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.

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.

I'd recommending focusing a lot more on engagement and less on lead generation or MQLs. In general, you should know the people you want to engage in each account, and you'll have them already populated in your CRM. This completely eliminates the need for any "lead source" tracking to prove effectiveness. Additionally, you'll want your team to keep engaging the important few until they're ready to take the next step with your company, so measuring actual engagement with marketing materials/programs is key. Several tools out there help with this such as Demandbase and 6Sense, but it can also be homegrown if you have the appetite for it. If I were to oversimplify a lot, assign points based on activities, roll them up to the account level, ensure they decay over time, and then set thresholds based on what matters most for your business. Maybe you need a lot of engagement within a few key contacts, maybe you need the whole village to get activated! If you're not sure, start somewhere, backtest, measure, and iterate. 

My role evolved as the organization grew from $100 mil ARR to ~4X the size today. In earlier days, our GTM motion was primarily PLG. I was measured on Qualified Traffic as a leading KPI, and Trial volume and Sales CVR% as the lag KPIs. Today, we have a twin GTM engine - PLG & Direct Sales model. My role and success parameters have evolved accordingly. I'm measured on Marketing sourced and influenced pipeline. The leading metrics are Trial volume and # of accounts displaying category intent and engagement in a given period.

I find interviews to be the most successful as a hiring manager when I prep the questions I want to ask in advance. For a 30-minute interview, I'll have 6 or 7 questions ready to go. These questions are a mix of situational questions "Tell me about a time when..." and more general questions around the person's goals, strengths and weaknesses, and achievements. I'll also ensure that any cross-functional partners in the process have a good understanding of the seniority of the ideal candidate we are expecting and what to focus on for their interview time. For example, a sales interviewer can focus on sales collaboration and partnership, while a marketing operations interviewer can focus on skills around analyzing data. If I'm ever blanking on good questions, a quick google search and perusing a few blogs usually gets the ideas flowing.

I start making a list of what I want in my next role during my current role. I don't wait until anything is bad or tough, I just start compiling the list when inspiration hits me. (ex. Own a pipeline number, or report straight into the CMO). For the role itself I look for some of the items I write on my list, opportunity for career growth, and managers that I can learn from. In terms of the company itself I look for product-market fit, opportunity for company growth, understanding their sales stats, and a product that I feel excited about/passionate about. Most importantly I also look for a team that I like, because let's be real—we spend so much time with our coworkers, I need to like them!

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.

To gain influence, do your job well. When you join a team, it is essential to connect with all your teammates and try to add value as soon as possible. Throw yourself into projects and offer up your time and expertise. A series of small, quick wins can go a long way toward earning you some "street cred" while showing you're a team player here to make an impact. 

Yes, I've introduced many MarTech solutions throughout my career! As with any business case for new technology, it will require buy-in from leadership and cross-functional teams. Where possible, I highly recommend finding a peer-level champion at the company to help make the case with you. It usually requires a succinct executive summary + 2-3ish page doc, lots of repetitive conversations about "why" this is necessary to gain buy-in from your manager, and an internal roadshow to other key stakeholders. You'll need to paint the vision & succinctly answer: * Why now? (e.g. internal/external factors, opportunity at stake, challenges). * What goals will this software allow us to accomplish? Include quantifiable metrics and realistic ROI. * Why this solution & not a competitor, or even build it ourselves? * How will you measure success? Over what time frame? * Can you have a conversation with a customer that's not on their advisory board? * Does this need to pass a security review? Is there an "out-clause"? * What does the onboarding process look like? * What milestones will be part of a Crawl, Walk, Run implementation plan

Setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for a new start-up in the technology industry can be challenging as there may not be a lot of historical data to use as a reference point. However, here are some steps to follow when setting KPIs for your new start-up: 1. Identify your business objectives: Start by identifying your overall business objectives. This will help you determine what you need to measure to ensure you are making progress toward your goals. 2. Determine the most critical metrics: Identify the most critical metrics that will help you measure progress toward your objectives. These may include metrics such as customer acquisition, revenue, user engagement, and product development. 3. Look for industry benchmarks: Research industry benchmarks for your key metrics. This will help you determine what is considered successful in your industry and help you set realistic targets. 4. Set targets: Based on your business objectives, the critical metrics you have identified, and industry benchmarks, set targets for each metric. Make sure your targets are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). 5. Review and adjust: Review your KPIs regularly to ensure you are making progress towards your business objectives. If necessary, adjust your targets based on your performance and any changes in your business environment. Remember, KPIs should be aligned with your overall business objectives and should be regularly reviewed to ensure they remain relevant and effective. If there are not reliable benchmarks, you can start by making minimum viable investments of different campaigns/channel and these results will become your KPIs.