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.

This question is very similar to the one titled: Are there specific channels you think are a foundation to a Demand Generation strategy? Short answer is focus on your website and email channel first. In addition to what I discussed in that section, I would highlight recommend aligning with your product leaders and support/customer service leaders the same way a demand gen leader would if they had a sales leaders they align with. Your job is to convert users and help them adopt the product. Use data science to drive your marketing activities. Once you identify where the gaps are in your conversion process you can start to build marketing adoption programs based on the unique challenges your business is facing. Here's an example of a problem statement that was one of our biggest challenge when I led demand gen for our self-service/product led product: * “Which in-app activities help SMBs convert being a free trial user to paying customers of salesforce”. What we learned from data science is that the biggest driver of conversion is getting someone to log back into the app on the 2nd day. If they don’t, we lose them. And on the flip side, If we can just increase Day 1 to Day 2 retention by +X% that will get us +XX% more conversions. So it’s absolutely critical to drive return logins early. And based on that, we have these 3 programs in market to encourage trialist to log in: 1. Launched a 90 day email nurture that includes a series of 15 emails to encourage feature adoption. 2. Best Practice webinars that will feature customers to talk about how they are using the features in our product to drive business value. 3. Our adoption team has an in going hands-on workshop to teach trialist how to do things like adding additional users and editing accounts & contacts - these are all features that these trialists must adopt in order to see the value in our product. Underneath all this we have a Propensity to Convert (PTC) score designed by our data intelligence/data science team where we graded each cohort's propensity to convert by the end of the 14 day trial period. This score not only helps you segment and customize your marketing journeys but it can also help you forecast to see how many conversions or revenue amount you will expect at any given month/quarter. 

I always start with a comprehensive audit, focusing generally on the following areas. I evaluate a combination of qualitative and quantitative factors which allows me to have a clear understanding of the maturity of the function. The key is knowing what good looks like / being able to know where you want to get to. Because this audit should then turn into a roadmap towards building a proper demand center. * Sales & Marketing alignment * Demand funnel * Lead scoring * Lead nurturing * Content * Buyer personas * Planning and strategy * Process * Data management * Measurement * Systems * ABM * Campaign data and orchestration * Business acumen

If you're still on an inbound (MQL) model, I would start by pivoting every report through the lens of "target account vs. non-target account". * # of campaign responses * # of opportunities generated * $ pipeline generated * ACV * # closed won * $ closed won What matters gets measured. Over time, (ideally) it will reflect that target accounts drive the biggest impact to the business. (If not, it likely means that you'll need to take another look at the target account / ICP criteria.) In my experience, that usually is the catalyst to change how can we drive more "target account" pipeline? To do that, we'll need to think differently about engaging with an account & identify more of those leading indicators. Then, you can start thinking about the KPIs and what it means for an Account to be "Qualified".

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.

Work with your sales team! You can use a lot of different tech and methods to identify target accounts, but if your sales team isn't bought in, you won't be successful. I suggest using tools or conducting a TAM analysis to narrow down the list of potential accounts a tad small. Have the sales team participate in the account selection process. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is allowing their sales teams to pick companies like Verizon, ATT, Amazon etc. These companies are broken out into several lines of business and divisions. Sales should understand the account and where they'll break in. If you are going to use digital channels, ensure you have a list large enough to meet audience size requirements on your preferred media partners.

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.

The best candidates have a ruthless attention to detail, this is by far the most important trait in my view. Without it planning, managing, executing, and scaling campaigns becomes nearly impossible. Additionally stellar demand gen team members understand the importance of building true cross-functional relationships. I encourage new members to take the first half of all regularly scheduled 1 on1s to chat about non-work related things, and really get to know your PMM, MOPS, web, paid counterparts. As campaign managers we rely on other teams to get work dones and sometimes on short notice, strong relationships will help you deliver.

* Not necessarily over-hyped, but I think it is important to find the balance between being too focused on top-of-funnel (Traffic, leads, MQLs) and having targets that are out of your control to drive (closed / won, revenue). If your marketing team is ONLY KPI'ed on MQLs and nothing else, you may be incentivized to drive a ton of volume at the detriment to quality. Then your sales team might come back and say that the 'leads' you are sending aren't good quality. If you don't have other metrics further down funnel (I recommend tracking SALs - sales accepted leads, and SQLs - meetings booked or opportunities created), then it becomes hard to identify where you need to optimize and lean in. * I also see a lot of fuzziness around the word 'leads'. In my world today, lead means a net new name to the database. But, I will often hear BDRs talk about leads in terms of the people they are working (so an MQL or SQL), and AEs might talk about leads in terms of the deals they are working (an SQL or SQO). It's really important to make sure you have clear definitions for the KPIs that you are driving and that you are working over time to build a shared language in your organization.

Tactical: - Be close to the metrics - Strong writer - Problem solver - Solid speaker (this helps when you are presenting to sales all hands or even internally to your own marketing team) Intangible: - Think about campaigns/programs with an integrated lense - Strong cross-communication skills with different teams - Understanding the strengths from others and your team