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.

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!

1) BE CLOSE TO THE NUMBERS. I cannot stress this enough. I was once told that this was my weakest spot–being metric driven. I quickly tried to rectify this and what I realized is that numbers could be my best friend. Once I got closer to the numbers, I was able to reframe them to tell the story I wanted to tell. (This is the hard skill I leaned into when I wanted to transition from field marketing to demand gen). 2) Be comfortable with writing. Sometimes on your teams, you won't always be the one producing content, but I do believe demand gen should be strong writers. This is the team that knows how to get people to sign up for a webinar and download a piece of content. If you are not close to your solution/product, team up with your PMM team and refer to messaging briefs to be able to write the content that are going to convert people into leads! Some of the strongest demand gen people I know all have different strengths, so nothing is a nice to have. It's just what makes them special. I know folks who are really strong writers, very creative, and very savvy with marketing tech. Lean into your strength and it will BECOME the hard skill the CMO/VP of Marketing interviewing you NEEDs on their team.

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

* 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?

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.

The best questions you can ask yourself as a marketer are always: * who is my target audience? * what do they care about? * where do they spend time? Make sure you have a dedicated sales development representative to follow up on leads. You can have some excellent marketing but if the leads don’t get followed up with, what’s the point? Build programs that provide a steady drumbeat that can act as an always-on “net” to attract and convert traffic to your site and also serve as offers you can promote in paid channels to accelerate activity until you have established an audience. 1. Develop 1 long form high value piece of content a quarter tied to your marketing themes and repurpose the heck out of the content making it into many “snackable” pieces. Release blogs regularly (SEO & ungated value to your audience, offer other CTAs on the page such as links to your larger pieces of content) 2. Have a newsletter (low friction way to collect email info and gain permission to continue communicating with your audience) 3. Once you have a “net” (always on programs that nurture your audience) go build/grow your audience with some strategic paid digital channels that you use to promote the content in your always-on strategy and accelerate audience growth 4. Invest in a couple of key events for the year where you have target audience alignment and get creative. Having a captive audience and a specific moment in time is a great reason to leverage the channel as part of an integrated marketing campaign that builds up to and off the back of that experience.

Scheduling one-on-ones with your new colleagues is one of the first steps to tackle in your 30/60/90 day plan. In fact, those conversations should influence what makes it into your final draft. You should lean on the team that has seen it firsthand versus thinking you have all the answers. When I first join a company, I make sure that I schedule meetings with at least one representative from sales, customer success, finance, business intelligence, product, and engineering. I also ask these very same questions to every single direct report. Finally, I make sure to interview the longest-tenured employee at the company. 1. What is the best thing that the demand generation team is doing right now? 2. What is something that the demand generation team is not currently doing that you think we should be? 3. Are there any challenges currently facing the organization that the demand generation team should know about? 4. If you had to choose three thought leaders in our industry, who would you choose and why? 5. What are the top three publications/websites in our industry that are frequently read by our target audience? 6. What are the three most common problems customers are trying to solve with our product? 7. What are the three most common objections we face when selling to prospects? 8. Who do you think I should talk to next at this company and why?

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. 

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.