My recommendation is to apply and not be discouraged. Learn as much as you can on the subject. If you are able to have a good understanding conceptually, you will stand out among the other candidates that may not gone the extra mile. Be open to any entry level role in Marketing that even remotely works closely with the demand gen team. Sometimes these roles won't have a demand generation title. Marketing analyst, sales development rep, digital marketing specialist, or marketing coordinator are all paths that lead into Demand Generation. When there is an opportunity to work on a cross functional project that interfaces with the DG team - jump on it and show them how helpful you are.

The best Demand Generation candidates possess a unique blend of strategic thinking, creativity, and executional excellence. They deeply understand the product, messaging, and audience, enabling them to craft compelling go-to-market strategies. Creativity is key—they generate innovative ideas to activate campaigns and drive engagement. I was once tasked with building a campaign for a software product we were selling in the Retail space. To activate this beyond the run of the mill webinar and content, we decided to take over a luxury retail store in SoHo during fashion week. We hosted top customers for an exclusive shopping experience and a live interview with the famous designer that we also streamed online and amplified on social media. Because this was such a unique and memorable activation, we were able to close business and also drive awareness. In addition, a strong grasp of channel strategy and optimization is essential. These candidates know how to leverage paid media, content, email, events, and other channels effectively, continuously testing and iterating for performance improvement. They are resourceful and scrappy, thriving in fast-paced environments where they must do more with less. Beyond tactical execution, top candidates are natural leaders who can align cross-functional teams, collaborating seamlessly with product marketing, creative, field marketing, and sales. Their high emotional intelligence (EQ) allows them to navigate pressure with composure, influence stakeholders, and drive alignment across departments. Being data-driven is non-negotiable. The best candidates don’t just execute campaigns—they analyze performance metrics, extract insights, and refine strategies based on data. They understand pipeline impact, revenue contribution, and how to optimize for business outcomes. Ultimately, the strongest Demand Generation professionals balance analytical rigor with creativity, strategic vision with hands-on execution, and leadership with adaptability. Their ability to connect the dots between messaging, channels, data, and cross-functional collaboration makes them invaluable assets to any marketing team.

First, congratulations on your new role! I love this question because it suggests you have already come to the realization that there are significantly more things that you could establish as KPIs than things you should establish as KPIs. A good manager earlier in my career told me once that good goals are those you can a) directly influence and b) easily translate into detailed plans to achieve them. In other words, try to avoid “goals by wishful thinking,” which is often how early-stage companies approach setting Marketing objectives. If I was in your shoes, here’s where I’d start: 1. Understand the Sales Process: If you haven’t already, define the lead stages & what will happen at each. Is Marketing qualifying leads or is Sales? This will help you understand what your team is accountable for vs what you can/should hold Sales accountable for. (Typical KPIs: MQLs, SALs, SQLs) 2. Know How Much Pipe You Need: This is harder in early-stage companies where GTM processes are less mature and changing rapidly; however, you should be able to establish baselines for stage-to-stage CVR% and C/W%, which are critical to understanding how much pipeline you need to generate. (Typical KPIs: Marketing Contributed Pipeline (MCP), Marketing Originated Bookings (MOB). 3. Establish a North Star: Finally, start by asking what the business is trying to achieve and on what timeline. What % of growth is Marketing expected to drive? If this is a brand new company or nascent category, awareness might also be a challenge that you need to invest in solving. Regardless, starting with the big picture will help you understand where to allocate resources and whether your budgets are sufficient to generate what the business is expecting of you.

Marketing can be a black box to people outside of it, which is why transparency and education are so important. The last thing you want is for the rest of the company to think Demand Gen is just running ads and sending emails. The reality is, Demand Gen is highly strategic and directly tied to revenue, and it’s our job to make sure that’s clear. One of the ways we have started to do this is through Monthly Business Reviews (MBRs). These meetings focus on key areas: What’s in the market right now? How is it performing? What’s not working and why? What’s coming next? We make sure we’re looking at actual business metrics—pipeline contribution, conversion rates, and revenue impact—not just vanity metrics like clicks or impressions. Another key piece is real-time dashboards. Everyone should be able to see how Demand Gen is performing at any time. No hidden reports, no mystery numbers—just clear, accessible data that shows the impact of our efforts. But beyond the numbers, I think one of the most important things we do is educate the company on how Demand Gen actually works. A lot of people think marketing is just about ads and messaging, but in reality, it’s a highly sophisticated system that involves experimentation, optimization, and a deep understanding of customer behavior. Attribution is a great example. People outside of marketing often assume it’s easy to track the exact path a customer took to conversion. The reality is that it’s messy and tracking is even more so—last touch, multi-touch, incrementality—it’s all complex. But people will assume we're guessing if we don’t communicate that complexity and show how we measure success. As a marketing leader, one of the best things you can do is build strong relationships with Finance. If Finance understands the value of Demand Gen and sees that we’re disciplined in allocating budget, it’s a lot easier to secure resources and make the case for growth. At the end of the day, if you’re not actively communicating Demand Gen’s impact, people will make their own (often incorrect) assumptions about it. Regular updates, clear reporting, and ongoing education are the best ways to make sure the business understands how marketing is driving revenue.

