Get answers from demand generation leaders
Laura Hart
Figma Senior Director, Growth Marketing • July 27
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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Monica Myers
Lattice Director of Demand Generation | Formerly Gusto, Qualia, AdRoll • August 25
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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Sheena Sharma
JumpCloud Vice President, Revenue Marketing • August 25
* 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.
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Bhavisha Oza
Gong Performance Marketing Lead | Formerly Genesys, Instapage, Red Hat • January 27
This is where using Account Based Marketing and Demand Unit Waterfall (DUW) comes into play, especially for B2B Mid-market and Enterprise segments. Integrating a solution like Demandbase into your tech stack will help you identify accounts based on how they engage with your campaigns and execute channel tactics based on the DUW stages * Target Demand * This stage is all about sizing the market and identifying your Total Addressable Market or TAM based on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). * Which accounts are most likely to buy your products/solutions/services? * Pro Tip: Execute TOF (top of funnel) campaigns on paid social and third-party media partners * Active Demand * Of the TAM, how many accounts are in-market to buy in the near future * Pro Tip: Present TOF and MOF (middle of funnel) content via paid social and email * Engaged Demand * How many accounts have interacted with your website, campaigns or content? * Pro Tip: Continue the buyer’s journey with MOF content served up by paid social, email nurture and webinars * Prioritized Demand * In this stage, you’ll take all the target accounts that have engaged with you and prioritize them by Account Score. * Pro Tip: Build dedicated Outreach sequences for Sales Development teams / SDRs to use * Qualified Demand * SDRs have to start multi-threading to key contacts within the account. * Pro Tip: Work with SDRs to execute a targeted, high-touch direct mail campaign via solutions like Alyce or Sendoso * Pipeline Opportunity * More and more marketers are getting involved at this stage * Pro Tip: Execute brand campaigns on paid social, YouTube and display to stay top of mind
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Sam Clarke
Second Nature VP of Marketing • March 15
Your first month should be 80% focused on learning the business and 20% focused on finalizing your 30/60/90 plan. For the remaining two months of the quarter, you should be 40% focused on continuing to learn the business and 60% focused on executing your plan. In the first 3 months... 1. Schedule one-on-ones with every team member you will interact with weekly. 2. Map out your existing funnel by taking the steps a prospect would. Make sure you complete every funnel step yourself, from landing on your website to demoing with sales to putting in an actual credit card. This will help you identify areas that need fixing. 3. Hop on 5-10 sales calls with actual prospects. Record the questions they ask and the responses by your sales team. Ask to be bcc'd on all emails to those prospects. 4. At least once a week, get into the support ticket queue and answer questions. Leverage your existing help center to see if you can come up with the answer yourself, before relying on a team member. In the first quarter... 1. Set KPIs by month for the rest of the year. 2. Deliver a "what's working" and "what's broken" presentation to senior management. Ensure that the team has visibility into how the current funnel is performing and where the opportunity is. 3. Identify one channel that is underperforming and launch a campaign to turn it around. 4. Identify a channel the company hasn't yet experimented with and kick off a test. 5. Kick off a campaign that will improve the lead-to-closed won conversion rate.
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Dan Ahmadi
Branch VP Demand Generation and International Marketing | Formerly Outreach, MuleSoft • September 9
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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Krista Muir
Snowflake Senior Manager, Streamlit Developer Marketing | Formerly Sentry, Udemy for Business, Demandbase • August 24
If you're still on an inbound (MQL) model, I would start by pivoting every report through the lens of "target account vs. non-target account". * # of campaign responses * # of opportunities generated * $ pipeline generated * ACV * # closed won * $ closed won What matters gets measured. Over time, (ideally) it will reflect that target accounts drive the biggest impact to the business. (If not, it likely means that you'll need to take another look at the target account / ICP criteria.) In my experience, that usually is the catalyst to change how can we drive more "target account" pipeline? To do that, we'll need to think differently about engaging with an account & identify more of those leading indicators. Then, you can start thinking about the KPIs and what it means for an Account to be "Qualified".
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Kathy O'Donnell
Gong Senior Director, EMEA Marketing • December 21
Honing your craft and being able to share insights and recommendations (based on data) is a great start. Managers often don't have time to get into the weeds, but if they get insights they don't know or recommendations on how to do something differently, this is a good first step in becoming influential. Being concise in your delivery is also important. If you're putting together a written proposal, it's always recommended to start with a brief summary of the expected outcomes/key findings at the start. More generally, the more you understand the business, the better. For example, if you're aiming to be more influential with sales, understanding their challenges, having shared KPIs, talking their language and really knowing the customer will help you gain respect and become more influential. Finally, being a good person to work with naturally drives this. Being a good listener, giving others a voice, taking ownership, avoiding blame, and keeping everyone focussed on what matters.
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Liz Bernardo
SquareWorks Consulting Head of Marketing • October 27
In the Demand Generation world, KPI's are ever-evolving but one always remains consistent - "to drive marketing pipeline for the business." When starting out your career in DG, KPI's will be decided by your MLT team and assigned dependent on the annual, bi-annual or quarterly goals. Some of the most common may be dependent on: - a low performing product line needing a boost - a regional team needing pipeline assistance - or a channel needing support As you grow into DG leadership, additional KPI's come into play around driving better ROIs on campaigns, driving down business costs, while delivering additional pipeline, as well as employee development for your team.
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Sruthi Kumar
Notion Account-Based Marketing - Lead | Formerly Sendoso • August 10
There is definitely not a single path for demand gen. I personally transitioned into demand gen from field marketing. I can't say there is a single path that makes more sense than the next, but I can say there were a few things that helped me make the seamless transition. 1) All the events I ran had a quantative goal along with a qualitative goal. All programs had success metrics attached to them so we could look back and understand was it sucessful or not. 2) The other was that I always had buy in from the sales, CSM, and other GTM teams. I would start with communicating that this path forward would help them hit their goals and then share how their partnership would bring it even more success. 3) Events are expensive! Field marketing and demand gen will always cost money. Learning how to communicate upwards to c-level and other leadership positions is key. Whether you are on the content team, product marketing team, or a fellow field marketer and want to transition into demand gen, focus on proving value of your programs, have a close relationship with sales, and be ready to prove value of your demand gen mix to leadership.
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