When addressing alignment with executive stakeholders it is important to drive clear goals, KPIs, RACIs, and a strategy that outlines the pros and cons. This can include the following: 1. Goal alignment: You need to align with both stakeholders up front on the core problem we are trying to solve. By driving this alignment you ensure that everyone is on the same page around the goals we are trying to achieve. Without this, your strategy won’t align. 2. Organized swimlanes: It is important to build a RACI with an ultimate decision maker, including who can make the final decision and escalation paths as needed if these two stakeholders disagree. 3. Influencer mindset alignment: It is your job to understand their core KPIs and business needs, which you can highlight in the options you share. This includes their personal and professional drivers, which may influence their decision-making later in the process. 4. A company-first strategy: The proposed strategy should include the pros, cons, and risks. Different leaders may assign different values to each of these areas. Ideally, you align these to your company or organization's priorities to make it easier to see from a company-first perspective. Ultimately, when you provide a suggested strategy, it should be the one that provides the overall company with the least amount of risk meeting the core objectives you agreed to solve for. If needed, you can use the escalation paths in your RACI, but ideally, doing the upfront alignment will be needed less often.

Always be open to feedback. Any feedback either positive or negative is a gift. There's always opportunities to improve and grow no matter how much experience you have. In your case, if you don't agree with the feedback, I would ask for examples on how you could have done something differently, or better. Your boss may not see eye to eye with you and that's okay, but as long as you can show impact through your work, numbers don't lie.

The best Demand Generation candidates possess a unique blend of strategic thinking, creativity, and executional excellence. They deeply understand the product, messaging, and audience, enabling them to craft compelling go-to-market strategies. Creativity is key—they generate innovative ideas to activate campaigns and drive engagement. I was once tasked with building a campaign for a software product we were selling in the Retail space. To activate this beyond the run of the mill webinar and content, we decided to take over a luxury retail store in SoHo during fashion week. We hosted top customers for an exclusive shopping experience and a live interview with the famous designer that we also streamed online and amplified on social media. Because this was such a unique and memorable activation, we were able to close business and also drive awareness. In addition, a strong grasp of channel strategy and optimization is essential. These candidates know how to leverage paid media, content, email, events, and other channels effectively, continuously testing and iterating for performance improvement. They are resourceful and scrappy, thriving in fast-paced environments where they must do more with less. Beyond tactical execution, top candidates are natural leaders who can align cross-functional teams, collaborating seamlessly with product marketing, creative, field marketing, and sales. Their high emotional intelligence (EQ) allows them to navigate pressure with composure, influence stakeholders, and drive alignment across departments. Being data-driven is non-negotiable. The best candidates don’t just execute campaigns—they analyze performance metrics, extract insights, and refine strategies based on data. They understand pipeline impact, revenue contribution, and how to optimize for business outcomes. Ultimately, the strongest Demand Generation professionals balance analytical rigor with creativity, strategic vision with hands-on execution, and leadership with adaptability. Their ability to connect the dots between messaging, channels, data, and cross-functional collaboration makes them invaluable assets to any marketing team.

Start with understanding what the business cares about most. All Demand Gen teams are expected to help drive pipeline and bookings, but you should try to get as much context on both as possible. For example, is the business trying to move upmarket? If so, over what timeline? To what extent do your current-state investments support that objective? Are you hiring new reps? If so, in what segments/markets? The closer you can align your Demand Generation strategy to business objectives, the easier it will be to establish appropriate metrics for the team. For example, in the hypothetical above (i.e., business moving upmarket over X quarters), you will need to establish goals tied to growth within the Enterprise or Mid-Market segments instead of setting holistic lead, pipeline, and marketing-originating bookings goals.

