Get answers from demand generation leaders
Sruthi Kumar
Notion Account-Based Marketing - Lead | Formerly Sendoso • August 9
1) BE CLOSE TO THE NUMBERS. I cannot stress this enough. I was once told that this was my weakest spot–being metric driven. I quickly tried to rectify this and what I realized is that numbers could be my best friend. Once I got closer to the numbers, I was able to reframe them to tell the story I wanted to tell. (This is the hard skill I leaned into when I wanted to transition from field marketing to demand gen). 2) Be comfortable with writing. Sometimes on your teams, you won't always be the one producing content, but I do believe demand gen should be strong writers. This is the team that knows how to get people to sign up for a webinar and download a piece of content. If you are not close to your solution/product, team up with your PMM team and refer to messaging briefs to be able to write the content that are going to convert people into leads! Some of the strongest demand gen people I know all have different strengths, so nothing is a nice to have. It's just what makes them special. I know folks who are really strong writers, very creative, and very savvy with marketing tech. Lean into your strength and it will BECOME the hard skill the CMO/VP of Marketing interviewing you NEEDs on their team.
...Read More2343 Views
Upcoming AMAs
Abhishek GP
Freshworks Inbound Growth • December 1
Your buyer's journey as well as your demand funnel, play a key role in this decision. * First set of channels & tactics: A rule of thumb that has worked for me when launching a campaign is to select the channel(s) that provide the widest audience reach. I've consistently observed that 'Audience reach' & 'Frequency of reach' have had a clear impact on overall campaign performance (qualified lead volume and pipeline). But the way I think about 'Reach' is that it is a necessary, not a sufficient condition. So what else matters? Curating the right 'offers', and the right 'format'. For example, Linkedin (the channel) offers a reasonable reach per month for most B2B SaaS players. What offer you choose to launch the campaign with is equally important? Should it be a global virtual summit headlined by Top influencers or a Playbook with interviews from well-regarded industry practitioners? Here two very different offers are served on the same channel. * Next set of channels & tactics: As you start thinking about the Demand capture phase of your campaign, you'll work with channels that reach fewer audiences. These channels include SEO, Paid Search, In-product journey, SDR engagement, etc. Most of these channels involve high-effort, and a high-volume of output, so prioritization is key. A way to allocate budgets toward these channels is by prioritizing them by reach, expected buyer engagement & intent.
...Read More2482 Views
Andy Ramirez ✪
Docker SVP, Growth Marketing (CMO Role) • May 3
Across every role in growth there's one common trait I try to ensure. The ability to look at seemingly disparate data, make sense of it, create hypotheses, and prove or disprove them. Lots of people will answer yes to this if asked as a yes/no question, but the ones that truly get it can articulate examples. These are the folks that take data and turn it into action. I have often seen people be really good at collecting and presenting data, but not be as good at the "so what" part of it.
...Read More1109 Views
Sierra Summers
Albertsons Companies Director of B2B Marketing • January 18
This is a great question! I can't tell you the number of times I've created content because someone in the C-suite thought it would be a good idea, or because a sales reply simply couldn't close a deal with a highly customized 1-pager. The truth is - content should be created with a purpose. Here are the questions I like to ask when conducting a content audit: * Does this content answer questions our customers are asking? Does it help our customers & prospects accomplish their goals? * How does the reader feel after consuming this piece of content? Does that feeling align with what our goal was when we created the piece? * What is the purpose of this piece of content? Is it still serving that purpose? * How often is this piece of content used, by who, and in what capacity? * When was the last time this content was refreshed? Is this something we want to be a staple in our library? * In what other forms does this content exist (blog, podcast, short video, webinar, etc)? If the answer is none, should it be created in smaller, more digestible snippets?
...Read More1922 Views
Kexin Chen
Salesforce Vice President, C-Suite Marketing • April 25
The audience I target are primarily Fortune 500 C-Suite. In this case, we take an account first approach and weigh events more heavily than digital in our marketing plans. For integrated marketing plans, bringing in the functional experts to inform the strategy from the start is critical. Generally I recommend having a clearly articulated goal/vision with clearly articulated outcomes of success. Then opening the space for ideation to build the strategy jointly helps create the initial alignment needed for your demand gen strategy.