As a people manager, you must wholeheartedly invest in your team and your employees’ career objectives, even if it’s not Demand Generation. Here are a few things I do to cultivate my team’s growth: 1. Create strong career ladders. This drives a few things: 1. Clear articulation of my expectations for their existing role and promotional requirements. 2. Transparency in your career discussions on their strengths and areas of opportunity, which can be used throughout the year and during the review cycles. 3. Hiring skills are clearly outlined, so your recruiting team can attract the right candidate at the correct job level. 2. Leave the space for them to grow. There are a few ways to do this: 1. Carve out dedicated time on people’s calendars where they can hold space for learning opportunities. 2. Support outside L&D with company funding for educational courses. 3. Host team L&D sessions on relevant topics related to your career ladders. 4. After discussing their areas of interest, stretch projects allow them to learn a new skill hands-on. 3. Give them autonomy to do their best work, this includes but is not limited to: 1. Allowing them to own their work. Do not micromanage a top performer. 2. Designate team leaders to represent your team on calls and projects, and remove those who are necessary. Allow their voice to represent your entire team. 3. Be clear about when you want to be more involved and why.

Growth marketing is a field which requires one to be constantly on their feet. So the biggest quality in someone should be adaptability to change and ability to react quickly to the market. A lot of the work involves analytics, SEO, so having those skills will give you an edge. But what makes you truly successful is to understand the requirements of the company and then using those skills to achieve your goals.

* Own: * Lead volume and quality (MQLs, SQLs). * Campaign performance (CTR, conversion rates). * Pipeline contribution and ROI of demand gen efforts. * Don’t Own: * Pure revenue metrics (owned by sales). * Customer retention and expansion (owned by customer success). Focus on the metrics you directly influence and partner closely with sales to ensure alignment.

Effective OKRs for demand gen are measurable objectives that drive impact or growth in key areas such as acquisition, pipeline, awareness, and engagement. Before creating OKRs, it's crucial to have a firm grasp of not only your team's specific goals but also the broader company objectives. This ensures that your marketing efforts and the OKRs you develop will ladder up to these higher-level objectives. This approach elevates your OKRs from good to great and enables you to tailor them more effectively, making them more specific and relevant. For instance, if launching a new product is a top company-wide priority, then your OKRs should be refined accordingly. Here are a couple of examples: * Decent OKR: Source X% of site traffic * Better OKR: Source X% of traffic to the new product site page * Decent OKR: Source $X in sourced opportunities * Better OKR: Source $X in sourced opportunities, with Y% being new product opportunities

Having accurate data and good data is the foundation in delivering success. You have to be able to quickly answer this question: “For every dollar I put in market, how much am I bringing back to the organization?” If you can't answer this with confidence, then you can't even begin to drive success of your programs. We all know when we put garbage in, garbage comes out. Reports are great but only if the input of the data is accurate. Which is why it is critical to focus on the data structure to make sure we have a good foundation to surface up the data. And ensure you have the right connectors that allow marketing top of the funnel/mid-funnel metrics to your company's revenue data. Marketing leaders will ask each other: “How do you do lead gen” and think there’s a special channel they didn’t know about. Unfortunately, I wish it was that easy. What I’ve found is that the ingredient to building a world-class marketing organization is how a company uses martech to effectively automate workflows and track ROI. Your reporting and data visualization should be able to help you answer these high level questions: * What is marketing’s impact to the company’s pipe gen? * What channel or tactic drives the most pipe gen? * Which grouping are your highest converting leads? * Are your strategies delivering quality leads, pipeline and positive business outcome? * What is the audience mix in your strategy? (i.e: how much new business vs. cross-sell/upsell/upgrades is your team bringing in) Having the right data is critical because: 1) We need to know where our business stands, 2) if things look off we can investigate and react early before it becomes a firedrill, and 3) identify which strategy works and which doesn't.

Typically a content marketing function is measured on the engagement with the associated content put into market via paid, owned, earned tactics (i.e. content/asset downloads, social media engagements, webinar views, etc.), however when associating that content to demand generation programs and campaigns, It's important to understand how that content is impacting and driving the business. Essentially, how many MQLs did that content produce and ultimately what is pipeline associated to the content. I think it's also important to understand how marketing content is driving business outcomes via a direct attribution, as well as influenced attribution as customers will engage with multiple pieces of content throughout the customer journey. However, if your company is not at the state of having a sophisticated multi-touch attribution model that provides a weighted measure of the content's impact, you'll have to align on a first-touch or last-touch model to determine which content gets "credit" for driving downstream impact. It's also important to understand the type of content your organization is creating and the purpose of that content. For example, thought leadership content is not typically intended to drive short term pipeline, but it can impact a weighted multi-touch attribution model. Content on a company's website also has a very different purpose which is to engage and convert customers/prospects to the next action in the customer journey. Therefore it's very important to align on clear expectations of the purpose of the content being produced before it goes into market.