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.

Incorporating experimentation and A/B testing into growth marketing strategies is key for driving sustained growth. Without it, marketing results often plateau quickly. Here’s a 6-step process I’ve used in the past to structure a conversion rate optimization program around. Step 1 - Hypothesis Formation In this initial step, pinpoint crucial variables that influence user engagement and construct hypotheses regarding potential changes and their outcomes. * Identify Key Variables: Recognize the key variables (like webpage layout, email subject lines, ad creatives) that you think have a significant impact on user engagement or conversion. * Develop Hypotheses: Formulate hypotheses based on your observations, analytics data, or customer feedback, predicting how changes in these variables might affect the outcomes. Step 2 - Designing Experiments Here, the focus is on developing different variants based on the formed hypotheses, establishing a control group, and setting up appropriate analytics tools to track the performance metrics accurately. * Creating & Develop Variants: Create different variants of the webpage, email, or ad, incorporating the changes as per your hypotheses. * Control Group: Maintain a control group where no changes are made, to compare the results with the variants. * Define Key Metrics: Set up key metrics (like click-through rate, conversion rate, etc.) that will help you evaluate the performance of each variant. * Setting Up Analytics: Ensure that analytics tools are set up correctly to accurately track the performance metrics. Step 3 - Conducting Experiments During this phase, conduct the experiments by segregating the audience into different groups and launching all variants simultaneously to avoid time-based biases, ensuring a fair test. * Randomized Split Testing: Divide the audience randomly into different groups, each group being exposed to one variant. * Simultaneous Launch: Launch all the variants simultaneously to prevent any time-based biases from affecting the results. Step 4 - Data Collection and Analysis This step entails meticulous data collection and analysis to discern the most effective variant, followed by deriving insights to comprehend customer preferences and documenting the findings for future reference. * Collect Data: Gather data on how each variant performed based on the defined metrics. * Analyze Results: Analyze the data to find out which variant performed the best and if the differences are statistically significant. * Draw Insights: Draw insights from the experiment results, understanding customer preferences and behaviors. * Document Learnings: Document the learnings from each experiment to build a knowledge base for future reference. Step 5 - Implementation and Optimization At this point, your focus is implement any successful test, engage in continuous optimization based on the learnings, and accelerate growth by repeating the testing process with new hypotheses. * Implement Changes: Implement the changes based on the winning variant to optimize your marketing strategies. * Continuous Optimization: Use the learnings to continuously optimize and improve your marketing strategies. * Scale Successful Experiments: Scale up the successful experiments to a larger audience to maximize the benefits. * Iterative Process: Make experimentation an iterative process, continuously testing new hypotheses to foster growth. Step 6 - Knowledge Sharing Lastly, foster a data-driven culture within the organization by sharing the learnings with the team, encouraging collaboration, innovation, and developing a flexible marketing strategy adaptable based on the insights gathered from the experiments. * Share Learnings: Share the learnings with your team to foster a culture of data-driven decision-making. * Collaborative Approach: Encourage a collaborative approach where team members can propose new hypotheses for testing. * Fostering Innovation: Foster a culture of experimentation within the organization, encouraging innovation and agility. * Adaptability: Develop an adaptable marketing strategy that can pivot based on the insights from the experiments. By following this structured approach to experimentation and A/B testing, you can effectively incorporate them into your growth marketing strategies, driving improved results and fostering sustainable growth.

* 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?

For me, the best demand generation candidates are growth-oriented, have customer empathy, and have a strong quantitative bent. For growth-oriented, this means that they likely have some combination of the following: * Natural curiosity - What's working/not working? Why? What can I do differently? * Self-awareness - What could I/we have done differently? * Drive - A desire to make their numbers, regardless of the circumstances For customer empathy, this means that they understand who the customer is, and what their circumstances are. Demand generation is much more impactful if one can meet the customer where they are, both physically, mentally, and psychologically. Out of the three, nailing this produces the most outsized returns. I left the strong quantitative bent as the lowest priority because it's generally something that most candidates have, so it's the least differentiating. However, there's an aspect of this that's important, which is not only a comfort in working with numbers, but being able to meld the numbers with an understanding of what's happening. The cherry on top is experience. It's always great if they have it, on top of the above. However, I've generally found that folks who possess the above three qualities will be able to quickly make up any experience gaps versus someone who doesn't possess the above.