...Read More947 Views
Sam Clarke
Second Nature VP of Marketing • March 14
If you are the first demand generation hire at a company, chances are you are going to need to advocate for some immediate changes to your funnel. They probably hired a demand generator because something needs to be addressed. However, question everything and confirm what needs to be addressed yourself. Start by mapping out the funnel in detail. Figure out every entrance into your website and then map out each following step. In addition to the mapping, record the conversion rates for each one of those steps. Then schedule a meeting with senior leadership across the company and walk them through the funnel. Highlight all the areas where the conversion drops the most and then recommend process changes, fixes, and tests to address them. This exercise not only helps you work out your 30/60/90-day plan but also generates unanimous buy-in from the team.
...Read More1613 Views
Keara Cho
Salesforce Sr. Director, Field Marketing • October 25
What a great question. I never thought about data in this way. Thanks for forcing me to think through the differences as it relate to KPIs vs. data to help inform vs. pure noise. Metrics: These are the key performance indications that, you as a marketer, should evaluate your programs and your teams against. At the end of the day our job as marketers is to drive revenue alongside our go-to-market partners. Key metrics I've outlined in another AMA question that is worth mentioning here: * What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation * How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance and executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+) * How are we aiding in contact acquisition by account? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. I'm going to group Analytics and Insights together because analytics to me is the data that backs up (or inform) the insights. Analytics: What problem are you trying to solve for? You have to have succinct questions before you (or submit a request to your analytics team) dig into the data to pull analytics. Analysis paralysis is the cause of unnecessary cycles and it will lead to dead ends. Insights: These are an individual or a group's point of views or someone's analysis based on the analytics being pulled. It is a hypothesis backed by data to gain understand of your business. Here's my thinking process when solving for a specific hotspot for the business and how I would go about looking for the analytics and surfacing insights. Problem/hotspot: Account X is not hitting the ACV target. Why? Logic: "Analytics is showing us that the pipe gen is flat YoY and we are behind target attainment by X percentage points - the trend was surfaced up last week as well." The hypothesis here is that we are behind on pipe gen, an early indicator that we'll miss our revenue target. This requires an action/get back to health plan right away. In search of insights these are the questions I would answer and gather the analytics for: * Are we simply not piping enough? * What's the close rate/win rate this quarter compare to last quarter and last year (is the hypothesis we're losing to a competitor or is this an enablement problem?) * Is the pipe stuck in a certain stage? What's the average days/weeks it's been stuck in that stage for? The action plan is to figure out how to leverage marketing touchpoints to progress the pipe. * Is there deal compression happening because Account X is putting projects on hold or swapping licenses in an effort to drive vendor cost down? These questions then become guidance to help us surface up the right analytics so we are not lost in analysis paralysis.
...Read More1241 Views
Pamela King
YouTube Marketing Lead for NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV | Formerly Google Cloud • July 27
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.
...Read More1935 Views
Nicolette Konkol
Morningstar Global Head of Demand Generation | Formerly Ariba, Taleo, Showpad • January 11
I find the definition and scope of customer marketing vary widely from company to company. Still, the main work areas can be described as Onboarding/Adoption, Renewal & Expansion, and Customer Advocacy. Responsibilities can be boiled down to answering: how quickly can you validate that the customer’s decision to purchase was the right one? And then continue building on that foundation to create a raving fan base of customer advocates.
...Read More730 Views
Krista Muir
Snowflake Senior Manager, Streamlit Developer Marketing | Formerly Sentry, Udemy for Business, Demandbase • August 23
I would recommend building target account lists based on where that account is in their customer journey. Channels are usually pretty constant. Your targeting ability, level of intent, tactics/offers, messages, and the budget you're willing to spend on them will change. It will cost significantly more budget & time to acquire a new customer, so focus on where you see the biggest potential impact first. Within a tiered 1:1, 1:few, 1:many structure: what is the potential ARR of an account within each segment? That could help determine your effort & willingness to spend on a given account list.
...Read More1698 Views