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.

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. 

Below is how I would define the demand gen strategy, create content and plan campaign tactics aligned to the 5 stages of awareness UNAWARE: Demand gen strategy: Build awareness Content strategy: create blogs, media articles, podcasts to drive awareness Campaign tactics: Promote via organic social, YouTube, Spotify/Apple podcast PROBLEM AWARE: Demand gen strategy: Drive top-of-funnel demand Content strategy: Help them solve the problem with How to guides, best practice playbooks, cheat sheets, maturity assessment (online tool) Campaign tactics: Paid social, paid search, thought leadership webinars, content syndication, industry webinars/events SOLUTION AWARE Demand gen strategy: Drive engagement Content Strategy: Help them understand how your product can help solve their problem with product tours, video demos, checklists, tips and tricks, Campaign tactics:: Paid social, paid search, demo webinars, email marketing PRODUCT AWARE Demand gen strategy: Drive demos, free trials, bottom-funnel demand Content strategy: Help them understand how your product is uniquely qualified to solve their problem with an ROI Calculator, Success stories, Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave, Forrester TEI Campaign tactics: Events, executive roundtables, paid search MOST AWARE Demand gen strategy: Give them incentives to buy

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)."

ROI and marketing attribution is the most challenging KPIs for startups in the technology space; most of these companies do not measure CLV and instead, they measure results on an annual basis, depending on factors such as average sales cycle, average deal size and market maturity, reporting returns of marketing investment in the short term is challenging. One important KPI that demand generation teams may overlook in fast-growing technology companies is the customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is a metric that calculates the total amount of revenue a customer is expected to generate for a company over the course of their relationship. It takes into account factors such as customer acquisition cost, average purchase value, and customer retention rate, and provides a more accurate picture of a company's revenue potential than simply looking at short-term revenue or leads generated. By focusing on CLV, demand generation teams can prioritize their efforts on acquiring high-value customers who are more likely to generate long-term revenue for the company. They can also identify areas where they can improve customer retention and increase the overall value of each customer. Overall, CLV can provide a more comprehensive and strategic view of a company's revenue growth potential and help demand generation teams make more informed decisions about their marketing and sales strategies.

This question is very similar to the one titled: Are there specific channels you think are a foundation to a Demand Generation strategy? Short answer is focus on your website and email channel first. In addition to what I discussed in that section, I would highlight recommend aligning with your product leaders and support/customer service leaders the same way a demand gen leader would if they had a sales leaders they align with. Your job is to convert users and help them adopt the product. Use data science to drive your marketing activities. Once you identify where the gaps are in your conversion process you can start to build marketing adoption programs based on the unique challenges your business is facing. Here's an example of a problem statement that was one of our biggest challenge when I led demand gen for our self-service/product led product: * “Which in-app activities help SMBs convert being a free trial user to paying customers of salesforce”. What we learned from data science is that the biggest driver of conversion is getting someone to log back into the app on the 2nd day. If they don’t, we lose them. And on the flip side, If we can just increase Day 1 to Day 2 retention by +X% that will get us +XX% more conversions. So it’s absolutely critical to drive return logins early. And based on that, we have these 3 programs in market to encourage trialist to log in: 1. Launched a 90 day email nurture that includes a series of 15 emails to encourage feature adoption. 2. Best Practice webinars that will feature customers to talk about how they are using the features in our product to drive business value. 3. Our adoption team has an in going hands-on workshop to teach trialist how to do things like adding additional users and editing accounts & contacts - these are all features that these trialists must adopt in order to see the value in our product. Underneath all this we have a Propensity to Convert (PTC) score designed by our data intelligence/data science team where we graded each cohort's propensity to convert by the end of the 14 day trial period. This score not only helps you segment and customize your marketing journeys but it can also help you forecast to see how many conversions or revenue amount you will expect at any given month/quarter. 

* 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?

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.

Here are the four most important parameters that determine your Channel strategy when designing an Integrated Campaign. 1. Who? - Audience * Are you talking to developers, end-users, or decision-makers? * How large is the buying group for your product? * Is your product a single or multi-department purchase? 2. Why? - Marketing objective Is your campaign objective creating awareness, building pipeline, or accelerating pipeline? Each objective dictates the count of audience you have available to target which in turn informs the decision to choose channels. For example, if your objective is to accelerate pipeline, you might be limited to using targeted Social (custom audience), emails, closed-door events, and direct mail. However, if your objective is to create awareness, your channel coverage needs to expand dramatically because you are now trying to reach a broader audience to inform them of your existence. Now you are thinking Display, Content syndication, 3rd party tradeshows & publishers, etc. 3. What? - Average Contract Value (ACV) or ARPA What kind of product do you sell? Typically, it's safe to assume that a product with a higher ACV needs consideration and involvement from senior decision-makers across LoBs. Note that the same decision-makers are not easily accessible via conventional channels such as Paid social, email, Paid search, etc. Therefore your channel mix needs to evolve to match where they pay attention to. In this scenario, your channel mix might include direct mail, exclusive invites to 3rd party events, etc. 4. How much? - Available budget If you are well-funded, go ahead and explore multiple channels until you have a mix that delivers predictable lead volume and Qualified Pipe. If funds are tight, you might want to prioritize channels based on 3 factors - - Does that channel have your buyer's attention? (qualitative assessment) - What is the Cost per reach per channel? - Based on rough funnel math, can this Cost per reach ultimately deliver a respectable Pipe per $ spent over the duration of your sales cycle? Overall, two variables determine the effectiveness of this strategy - 1. Do you have a sufficient volume of buyers who you can target? 2. Are you able to effectively and efficiently access those channels to reach them?

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 ;)