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. 

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? 

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.

* 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.

As a first demand generation hire at a startup, some KPIs that you could own are: 1. Lead generation: This KPI measures the number of leads generated through marketing campaigns, events, or other channels. Depending on your market and industry, you may want to consider measuring results from your target account list. 2. Conversion rates: This KPI measures how many leads are converted into paying customers, or at different stages of the funnel. 3. Cost per lead: This KPI measures the cost of acquiring each lead, which helps you optimize your marketing spend and allocate resources more efficiently. 4. Website traffic: This KPI measures the number of visitors to your website and can indicate the effectiveness of your SEO, content marketing, and other inbound marketing efforts. 5. Social media engagement: This KPI measures the level of engagement on your social media platforms, including likes, comments, and shares. Remember that the specific KPIs you own may vary depending on your company's goals and the resources available to you. 

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.

As with most questions I'll answer there isn't a single answer, this really depends on where your team and company are and what the current needs are. Here's a few thoughts on how you can address this. 1. FOCUS - Small teams often have direct lines of communication to leadership, leadership often has a lot of ideas, those ideas are almost always a distraction from what you should be doing. Most leaders aren't trying to distract you, if you take their idea and say when you think you could address it relative to your current priorities they'll be fine with it or help you reprioritize. Shiny object syndrome is a thing, don't let it get you. 2. Ensure there's a funnel there - If any of the products absolutely lack the basics required to drive growth then focus on building those. I strongly believe in not letting perfect be the enemy of great. Build the MVP to ensure something exists end to end then move on to the next. 3. Be thoughtful about what work you do - With everything in place you can start thinking about what work needs to be done, what the impact COULD be (finger in the wind is fine), and what the level of effort is. That will help you build initial prioritization. 4. Group the work to minimize scope - When you create one piece of work, lets say a piece of content, what you have created likely contains all the pieces you need to help update a related landing page, add depth to ads, review the product page, or revamp internal enablement. I coach my teams to look for every possible way to take advantage of the work they do. 5. Measure what you do - I think the biggest part of my careers success has been my obsession with knowing the results of my work and trying to beat them. Not just because of the competitive benefits of racing my past successes but measurement, moneyballing my work, has been a huge driver in helping me understand what work is and isn't worth doing. This is how you learn what works for your current company and team, make sure you measure it and then benchmark your results and future expectations, then rethink your approach to prioritizing based on this. 6. One foot in front of the other - It is super easy for smaller teams to feel overwhelmed and like the work is never going to end. All you can do is get the next thing done, and the next, and.. you get it. The work is never going to end, but your work day does. Keeping yourself healthy will actually improve your results, you are the asset not the marketing. A campaign launches two days late there is little impact, you feel completely drained and burned out for two months and the impact is HUGE. I realize this didn't really answer your question about short term vs long term directly but I've used the word "priority" a lot because that's what will help you there. Short term growth often means paid growth that stops when the money stops, you'll have to prioritize that based on impact but you can consider impact over time as well. The foundation for the long term has to be there, your products have to be well positioned, you have to have content that speaks to your audience, relationships with your customers have to be built, etc. So for longer term projects think about longer term results (what will this get me in its lifetime?), for short-term think in the sense of what you get for the time you're spending on it and the cost of that spend. I hope this somewhat answered your question.

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.

The one lesson I learned the hard way as a Demand Gen leader was that I was not as knowledgeable about my target audiences as I thought I was. I kept seeing different people respond differently to various assets and did not understand why. I learned that it was important to thoroughly understand the audience before building or when optimizing the campaign. It can't just be work from a 3rd party paper (e.g. - Forrester), it has to be true on the ground insights (from Sales or a Research team). This was so important to me because I sometimes did not see the results I had hoped to see. Moving forward, I kept in constant contact with Sales to understand what they were hearing from prospects/customers.