Get answers from demand generation leaders
Laura Hart
Figma Senior Director, Growth Marketing • July 26
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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Liz Bernardo
SquareWorks Consulting Head of Marketing • October 26
Where do I see Demand Generation heading? That's an interesting question. Like most DG roles I am see them being converted to Field Marketing. In my humble opinion, a traditional Demand Generation role is much more than just Field Marketing. With Demand Generation you basically sit with one foot in marketing and one foot in sales. You not only strategize and run campaigns, but you track the metrics, ROI, leads and conversation rates/success metrics all the way to closed won. Those skills are the reason I LOVE DG. It is all encompassing. This is not to undervalue the importance of the Field Marketing role, my title event recently has shifted to include Field Marketing in it. Maybe the real future of Demand Generation is converting Field Marketing to it?!
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Sierra Summers
Albertsons Companies Director of B2B Marketing • January 18
I don't think ABM at its core is all that different from landing net new vs cross/upsell/expansion. If you boil it down, you are taking a set of channels and tactics and deploying campaigns to get your prospects or customers to take a desired action or behavior. I will argue that you have more room for error when going into new prospects or markets where you might not have as much data or evidence to support your messaging, positioning and campaign strategy. When marketing to current customers, you better know what you're talking about. There is nothing worse that being an existing customer of a brand and receiving messaging and campaigns as if you had never worked with that brand in your life. With cross/upsell/expansion, you not only have to know your customer, but you better make sure you let your customer know you know them. For example, if you're already in at Amazon and looking to upsell, you better be able to discuss pain points that came up at prior QBRs, understand their org chart, tech stack, and review how you can help them achieve their goals,
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Krista Muir
Snowflake Senior Manager, Streamlit Developer Marketing | Formerly Sentry, Udemy for Business, Demandbase • August 23
This question has a lot to unpack. Influencing change takes a LOT of time, but I would recommend starting with first principles. 3 things I would start with: * I gotta say marketing sure did a good job of marketing ourselves! However, “ABM” is not a marketing thing; it’s a holistic revenue strategy. The first thing I usually do is internally rebrand “Accunt-Based Marketing” to be a target account strategy. * “Seek first to understand.” That will mean building relationships cross-functionally to establish trust and credibility. You’ll need key stakeholders to advocate for this strategy when you’re not in the room. Understand what’s important to those teams first: whether sales, e-staff, revenue ops, customer success, and product. * With Sales & Customer Success: Learn how they are approaching their accounts today. What’s working well for them, what do they need help with? What account insights can you surface that they wouldn’t otherwise have? * With Product / Product Marketing: How does the voice of the customer inform product development? What market trends are you seeing from your ICP? * With revenue ops: Depending on the maturity of the organization, you’ll need their alignment to identify ICP criteria to build out target account lists and partner on campaign measurement. This account-centric view will require a different way of measuring traditional lead > opportunity reporting. Can we measure account engagement today? * For Finance: You’ll need their support for any new budget, which means you’ll need to do some math to speak their language. Can you show them customer acquisition costs (CAC) for target accounts vs. non-target accounts? * Then, you’ll likely need to show results before you tell. Introduce an experiment that you can manage without fancy technology. Start with a hypothesis around a very crisply defined account list, brainstorm with others around a mix of tactics / messages / channels that you can measure, and chip away to learn what works. Share progress often.
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Andy Ramirez ✪
Docker SVP, Growth Marketing (CMO Role) • May 3
This is another question that is highly dependent on the needs of an organization, the current state of their growth team, and what resources they have today, etc. When I start the build, or rebuild, of a team the first thing I do is get to know the current players. I have learned through the years that too often teams that aren't working well have talented people doing the wrong job. I like the old analogy of the team being a bus, you have to know who belongs on the bus and in what seat they'll do best, then you help those who don't fit transition, then you begin rebuilding. For me it's less about the specific roles and more about the types of folks in those roles. Though of course roles do play a role. Here's some thoughts to consider. 1. A balance of veteran and early career folks. As Andy Jassy is fond of saying "there is no compression algorithm for experience." While I love having folks looking to grow their early stage careers they can't get the support they need in doing so if they don't have experienced people around them. 2. Balance out strengths / weaknesses. This applies to myself and everyone on the team. I like to think about longer horizons and bigger ideas and I look to build teams that have others who are good at making those ideas doable, those who can define the first steps. If I have folks who are highly analytical I look to hire folks who like to get stuff done. Whether we're talking team of two or team of 50 be really thoughtful about this, educate your folks on their personality types, use tools like Strength Finder or Meyers Briggs. 3. Cover the foundational needs. In a smaller team you need breadth of capabilities to cover your critical roles, SEM, social marketing, content, brand/design, etc. There are unicorns out there who can do more than one of these relatively well and get you out to the next phase. You don't have to have industry experts in each, just talented folks who can get you from here to there. 4. Don't get overspecialized. As orgs grow we want to hire people to focus on just one thing. This is great from a responsibilities perspective but it does begin to limit your agility over time. So when possible I like to ensure there's cross training and sharing of projects across functions. Not only do you usually get a better result but then the team also builds a mutual understanding of each others roles, and a stronger bond. I've done this even in teams of 30+ with great effect. You asked for org structure but this is hard to do without context. Here are some common roles/teams I see in growth orgs. These can be filled by people or agencies. * Content marketing * SEO * Customer engagement / Lifecycle marketing * SEM * Web - Engineering (Front end, back end, QA) * Web - Conversion rate optimization * Web - Product Management (someone absolutely needs to think of your website as a product) * Technical product management (think martech admins) * Paid Advertising (all non SEM spend) * Social * Brand Marketing (less often, usually this is sperate from DG/Growth) * PM / PMO (this is often an underrated role, so much more gets done when it's managed well) * Product Marketing (in larger orgs this also tends to be separate but highly connected to growth) There's so much more I'm leaving off, I don't want to just spout off every marketing role that exists but that covers my most common list.