There isn't a single, linear career path to landing a senior demand generation leadership role. The field of demand generation is multifaceted and draws on various disciplines within marketing and beyond (including pretty much any GTM role). That said, I think there are a couple of commonalities: Some folks start in an entry level Demand Generation role (coordinator), and move straight up the ladder (specialist, manager, director). Moving into these mid-career roles involves focusing specifically on strategies to generate and nurture leads, often in close partnership with the SDR or BDR team. This path offers so many learning opportunities: proficiency in building relationships with Sales, marketing automation tools (e.g., HubSpot, Marketo), Inbound strategy, Outbound strategy and ABM, email nurture programs, funnel conversion rate programs, as well as data/funnel analysis. Many folks get their start in digital: Many professionals begin their careers in roles such as paid media manager, digital marketing specialist, content marketer, or social media manager. You'll gain a ton of critical skills on this path: Understanding of SEO, PPC, email marketing, content strategy, and social media marketing. Other senior demand generation leaders come from generalist backgrounds, and there's nothing wrong with that. That might be product marketing, customer marketing, community, brand or field marketing. Fostering a broad understanding how different marketing functions interact can provide a holistic view of the marketing ecosystem, one that is absolutely critical when you are responsible for the whole enchilada. In this case, you might be leaning harder into broader marketing strategy, cross-functional collaboration, as well as capturing and leveraging customer insights. Those are some common paths and any one of them offers real paths to leadership. But if you are looking to improve your chance to land a Demand Generation leadership role, you can focus more on developing attributes. Those include: * Analytical Mindset: Ability to interpret data and make data-driven decisions. * Technological Proficiency: Familiarity with marketing technologies and platforms. * Creative Thinking: Innovative approaches to campaign development and problem-solving. * Leadership: Inspiring and managing a team effectively. * Communication: Clear communication with stakeholders at all levels. * Relationship building: Often forgotten and neglected, it's one of the very most important skills at the upper most levels of leadership. Final point: I could be wrong but my experience tells me that growth stage startup C level roles (the only space I know) come from one of two backgrounds: PMM or Demand Generation. They are going to hire to solve the problems they are facing. It's usually driving predictable demand first, with a measure of brand building second. Worth considering as you navigate your path towards an upper management role in Marketing

It's not too different from your traditional demand funnel/waterfall and KPIs, but instead of leads > MQLs > SQLs > Opportunities > $ pipeline, your funnel should start with web traffic, both from an aggregate perspective, as well as the core pages you want to drive users to sign-up for your self-service offering. Quality web visitors are essentially your "leads," and from there you measure conversions to your sign-up pages, web trial downloads and starts, paid users, and eventually upgrades, expansion, etc. Then depending on your martech sophistication you can get extremely granular with your UTM parameters to measure where traffic is coming from, whether by channel (i.e. organic search, SEM, paid media, organic social, etc.), tactic, campaigns, etc. and continually optimize based on where you're seeing the greatest conversion throughout the self-serve funnel.

When entering new markets, I rely on the following process: 1. Data-Driven Benchmarks: If there’s no internal data, I look for benchmarks in similar industries or geographies. 2. Iterative Goals: Start with conservative, hypothesis-driven KPIs. Track performance, learn, and adjust quarterly. 3. Cross-Team Collaboration: Align with sales and product teams to ensure market entry assumptions are realistic. 4. Leading Indicators: Focus on early signs of traction (e.g., engagement rates, early-stage pipeline) rather than lagging metrics like revenue.

That would definitely make it more difficult, but there are ways I think you can make a path forward. For example if you're in an early growth stage demand gen may lean more on organic channels like SEO and social to drive demand. You can use engagements like webinars or virtual meetings, linkedin live, or free/low cost events to help.

There are three items I would recommend evaluating when joining any small but mighty demand generation team: 1. Reporting & Infrastructure - Identify how leads are flowing from the website and offline programs through to the sales team. Many times there are issues in this process - incorrect scoring, gaps when syncing from marketing automation to CRM, undefined sales follow-up processes, missing tracking on conversion to opportunity. Making sure that you fully understand how this all works is critical and improving pieces here can have an immediate uplift on pipeline. 2. Best Practices - If the team is newer to Demand Generation, help to implement templates, processes, and guidelines for how everyone should be operating. Literally build a process document, a marketing calendar, and a results template. Overview these on team calls and have others speak to their own work in these formats. 3. Optimization - Pick one channel at a time: ads, or emails, or social, or the website. Dig in and find areas to improve these. Perhaps your ads are missing keywords, or your email template is outdated. Work on one channel at a time to improve results.

Similar to the question about worst KPIs, I believe vanity metrics and volume KPIs are often too easy to manipulate and can be used to tell a misleading story. Metrics like email open rates and click-through rates can be artificially inflated by bots. Lead counts and sign-ups can also be influenced by acquisition campaigns that don’t necessarily bring in high-quality prospects. Likewise, a low cost-per-lead (CPL) is often over-hyped; in the end, what matters is quality, bottom-of-funnel conversion. Constantly feeding the top of the funnel with low-quality leads won’t actually move the needle.