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.

Below is how I would define the demand gen strategy, create content and plan campaign tactics aligned to the 5 stages of awareness UNAWARE: Demand gen strategy: Build awareness Content strategy: create blogs, media articles, podcasts to drive awareness Campaign tactics: Promote via organic social, YouTube, Spotify/Apple podcast PROBLEM AWARE: Demand gen strategy: Drive top-of-funnel demand Content strategy: Help them solve the problem with How to guides, best practice playbooks, cheat sheets, maturity assessment (online tool) Campaign tactics: Paid social, paid search, thought leadership webinars, content syndication, industry webinars/events SOLUTION AWARE Demand gen strategy: Drive engagement Content Strategy: Help them understand how your product can help solve their problem with product tours, video demos, checklists, tips and tricks, Campaign tactics:: Paid social, paid search, demo webinars, email marketing PRODUCT AWARE Demand gen strategy: Drive demos, free trials, bottom-funnel demand Content strategy: Help them understand how your product is uniquely qualified to solve their problem with an ROI Calculator, Success stories, Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave, Forrester TEI Campaign tactics: Events, executive roundtables, paid search MOST AWARE Demand gen strategy: Give them incentives to buy

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.

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.

SEM is an excellent way for a company to get up and running by responding to demand in the market. Early-stage companies who have not established their brand can start driving interest and opportunities immediately. As an organization grows, SEM can continue to be a large part of its digital toolbox while adding in other areas, including organic (SEO), as the company's brand becomes known and it builds authority.

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.

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.

I wish I had a rosier outlook, but I think demand gen is actually going to get gradually more challenging as time goes on. I think that the profession itself is going to need to move away from things like PII exchange through gated forms, and focus more on value delivery to the viewer/reader/consumer. Global digital privacy regulation is more likely to expand than contract at this point. I think the way companies measure demand generation is going to need to evolve as well - with broader full-funnel attribution being more socialized, accepted and understood at the highest levels in the company. One area where many demand gen leaders underinvest is strengthening finance and marketing alignment. Everyone talks about sales and marketing alignment - that's just a must to have a functional revenue team. How to strengthen that bond with finance? Educate them on marketing's broader contribution, and demonstrate that you have the respect and feel the responsibility for what is usually a large portion of variable company spend.

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.

Build a simple waterfall model that starts with the revenue target for the year. Assign a percentage of that target to marketing. Use some conversion benchmarks (either historical for your company or industry avg) to work up a funnel for how many opportunities, demos, MQLs you need to hit that target. Plannuh has a free funnel-building tool to guide you through this exercise. https://funnel-builder.plannuh.com/