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.

I have one question that I love to ask in all of my in-depth interviews: "What is the challenge you are looking for at your next opportunity to help you grow to the next level in your career?" The best answers are those that sound intentional, thoughtful and deliberate. "I want to grow in my ability to do (x), and through this role, I'll be able to take on challenge (y) to help me get to the next step on my career path to (z)."

A team of one has the opportunity to lay the foundation for a solid demand generation function. That being said, it's important to ensure a thoughtful and scalable approach. You'll need to choose 1 or 2 main KPIs to impact, you should work with sales and PMM to form a point of view. You might choose traffic and form fills to start depending on the maturity of your business. Or you might choose MQLs and Opportunities. Once you have your KPIs chosen you can begin crafting the right mix of programs to achieve your targets. Generally speaking I recommend an 80/20 split, 80% always on programs, think trial, ebooks, on demand webinars, AR, etc and 20% point in time (PIT) webinars, training, hands on etc. Especially for a team of one you need to prioritize programs that will help you get the most out of your efforts. You’ll never be able to run enough webinars to keep up with growing targets, so it's important to build a solid always on engine.

* 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?

ROI and marketing attribution is the most challenging KPIs for startups in the technology space; most of these companies do not measure CLV and instead, they measure results on an annual basis, depending on factors such as average sales cycle, average deal size and market maturity, reporting returns of marketing investment in the short term is challenging. One important KPI that demand generation teams may overlook in fast-growing technology companies is the customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is a metric that calculates the total amount of revenue a customer is expected to generate for a company over the course of their relationship. It takes into account factors such as customer acquisition cost, average purchase value, and customer retention rate, and provides a more accurate picture of a company's revenue potential than simply looking at short-term revenue or leads generated. By focusing on CLV, demand generation teams can prioritize their efforts on acquiring high-value customers who are more likely to generate long-term revenue for the company. They can also identify areas where they can improve customer retention and increase the overall value of each customer. Overall, CLV can provide a more comprehensive and strategic view of a company's revenue growth potential and help demand generation teams make more informed decisions about their marketing and sales strategies.

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.

Your buyer's journey as well as your demand funnel, play a key role in this decision. * First set of channels & tactics: A rule of thumb that has worked for me when launching a campaign is to select the channel(s) that provide the widest audience reach. I've consistently observed that 'Audience reach' & 'Frequency of reach' have had a clear impact on overall campaign performance (qualified lead volume and pipeline). But the way I think about 'Reach' is that it is a necessary, not a sufficient condition. So what else matters? Curating the right 'offers', and the right 'format'. For example, Linkedin (the channel) offers a reasonable reach per month for most B2B SaaS players. What offer you choose to launch the campaign with is equally important? Should it be a global virtual summit headlined by Top influencers or a Playbook with interviews from well-regarded industry practitioners? Here two very different offers are served on the same channel. * Next set of channels & tactics: As you start thinking about the Demand capture phase of your campaign, you'll work with channels that reach fewer audiences. These channels include SEO, Paid Search, In-product journey, SDR engagement, etc. Most of these channels involve high-effort, and a high-volume of output, so prioritization is key. A way to allocate budgets toward these channels is by prioritizing them by reach, expected buyer engagement & intent.

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.

Our demand generation team has three major pillars: * Website - responsible for our corporate website. While they care about impact, they also need to service other needs for the company beyond pure demand generation. They're held to a slightly different standard, as a result. * Acquisition - responsible for acquiring new leads. We have it split between Organic (SEO), Paid, and Channel (BD partnerships) * Customer Marketing - responsible for educating and upselling/cross-selling customers There's multiple teams that live within those major pillars that are structure more tactically, but the three pillars comprise the major differences in expectations and OKRs that would be associated there.

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.