Great question. Difficult to answer, without knowing more about you as a human (feel free to reach out to me on LI and we can chat more specifically). That said, here is my general thinking on the subject: First, leverage your experience. You sales background is a huge asset. Use your experiences to help the Marketing team get a better understanding of customer pain points, buyer personas, and the nuances of the sales funnel. Your team will find your knowledge to be invaluable in crafting effective demand generation strategies that resonate with potential customers. That said, you will have a lot to learn about how the function of "demand generation" works. * Digital Marketing: Learn about SEO, SEM, social media marketing, and content marketing. This is often the largest discretionary spend in your entire company. Experts here command executive attention, have a huge impact on spending decisions and can make or break your top of funnel volume. * Marketing Automation Tools: Get hands-on experience with tools like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot. Learn how scoring works. Get a sense of how email campaigns are developed, what your marketable database looks like, and how you can help the team improve their segmentation efforts. * Data Analysis: Marketing data is adjacent to Sales data, but it's a whole new pile of stuff (100's of metrics across the different parts of the org) to learn. Get a sense of what matters most and what are nice to do metrics. Develop skills in analyzing data to understand campaign performance and ROI. * Content Creation: Work with the content team to understand the machinery. How does content marketing generate leads? What content is mapped to what stage? How is that content scored? You can be a big help here; help the team brainstorm new and relevant topics at the awareness, consideration and decision stages. Help the PMM team develop one pagers for sellers that actually matter. I'd suggest that you work to deepen your understanding of the customer journey from awareness to decision. Spend some time with the PMM team, growth team, or your lifecycle marketing person. Get a sense of how your organization creates create touch points that guide potential customers through the funnel will be essential in a demand generation role. What are the "aha" moments in your product that signal a potential long-term paying customer? How many touches in your SDR sequences or in your marketing nurture emails. One interesting, big concept to consider: How can you start to shift your focus from individual sales (1:1) to broader, more programmatic marketing strategies (1:Many). Consider how you can leverage what you know, and how you can apply it at scale, to attract, engage, and convert leads to closed won. Making this mental shift will be critical to your success in Marketing and Demand Generation. This is a big one, a mandatory IMO. Please please please please please communicate your career aspirations with your current manager or HR department. You need to find the right balance between being direct but non-threatening. You want them to know what you want and when, but not make them feel like you have checked out or are not worth continuing to advocate for and invest in. Managing this carefully will be key to making a smooth transition between roles. The marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Stay curious, keep learning, and be adaptable to new tools and trends in demand generation. Attend events, participate in webinars, and read read read read read everything you can get your hands on. Continuous improvement will be key to your long-term success, whatever path you choose to pursue. Of course, I'd be remiss if I did not suggest you work to connect with professionals who are already in demand generation roles. You can't go wrong seeking mentorship from experienced colleagues and industry experts. Their guidance can provide valuable insights and help you navigate the transition smoothly. Some thoughts if you are still in your Sales role: Demonstrate your capability and interest in demand generation. Spend some time with your DG partners. Offer to assist with marketing campaigns, contribute to content creation, and help with lead nurturing efforts. Showcase your company knowledge, your proactive approach and you're going to win both kudos and a better chance at landing a Marketing role. Finally, I'd recommend working to build your "T-shaped career." A generalists breadth and broad understanding of marketing concepts will help you accelerate and become successful and valuable in smaller companies. As you grow, you'll develop the long leg of that "T" - your specialization. This will become more and more important as you grow in seniority and look to take on more senior roles. Companies usually hire because they have a problem they want to address, and they are looking for folks who have specialties in addressing them. This WILL become a huge part of your later career value proposition, so start thinking about it now.

In order to become a demand gen leader, you need to understand how to empower your team to execute to the best of their ability, and also forge a professional development path for every team member. Sure, there are skills like effective budgeting, managing cost efficiencies of channels, and typical manager-level skills such as performance management and coaching. But ultimately, a demand gen leader has many similarities to a CMO: the people that are on a demand gen team have many disparate disciplines, and you need to at least understand the key success drivers of each of those disciplines. It's common for medium-sized (~10+ full time people) demand gen teams to require smaller sub-teams for marketing operations, campaign management, paid media, events and field marketing. Understanding how to grow each function to meet the needs of the business is table stakes for a demand gen leader. What helps teams get to the next level is being a demand gen leader that focuses on the professional development and growth of everyone on your team. Ensuring that everyone has clarity into where they want to go next in their career, and giving them the resources they need to create their own specific path from the role they are in today to where they want to go next.

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.

This is a great question! Always use the metrics to support the story you are telling. You can get creative with this one and honestly— the world is your oyster when it comes to telling a story with metrics. So firstly, share your qualitative story. "Since I joined the team, we have diversified our programs and channels where we have been bringing in a bigger of volumes of names" Then you need to support that with a quantative story. - Where are your MQLs coming from? Are a majority coming from a new channel that you implemented? Look at the MoM change of this percentage and the volume of MQLs that have come from this one program (and share QoQ metrics). Some other metrics you could use: - Growth of the percentage of marketing sourced leads that turned into closed won deals/meetings with the sales team. (Ex. Did marketing originally infleunce 30% of sales qualified leads/or meetings and now it's 55% since you implemented your programs) - MoM growth of MQLs and other top of funnel metrics (like new names) since you joined the team or made a change

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?

The one lesson I learned the hard way as a Demand Gen leader was that I was not as knowledgeable about my target audiences as I thought I was. I kept seeing different people respond differently to various assets and did not understand why. I learned that it was important to thoroughly understand the audience before building or when optimizing the campaign. It can't just be work from a 3rd party paper (e.g. - Forrester), it has to be true on the ground insights (from Sales or a Research team). This was so important to me because I sometimes did not see the results I had hoped to see. Moving forward, I kept in constant contact with Sales to understand what they were hearing from prospects/customers.