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Pamela King
YouTube Marketing Lead for NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV | Formerly Google Cloud • July 27
I think the relationship with Sales should be seen as a Partnership where both sides have insights to deliver to one another (not just a one-way relatinoship where Marketing delivers Leads). This partnership should be built on trust and understanding. I was lucky to have done a Field Marketing role prior to leading Global Campaigns when I was at Google, and what I learned during that initial role is that Sales knows the field better than anyone. They understand what content resonates with prospects/customers, what competitors are doing to appease these audiences and what our brand's key differentiators can be, and what a target audiences' true painpoints are. Some best practices I found in striking a strong relationship with Sales are: * Have common goals: At the end of the day, Marketing and Sales all have the same goal -- increase revenue for the company. How each team goes about that is where we differ. Ensuring there's a strong handoff from Marketing Qualified Lead to a Sales Accepted Lead is critical. Also making sure Marketing is providing the right tools for Sales to take that Lead to the finish line is where the Marketing/Sales partnership can either fall flat or succeed. * Educate them & Make them a co-partner in your work: I co-created a Sales Council that met monthly where it was a two-fold experience: 1) educating Sales on what Marketing did so they understood we did more than just Events and 2) gathering their feedback on messaging, upcoming campaigns, and more. * Lean on their expertise to improve meessaging: I was charged with building Sales scripts for Inside Sales teams as a first touch for a Marketing Qualified Lead. I was the expert in the campaign but not necessarily the expert in the ideal length of a LinkedIn InMail or a first-touch email. So I often went to Sales colleagues I had a strong relationship with and would ask for them to review the messaging and gather tips on how to improve it. * Keep them in the loop: I would often meet with Sales Directors and other Sales Specialists to share campaign reporting and where we were looking to pilot or optimize the flow. Often times, Sales does not fully understand the Marketing funnel or how it works. So it's great to educate them on general reporting and areas that need improvement. Sometimes I would find myself brainstorming tactics with them that we employed in the campaign as a pilot and they would show success.
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Sruthi Kumar
Notion Account-Based Marketing - Lead | Formerly Sendoso • August 9
Tactical: - Be close to the metrics - Strong writer - Problem solver - Solid speaker (this helps when you are presenting to sales all hands or even internally to your own marketing team) Intangible: - Think about campaigns/programs with an integrated lense - Strong cross-communication skills with different teams - Understanding the strengths from others and your team
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Eric Martin
Stack Overflow Vice President, Demand Generation • September 7
The leap from manager-level to director-level demand gen leadership might be one of the biggest lifts in career development. Being a manager, coaching, and making sure your team is performing well and achieving goals are manager-level skills. Being able to develop a vision, strategy and creating a plan to executing on it is director-level. Directors are often given more substantial resources and budgets, and therefore held accountable at a higher level much more often. I think one of the most overlooked skills needed to leap from manager to director is effective executive-level communication. From a people development perspective, it's possible you'll also have direct reports with direct reports - so you'll need to help them guide and coach their own teams.
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Kathy O'Donnell
Gong Senior Director, EMEA Marketing • December 20
As an EMEA-based marketer working for a US-based company, building successful partnerships across the wider marketing org has always been critical to my success and that of my team. Whether that be partnering with the centralised paid search team to drive successful search campaigns, influencing content creation to ensure it resonates in our region or partnering with the social team to post EMEA-relevant content on our corporate social channels. Here are a few of my tips for building those partnerships: 1. Explain the why - help your stakeholders/partners understand why your ask/project is important. Maybe it's revenue potential (and therefore will benefit the company overall). Maybe you're streamlining a cumbersome process that will make the marketing team more efficient. 2. Shared KPIs are a great driver. And aligning your project/ask to a strategic priority helps people understand this is something they need to care about. 3. Don't underestimate in-person contact! Building a deeper connection with a person, knowing something about them outside the realms of the project you're working on together, can help you overcome challenges if they arise and generally make working together more fun and engaging. If the opportunity arises for face-to-face, take it! 4. Successful partnerships, whether they are personal or professional, are built on trust. Check out my answer to the question "How to establish credibility and trust in people around you?" on my perspectives on how to build trust and credibility.
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Jeff Jewett
Deel Senior Director, Lifecycle Marketing & Marketing Operations • April 12
I believe the simplest solution to misalignment is to make sure that both the sales and marketing teams' OKRs align with the same company objectives and to make sure that front-line managers in both organizations have regular touchpoints to communicate what campaigns and programs are running and how effective they are a generating leads. My team has weekly calls with our EDR teams to give and receive feedback on lead quality and campaign performance, as well as a monthly campaign enablement session to ensure sales understands what programs are in market generating demand.
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