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Get answers from demand generation leaders
Kathy O'Donnell
Kathy O'Donnell
Gong Senior Director, EMEA MarketingDecember 20
1. Communication! Shared Slack channels, meet regularly and ask your sales team for input so they feel engaged and involved in decisions. Be transparent about how the marketing budget is spent and what is working and what isn't. 2. Shared KPIs. The biggest mistake is disconnected goals. Having a marketing goal of driving leads and a sales goal of driving revenue rarely works out, in my experience. At a minimum, Demand Gen/Marketing needs a sales-qualified pipeline target to fill the top of the funnel. At best, it's a shared revenue target. 3. Having marketing champions on the sales team can make a big difference. A sales leader who advocates for and voices their appreciation for marketing sets the tone for the rest of the sales organisation. Invest time in building those relationships. 4. Listen back to sales calls and hear the types of objections and discussions they are having. It can often give you ideas for new pieces of content that will resonate well and that your sales team will appreciate. 5. Avoid jumping in to fulfil every request of the sales teams. In all likelihood, you will become much more tactical than strategic and ultimately deprioritise things from your plan that may have had a greater impact. It's always better to provide a rational explanation as to why you believe their suggestion isn't the right thing to do. For example, with event suggestions, I usually find that the target ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) isn't quite right. 6. Have fun! Lunch chats, socialising together, connecting over the coffee machine, finding shared interests. All help build up a more personal relationship that ultimately builds a deeper connection and better working relationship.
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2379 Views
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Sierra Summers
Sierra Summers
Albertsons Companies Director of B2B MarketingJanuary 18
Marketing cannot close business without sales. Sales is the most important partner to marketing, ABM or not. While you can gain the support of the leadership teams, sales ops, etc, if you don't have your sales team onboard with your plans, you will not succeed. Bring your sales team into the process early and keep them informed ia regular status updates (bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Highlight your wins and your losses.
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2761 Views
Laura Lewis
Laura Lewis
Addigy Director | Head of Marketing | Formerly Qualia, ProgressApril 6
When I'm looking for a new role, I have a couple of steps in my process. First, I narrow down the job titles and types of companies I'm looking for. This might mean I only apply to Director of Demand Generation jobs at SaaS companies over 500 employees. At the manager level, decide if you're looking for Manager, Senior Manager, what type of company your experience best aligns with or you are most interested in, and if there is any other criteria that is important to you. Before beginning interviews with companies I've applied to, I'll do my research. Who works there, according to LinkedIn? How much funding do they have, according to Crunchbase? Who is on the leadership team, and how much experience do they have? What are employees saying on Glassdoor? What is the salary range for this position in general, and this position at this company? I've turned down interviews before because of Glassdoor reviews. If you know exactly what you are looking for, you can filter companies in and out based on that. If you're not sure or can't find enough information, go through the interview process to learn more. I'll ask a lot of questions during my interviews, as well, as tailor those questions to the person I am speaking with. When you meet with a peer reporting to the same boss, ask them about your potential boss's management style. When you meet with the most senior employee, ask them about the financial viability of the company. When you meet with sales, ask them what their biggest challenge is right now to close deals. The company is evaluating you, but you are also evaluating the company.
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810 Views
Krista Muir
Krista Muir
Snowflake Senior Manager, Streamlit Developer Marketing | Formerly Sentry, Udemy for Business, DemandbaseAugust 23
* Metrics are the data points you are measuring the success of the campaign around (either leading or lagging indicators). This can be # of meetings from your account list, # of campaign responses per account, # of impressions or CTR by account, # of opportunities, $ pipeline generated, etc. Any goal you’re measuring yourself on. * Analytics is the process of acquiring Insights from the data. Why should the team care about these metrics? * How are those metrics driving the business? * What action items can we take from here? * How will we apply these learnings to future campaigns?
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4451 Views
Kexin Chen
Kexin Chen
Salesforce Vice President, C-Suite MarketingApril 25
In terms of defining success, more top line KPIs are aligned to the targets set for pipeline and ACV (annual contract value) and my team's marketing contribution. Since my team focuses on building new C-Suite relationships for a set global list of top accounts, we're able to measure and hold ourselves accountable to the ability to drive new C-Suite relationships and expand our footprint within the top accounts. Qualitatively I also check in with my key stakeholders to ensure my teams are aligned to their top priorities.
