Get answers from demand generation leaders
Monica Myers
Lattice Director of Demand Generation | Formerly Gusto, Qualia, AdRoll • August 24
One of the great things about Demand Gen is that there isn't a set path into it. For example, I started my career in sales and account management before transitioning over to marketing. While somewhat atypical, I've found having a sales background to be beneficial as I've grown my career in DG because it gave me a first hand look into what the sales and marketing relationship looks like from the other perspective, and a deep empathy for being quota carrying. I've worked with incredible DG marketers who have come to DG from different fields (both from other functions in marketing and fields outside of marketing) and landed on Demand Gen. My recommendation would be to think about how your skills in another field can transfer over to a Demand Gen role. Chances are they are transferable and will provide you with a differentiated view point because of them. Use that to your advantage!
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Matt Hummel
Pipeline360 Vice President of Marketing • January 31
Walk me through your favorite campaign. I love this question but it's pretty open-ended and can reveal a lot about the way in which a candidate thinks. Did they understand their audience? Did they design their program in a way to achieve the goals? Did it even have established goals? Was in creative in the sense that it ultimately achieved what it set out to achieve? It enables a candidate to demonstrate how they think about strategy, planning, and execution without leading the witness!
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Tamara Niesen
WooCommerce CMO | Formerly Shopify, D2L, BlackBerry • December 5
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 ;)
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Dan Ahmadi
Branch VP Demand Generation and International Marketing | Formerly Outreach, MuleSoft • September 8
I'd love to, but we have yet to find an intent vendor that has data rich enough for our specific segment that would indicate readiness to buy. For other companies, I've seen this to be really effective, especially when 10s or 100s of people might start researching something the moment a problem is faced. In my current role, our ABM approach is primarily successful in an outbound manner, and there's not a strong enough inbound signal to leverage to guide our efforts.
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Abhishek GP
Freshworks Inbound Growth • December 1
Let's first define an 'integrated campaign' approach. * At its core, the 'Integrated' approach implies three things - knowing and using the buyer's journey as the premise to building the marketing strategy, aiming for consistency in marketing across touchpoints & sequencing your messaging across these touchpoints * A 'campaign' is nothing but a coordinated set of assets & tactics to help your buyers progress from Awareness to Consideration to Decision. The other underrated impact of a campaign is its ability to corral organizational focus, time, and efforts toward a single goal and theme (sales, product, customer success, marketing) An Integrated Campaign strategy is an amalgam of these concepts. So do all businesses need an integrated campaign strategy? Yes. But does an integrated campaign strategy look the same for all businesses? No. The need for a Series A startup to craft an integrated campaign strategy is as much as it is for a Series C & Post-IPO business. The nature and scope of integration, however, vary significantly. These factors might help as you think through this. 1. Have you achieved Product-Channel(s) fit? * If are a Seed stage startup and have reliably managed to scale one or two acquisition channels, you have other things on your mind than 'integrating' these two channels. That is because, today, you do not have the channel width to capture a large part of the buyer's journey (community, email, in-app, review sites). * If you have a larger business, you might already have the channel width that covers a large proportion of your buyer's journey. This is the right time to think about an 'integrated campaign' strategy. Some of the questions to ask are - a) Do I know my buyer's journey with a fair degree of confidence b) Are they experiencing the same 'messaging theme' across touchpoints c) How can I sequence my tactics & messaging based on the demand funnel 2. What is your GTM motion? * Are you PLG or Sales-led or both? If you are PLG, you focus on specific channels that drive inbound demand - SEO, Paid Search, Content, In-app virality, Community, Review sites & Emails. If you have a Sales-led motion, you (mostly) focus on channels that go beyond these to also include Webinars, Events, SDR messaging, & Content. In both scenarios, your buyers want to experience your business in a way that is consistent across these touchpoints and takes them through a journey (sequencing in messaging) irrespective of whichever touchpoint they are in. 3. Do you have an established Brand marketing strategy within your organization? * If your org runs brand marketing campaigns, you'll need to redefine the architecture of your demand-gen-led integrated campaigns. In this new scenario, you'll have to view the buyer's journey together and build out common areas of leverage. For example, a Brand marketing campaign usually targets a large proportion of 'Problem unaware' buyers. So how can your demand-gen team nudge these buyers down the funnel via an integrated approach? Here, the role of demand-gen shifts to nudging these buyers to the 'Consideration' & 'Decision' stages using the same messaging theme and leveraging tactics (such as collecting a retargeting pool of qualified intent, etc.) that capture their engagement and intent for your category or business.
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Sierra Summers
Albertsons Companies Director of B2B Marketing • January 18
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.
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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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Adam Kaiser
6sense VP, Growth Marketing • March 28
The move from Manager to Director is about transitioning from someone who is told what to do and "pulls the levers." In someone who can own a strategy and help execute it. Before you can build a strategy, you need to be an expert on the execution side of the work. Dive into every channel, and understand how they work and when they are leveraged. Additionally, always be looking at how others market. Look at your competitor's digital ads, read their blog, sign-up for a newsletter, and immerse yourself in their content. And step outside competitors as well. Find those brands you respect and learn everything you can about how their teams work and build programs. From a strategy perspective, look at areas within your business and think about how you could improve them. Then, bring your ideas to your managers and leaders. Getting feedback on those ideas can help you understand their thoughts, and you'll pick up some strategic guidance along the way. And don't be afraid to ask questions!
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Jeff Jewett
Deel Senior Director, Lifecycle Marketing & Marketing Operations • April 12
Lead scoring is an integral part of my demand gen strategy to help gauge intent and engagement. It should be used along with other programs, like 3rd party intent data, contact and account enrichment, and 1st party data from sales teams to determine when a lead is highly engaged and likely ready to speak to a salesperson about a solution or product. The first step in setting up a lead scoring system is to determine the activities, actions, and demographics/firmographics that make up the scoring and the points associated with those activities. It is imperative that determining the activities, actions, and demographics/firmographics is a collaborative effort between marketing and sales, including any BDR teams, if they exist, and ideally should be based on historical data that indicates what successful activities/actions lead to opportunity creation. Once these have been established you should then determine a threshold to indicate sales readiness and an operational handover point where the lead is handed over to sales.
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Kathy O'Donnell
Gong Senior Director, EMEA Marketing • December 20
Thinking of this through a project lens, I have seen DACI or RAPID frameworks help by assigning clearer roles and decision-making responsibilities. The project owner then knows who they need to involve to gather input from, who they need to keep informed, who can contribute to the decision, and who can block it. I've seen this approach work well with a product launch, for example, which is a huge cross-functional effort. It allows demand gen teams, product marketers, content teams, PR and others to be clearer about their role, provide input, and share the dependencies and deadlines that need to be adhered to in order to execute their part of the project. My second tip is to avoid decisions by committee -- it's paralysing! I would try to limit the number of people who approve/sign off on a project. Finally, to manage stakeholder input, be conscious of people's time - it's a finite resource. Large group meetings going through status updates are generally not valuable to anyone. Gather the updates in advance and use the time together to review blockers and agree on the next steps.
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