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.

* These are the core OKRs that I've tracked in various forms throughout my demand generation career: * Objective: Drive pipeline * Key Results: * Raw volume merics: * Leads: Net new names added to the database * MQLs: Marketing qualified leads, or folks who have reached some kind of behavioral, predictive or demographic threshold * SALs: Sales accepted leads, or folks that BDRs/AEs have accepted to work * SQLs: Meetings booked. This can be either an SQL # or an SQL $ value, depending on your business. * Funnel efficiency metrics: * Lead:MQL CVR: What percent of leads generated this quarter turn into MQLs? This is an indicator of how well you are taking the new folks entering your database and engaging them with marketing materials to reach a score threshold, and/or how strong your targeting is in terms of bringing in folks with the right firmographic and demographic criteria. * MQL:SAL CVR: What is the quality of MQLs that you are sending to BDRs? Are BDRs disqualifying too many MQLs before they even reach out? You want to keep a really close eye on this metric if it is less than 75%. * SAL:SQL CVR: How well are BDRs converting the folks they are working into meetings. This is a little out of marketing's control, but marketing can support BDRs with enablement, email sequences, best practices and more to drive this number up. * In addition to the above, if you have a broader focus on awareness as well as pipeline, you should look at metrics that relate to website traffic, SEO (top keywords, traffic from SEO), etc. * As you get more sophisticated, you probably want to have a sense of how the pipeline you are generating turns into revenue for the business. Depending on the segments you serve, marketing should plan to provide anywhere from 25% of pipeline/revenue (Enterprise business) to 75%+ of pipeline/revenue (self-serve/SMB businesses). * When I take a look at the current quarterly OKR list for our entire marketing team, we have about 60 KRs we're looking to track - my team is responsible for about 30 of them. SO, as my team has scaled we've gone beyond the core metrics above.

I break out the DG metrics into two groups: 1. Demand generation Here I focused on generating demand through "push" campaigns to our ICP accounts. I call this "push" because I am essentially shoving our ads in front of folks who never asked for it. I look at things like ad impressions, CTR, engagement rates, and conversions. From an ABM perspective, I look at the same ad metrics, but I also look at account view-through rates (the % of accounts who've seen my ads and then visit our website by other means), intent signal increases, and funnel progression. Holistically, I want to ensure we are driving the right level of engagement to accounts on our target account list. Within our target account list, I want to make sure, period over period, I am creating awareness & demand at the same accounts our outbound teams are working so they have a higher rate of turning emails and calls into conversations. 2. Demand capture Here I focus on capturing demand through our "pull" campaigns to audiences that already have existing demand for our solutions. These are paid search, review websites, and content syndication with intent signals. The metrics I look for here are pure lead capture and lead nurture into MQLs that I can hand over to our sales teams to work. I review these metrics daily, but only when I see anomalies that last more than 3 days do I actually take action. On a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis, we review the demand gen machine by channel (paid search, paid social, organic, direct, etc.), then break it out by campaign, down to the utm_term level and ultimately follow these down to revenue and LTV:CAC. The intent here is to analyze the numbers to surface insights and propose action items for the month or quarter.

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.

1. Sales Leadership If you're in the B2B SaaS space, you'll know that marketing alone does not generate deals. We engage prospects and customers, bring them to the surface, and rely on AEs and sales development to mature that relationship, converting them to meetings and subsequently, deals. If your target account list is not aligned with Sales, the efforts get largely wasted. ABM works when Sales is ready and excited for each of those accounts to engage. Ultimately all accounts on the ABM list should either be assigned to an AE or on a target list, ensuring strong alignment between teams. 2. Sales Development Digging deeper on the above, it's imperative that Sales Development is also bought into the ABM strategy. It could have a major impact on their workflow, from lead assignments, qualification thresholds, and follow up SLAs. In my experience, I've found the best partner here to be the outbound SDR team, as they're incentivized to work the same accounts in the ABM list. Also, it's important to consistently surface the efforts being made to warm these accounts, as well as to analyze and prove that a warm account has a higher likelihood of converting than a cold one. If you do run the numbers and don't find that trend, it's likely that something is broken, or your thresholds for account activation are set too low. 3. Business Development / Partners Partners can make a huge difference when trying to break into major accounts. The BD team can be an excellent partner to provide inputs from partner organizations as to which accounts may be more susceptible to purchase new technology, as well as which ones have strong partners involved already.

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.

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,

I wish I had a rosier outlook, but I think demand gen is actually going to get gradually more challenging as time goes on. I think that the profession itself is going to need to move away from things like PII exchange through gated forms, and focus more on value delivery to the viewer/reader/consumer. Global digital privacy regulation is more likely to expand than contract at this point. I think the way companies measure demand generation is going to need to evolve as well - with broader full-funnel attribution being more socialized, accepted and understood at the highest levels in the company. One area where many demand gen leaders underinvest is strengthening finance and marketing alignment. Everyone talks about sales and marketing alignment - that's just a must to have a functional revenue team. How to strengthen that bond with finance? Educate them on marketing's broader contribution, and demonstrate that you have the respect and feel the responsibility for what is usually a large portion of variable company spend.

It is important to recognize that the B2B buying cycle is not linear. Various buyers can be in different stages of the buying cycle and the best way to address this is to have: 1. Always-on tactics such as paid search, paid social, and email nurture. These are by nature evergreen campaigns and must be optimized quarterly or based on performance 2. Time-sensitive tactics such as webinars, tradeshows and in-person and online BOF events such as executive round tables That said, it is important to have the MOF/BOF tactics such as email nurture and SDR outreach sequences live before you launch paid media campaigns. This will ensure the right follow-ups are triggered the moment the first content lead or the first demo lead or the first event lead hits the CRM.