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1103 Views
Sheena Sharma
Sheena Sharma
JumpCloud Vice President, Revenue MarketingAugust 24
* Quarterly/annual OKRs: * In an ideal world, you have a joint financial planning process between demand gen + Sales that outlines the sales bookings targets you need to hit for the year, and then broken down by quarter. * From there, say your quarterly sales bookings plan is $5M. * The finance and sales operations team (sometimes it is finance, sometimes it is sales strategy/operations, sometimes it is a revenue operations function), should then have a good sense of where that booking needs to come from * Is it all new business? Is there some expansion? * Do you have different AE teams (either segmented by region, product line, company size/deal size)? Generally, the answer here is yes, and so you have a sense of the quota roll-up for each of these sub-teams. * From there, then you can break down the sources of revenue: marketing-driven inbound, marketing-driven outbound/ABM, BDR-driven outbound, AE-driven outbound, channel sales, etc. * Ideally, you want a good sense of your typical win rates + average transaction sizes, so you can get to the number of opportunities (deals, or SQLs, or even SQOs in some organizations) that you need to generate * Don't forget about latency! In some enterprise organizations, you need to plan for 6-9 months between when an opportunity is generated and when it will close. Make sure you have a sense of your typical latency. If it is more than 30-60 days, make sure you are baking this into your plans. * The ultimate output of this exercise is a quarterly target of what your demand gen team is responsible for at the SQL level. * Once you know your SQL targets for each quarter that the business is asking of you from a top-down point of view, ALWAYS make sure you do a 'bottoms-up' pass based on your historical performance, how much investment you are getting in headcount, and operating expenditures, what strategies you'll be leading, and any information or intelligence you have on market trends. * If there's a big gap between the tops-down business number and the bottoms-up trends number, this is where you need to (1) think about re-allocating resources or re-prioritizing your strategies, or (2) see if there's room to negotiate your targets. In the case where you think the targets are low/achievable, then that's where you might go in and offer to raise your targets to take pressure off another area of the business. * Tying targets back to projects/initiatives: Then you definitely want to tie the SQL target to (1) your marketing funnel of leads, MQLs and SALs, and (2) make sure that you have key strategies and initiatives that ladder up into hitting those targets. Not every initiative will drive results for each stage, but you want to ensure that you have strategies to drive results at each stage of the funnel. You also should think about building a roadmap for the year and sequencing initiatives over time: Maybe you have more ability to pull a lever fast to drive more leads in the short term, but it will take you a long time to build really great full-funnel nurture campaigns to drive MQLs --> closed/won. Ensure you are not trying to take on too much in a given quarter.
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1663 Views
Andy Ramirez ✪
Andy Ramirez ✪
Docker SVP, Growth Marketing (CMO Role)May 3
A fully burdened CAC/LTV (cost of acquisition vs lifetime value) model. This is very hard to do and even harder to do right but it is the only way to truly understand if the investments you're making are paying off. If you can't do it on an ongoing basis at least revisit it a few times a year. Make sure that what you're bringing in is net positive to the company within a reasonable payback period.
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766 Views
Tamara Niesen
Tamara Niesen
WooCommerce CMO | Formerly Shopify, D2L, BlackBerryAugust 25
Operating in a silo from sales and not treating them as my first team. B2B demand gen marketing- developing pipeline for sales is our job. If we are not in lockstep with sales, and don't show up as one team, we end up with an unhealthy tension that pits teams against eachother. I have only made this mistake once, where I hit my MQL/Sales accepted targets and when we didn't hit our deal target for the quarter, I did not take accountability for the full funnel, and left sales to take responsibility. Marketing and sales need to have trust, sales needs to know that marketing understands how they qualify, sell, and close deals. Marketing needs sales to provide feedback on programs, narratives, campaigns so we can continually iterate and drive growth. In order for this to happen, marketing needs to be accountable from awareness--> closed won--> churn.
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762 Views
Sruthi Kumar
Sruthi Kumar
Notion Account-Based Marketing - Lead | Formerly SendosoAugust 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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1693 Views
Jordan Hwang
Jordan Hwang
OpenPhone VP of MarketingApril 20
I generally like to communicate through two types of vehicles: Weekly progress updates - this is meant to convey what's happening now * Performance metrics (absolute numbers, performance vs. goal, YoY %) * Drivers of above performance (i.e. what's causing it) * Adjustments that will be made given the drivers (i.e. what are we doing differently?) * Where we're stuck (i.e. how readers can assist) Monthly progress updates - this is meant to convey overall progress against a larger strategic plan * Performance (monthly to give context) * Initiatives that we committed to doing at the start of the plan (more context as to the what and the why) * Progress of those initiatives * Bottlenecks * Adjustments that we'll making based on what we learned (this reflects more against initiatives and where we're spending time)
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1011 Views