives and where we're spending time)