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.

Across every role in growth there's one common trait I try to ensure. The ability to look at seemingly disparate data, make sense of it, create hypotheses, and prove or disprove them. Lots of people will answer yes to this if asked as a yes/no question, but the ones that truly get it can articulate examples. These are the folks that take data and turn it into action. I have often seen people be really good at collecting and presenting data, but not be as good at the "so what" part of it.

The first places I'd invest for short term wins: * Capture intent via paid search (Google search, but also Bing) across branded and non branded keywords * Optimize your website for lead conversion (CTA structure, strategy, form enrichment) * Make sure you have multiple "high intent" offers including a contact sales request, live demo program, on demand demo program with short videos on your product, and free trial At the same time, you have to invest in medium-term strategies: * SEO for key non brand keywords * Content generation at the top and middle of funnel that is solution-agnostic and focused on solving the problems your key buyer personas face * Website messaging, positioning and key pages for your key verticals, personas or solutions * Brand efforts to drive awareness, including PR, events/field activations, brand advertising, and paid social * Lead generation via paid channels like paid social, content syndication, and targeted industry placements

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.

Your buyer's journey as well as your demand funnel, play a key role in this decision. * First set of channels & tactics: A rule of thumb that has worked for me when launching a campaign is to select the channel(s) that provide the widest audience reach. I've consistently observed that 'Audience reach' & 'Frequency of reach' have had a clear impact on overall campaign performance (qualified lead volume and pipeline). But the way I think about 'Reach' is that it is a necessary, not a sufficient condition. So what else matters? Curating the right 'offers', and the right 'format'. For example, Linkedin (the channel) offers a reasonable reach per month for most B2B SaaS players. What offer you choose to launch the campaign with is equally important? Should it be a global virtual summit headlined by Top influencers or a Playbook with interviews from well-regarded industry practitioners? Here two very different offers are served on the same channel. * Next set of channels & tactics: As you start thinking about the Demand capture phase of your campaign, you'll work with channels that reach fewer audiences. These channels include SEO, Paid Search, In-product journey, SDR engagement, etc. Most of these channels involve high-effort, and a high-volume of output, so prioritization is key. A way to allocate budgets toward these channels is by prioritizing them by reach, expected buyer engagement & intent.

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.

What a great question. I never thought about data in this way. Thanks for forcing me to think through the differences as it relate to KPIs vs. data to help inform vs. pure noise. Metrics: These are the key performance indications that, you as a marketer, should evaluate your programs and your teams against. At the end of the day our job as marketers is to drive revenue alongside our go-to-market partners. Key metrics I've outlined in another AMA question that is worth mentioning here: * What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation * How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance and executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+) * How are we aiding in contact acquisition by account? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. I'm going to group Analytics and Insights together because analytics to me is the data that backs up (or inform) the insights. Analytics: What problem are you trying to solve for? You have to have succinct questions before you (or submit a request to your analytics team) dig into the data to pull analytics. Analysis paralysis is the cause of unnecessary cycles and it will lead to dead ends. Insights: These are an individual or a group's point of views or someone's analysis based on the analytics being pulled. It is a hypothesis backed by data to gain understand of your business. Here's my thinking process when solving for a specific hotspot for the business and how I would go about looking for the analytics and surfacing insights. Problem/hotspot: Account X is not hitting the ACV target. Why? Logic: "Analytics is showing us that the pipe gen is flat YoY and we are behind target attainment by X percentage points - the trend was surfaced up last week as well." The hypothesis here is that we are behind on pipe gen, an early indicator that we'll miss our revenue target. This requires an action/get back to health plan right away. In search of insights these are the questions I would answer and gather the analytics for: * Are we simply not piping enough? * What's the close rate/win rate this quarter compare to last quarter and last year (is the hypothesis we're losing to a competitor or is this an enablement problem?) * Is the pipe stuck in a certain stage? What's the average days/weeks it's been stuck in that stage for? The action plan is to figure out how to leverage marketing touchpoints to progress the pipe. * Is there deal compression happening because Account X is putting projects on hold or swapping licenses in an effort to drive vendor cost down? These questions then become guidance to help us surface up the right analytics so we are not lost in analysis paralysis.

Personally, I don't think there is a one single path for Demand Generation. I came into the role by surprise. I was interviewing for a Marketing Manager role at a company, almost 10 years ago and during the interview we were whiteboarding out pipeline funnels. I was talking through waterfall metrics and which type of assets I would place at each stage in the funnel. Then we went on to discuss global digital strategies and then lastly, my favorite, events and the campaigns that surround them. I had lots of experience in SFDC reporting, Pardot and over all dashboarding and my soon to be manager said, "Liz, you're not a Marketing Manager, you're a Demand Generation Manager" (shout out to one of my mentors Allen Johnson) He taught me how to mold all the different parts of marketing I loved into the Demand Generation role. Being a Sales driven marketer, who knows their data, how campaigns work and the best way to create growth quick was the trick. So, my advice as to career path ... Become passionate about all aspects of marketing and sales. Learn the numbers, ask questions to those who are in the roles you strive for. Connect with me on Linkedin (I'm always an open book), research - you've got this.

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?

I would love to be a CMO one day, and I do think owning the Demand Generation function is a good way to get there. Here are some of the strengths that I have seen from the CMOs I have respected the most: 1) Being close to the numbers - even if you aren't the one owning the direct number, a great CMO will understand what is happening in their pipeline so they can communicatr with sales. 2) Leading by example - good people want to work for other good people. A CMO who leads by example will be able to build a good team with people who help build each other up. 3) Get creative with tech stack and tactics - successful CMOs are looking at how their tech stack helps them reach their goals and aren't afraid to switch it up. I don't know about you, but to me those are all skills Demand Gen leaders should have which translate directly into being a CMO ;)