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!

I have one question that I love to ask in all of my in-depth interviews: "What is the challenge you are looking for at your next opportunity to help you grow to the next level in your career?" The best answers are those that sound intentional, thoughtful and deliberate. "I want to grow in my ability to do (x), and through this role, I'll be able to take on challenge (y) to help me get to the next step on my career path to (z)."

I'd recommending focusing a lot more on engagement and less on lead generation or MQLs. In general, you should know the people you want to engage in each account, and you'll have them already populated in your CRM. This completely eliminates the need for any "lead source" tracking to prove effectiveness. Additionally, you'll want your team to keep engaging the important few until they're ready to take the next step with your company, so measuring actual engagement with marketing materials/programs is key. Several tools out there help with this such as Demandbase and 6Sense, but it can also be homegrown if you have the appetite for it. If I were to oversimplify a lot, assign points based on activities, roll them up to the account level, ensure they decay over time, and then set thresholds based on what matters most for your business. Maybe you need a lot of engagement within a few key contacts, maybe you need the whole village to get activated! If you're not sure, start somewhere, backtest, measure, and iterate. 

I believe that all integrated campaigns should exist to drive pipeline & revenue (there is an exception though: when this is not true is when you are creating a category). The biggest difference between these two goals is the volume and the type of buyers you choose to ignore or add to your campaign strategy. For example, an integrated campaign strategy that is focused on meeting pipe goals (assuming limited funds) is focused (more) on two buyer stages - Consideration & Intent. It therefore already assumes that the majority of buyers are aware of the product category and the existence of possible solutions in the market. * Your biggest leverage point here is to make yourself known in specific buying situations (eg. 'we are an affordable alternative to XYZ', 'we are easier to use compared to ABC'). Think of these as inputs to your ad creatives, content assets, etc. * You contain these seemingly disparate buying situations into a 'Campaign theme', a singular go-to-market messaging that focuses the collective energy of all GTM teams in your organization * You now create the right mix of offers that get your buyers to self-select themselves into the demand funnel. What is the type and number of webinars, owned vs 3rd party events, content assets, Demos, Free Trials, Free for forever plan, etc? * You develop a media plan that lays out these offers in a certain sequence, and the time period and is promoted using specific tactics. Since your focus is pipe-gen, it's important to have an educated pov on gated vs ungated content strategy. This, usually, is not as big a concern area in a Brand marketing campaign.

* 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.

In the Demand Generation world, KPI's are ever-evolving but one always remains consistent - "to drive marketing pipeline for the business." When starting out your career in DG, KPI's will be decided by your MLT team and assigned dependent on the annual, bi-annual or quarterly goals. Some of the most common may be dependent on: - a low performing product line needing a boost - a regional team needing pipeline assistance - or a channel needing support As you grow into DG leadership, additional KPI's come into play around driving better ROIs on campaigns, driving down business costs, while delivering additional pipeline, as well as employee development for your team.

* Make sure reporting is set up to measure what’s important and is agreed upon across sales & marketing * You can’t wait till the martech stack is built or the website is perfect or your strategy is complete to start generating demand. You’re going to have to build the race car while you are racing. You need to capture/generate demand while you are standing up new process, getting new martech in place, etc. * Set up a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders- actively setting and managing expectations with your stakeholders is key to building trust.

This is a tricky one as the business can often communicate all of these features and products are equally important. In reality it often creates too many messages for your audience if you try to go after them all at the same time, not to mention it will quickly burn one to two people out! Consider spending time with product marketing to map out a focus over the next quarter or two. Really force the conversation around prioritization. Pick a product or two or combo of features and ladder them up to a theme or concept. Figure out the story you want to tell and execute on that whether that be through ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc. Then repeat for the next quarter. Your prospects and customers will benefit from a focused and directed journey. Ideally the product or feature you focus on in one quarter should lead to the focus for the next quarter so it feels cohesive. Last thing to note, creating an effective an efficient always on engine will significantly ease this burden. I recommend an 80/20 split. 80% of your efforts should be focused on driving always on (trial, ebooks, whitepapers, web, etc) and 20% should be focused on Point in Time (PIT) (webinars, trainings, hands on). As your portfolio of always on assets grows it will naturally cover more products.