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.

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 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)."

This is a great question! I can't tell you the number of times I've created content because someone in the C-suite thought it would be a good idea, or because a sales reply simply couldn't close a deal with a highly customized 1-pager. The truth is - content should be created with a purpose. Here are the questions I like to ask when conducting a content audit: * Does this content answer questions our customers are asking? Does it help our customers & prospects accomplish their goals? * How does the reader feel after consuming this piece of content? Does that feeling align with what our goal was when we created the piece? * What is the purpose of this piece of content? Is it still serving that purpose? * How often is this piece of content used, by who, and in what capacity? * When was the last time this content was refreshed? Is this something we want to be a staple in our library? * In what other forms does this content exist (blog, podcast, short video, webinar, etc)? If the answer is none, should it be created in smaller, more digestible snippets? 

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.

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

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.

This is a great question and a tough one to answer! Every org should develop this based on need. If I were to design a Demand Gen org for Global, it would look like this: * Demand Gen Strategy & Operations: You need one (or multiple people depending on the size of the org) to own the general Operations for the team. Meeting scheduling, global team interlocks, OKR setting, etc. * Demand Gen Analysts: This team will own the campaign data and so your focus can be on deriving insights and demand gen orchestration. * Global Interlock Lead: This person should own the relationships with the regions and the process of how assets get localized and delivered to the global teams. Is there a regular meeting cadence? How do you introduce new campaigns to the global teams so they are aware? * Campaign Leads/ Orchestrators: These are the Demand Gen warriors who own building their campaigns end to end. You can consider dividing this team up by segment type (Prospects vs. Customers, specific target audience segments, etc.). * Content Strategists: This team can own building the content and ensuring they are including global insights to make it relevant for global teams. Often the pitfall when building global demand gen teams is that the teams build for the region they are in and are not considerate of how to extend the message to be global. This team can own building assets such as infographics, webinars, etc. 

We use segmentation both at the account and contact level since we are a multi-solution company. Start with what problems your solution(s) solve, then determine which people (using title, seniority, department, or other factors), industries, companies, and available TAM from those companies for a specific solution/product would make up your ICP and group them into segments based on that criteria. If you are a single solution company you would still want to segment based on the people criteria above so you can tailor your messaging to the specific persona.

I love this question. When you’re a small company, the stakeholders are a pretty small group: You’ll work with a small number of sales reps who generally serve similar customer groups and operate using the same sales strategy. As a result, the type of demand gen work you have to do is generally pretty consistent and straightforward (not that it’s easy!). As companies grow, customer bases expand and evolve, making Demand Generation work increasingly complex. For example, companies will begin serving additional geographies, each of which require their own programs. On top of that, sales reps will sell into new customer segments, which adds another layer of segmentation to consider. When a company shifts from private to public, we start to have conversations with even more stakeholders, including investors, analysts or perhaps your company’s board of directors. To tackle the complexity that comes with a growing business and also evade the temptation of doing everything, prioritize the programs that are the most scalable and will help make the company most successful as a whole. Communication is also essential: The big thing I teach my team is to never say no to sales (it feels draining and demoralizing to always say no, since we all know sales is always clamoring for more support). Instead, say yes AND agree on which program you will deprioritize as a result of adding the newly requested one. In other words, make program prioritization a shared responsibility. As a marketer, our job is to work with sales and understand which programs we can jointly drive to make an impact together.