Different organizations have various criteria and promotion processes. Depending on your company culture, different leaders will review promotions and sign off on these changes. What I’ll say is these are the typical questions managers and leaders consider before someone is put up for promotion: 1. What are the current business needs? For example, if someone is promoted, what work would they do differently to fill a business gap? People managers usually only open up when the business has a need for an additional people manager. 2. What are the technical competencies someone needs to have at the next level? 3. What brief of work can you point to showcase that this person is already operating at the next level? 4. What peers and leaders can speak to the level of work this person owns? If you are looking for someone to help advocate for you in your promotional journey, it’s essential to have a transparent conversation around the expectations of the next level, and if you are meeting those, provide them clear examples and metrics about how you’ve exceeded in these specific areas. 

As a DG leader, you play a critical role in supporting Sales by driving the acquisition and conversion of prospects into leads and converting them into customers. Here are some hard and nice-to-have skills (the list isn't extensive) Hard skills: Vision and experience building a multi-channel demand gen strategy - Having a good understanding of the levers that are available to you is necessary to build out your plan. This includes understanding your target persona so you can address their pain points, behaviors, and the channels they like to consume content. Data driven decision-making - This skill has become very important as finance and executives are interested in ROI and the results of your programs, so being comfortable around metrics/numbers and the ability to have deep inspection of funnel conversions will help you diagnosis and evolve your strategies. Strong cross functional collaboration - In this role, you are often the go between with Sales, Product Marketing, and Content teams. Strong communicator - Getting buy-in and alignment are important, so if you are able to provide the strategy, successes, and challenges to executives, they will more likely support your requests for resources. Nice-to-haves: Deep technical proficiency with marketing tools - basic knowledge is adequate Advanced graphic design skills In-depth product knowledge Sales-specific skills as you won't be negotiating or closing deals.

When I think about measurement gone wrong, my first question is typically about the marketer, not the KPI. All KPIs can be useful, assuming your measurement is scalable (i.e., it doesn’t take a week to do the analysis) and you are using them appropriately (i.e., context is everything). That said, here are some metrics that I generally find less material to understanding the health of the business: 1. Impressions/Followers/Engagement: In a world overrun by bots, ad impressions, social media followers, and engagement metrics have become less relevant. You’d be surprised how many companies with massive social media followings built their audiences by purchasing cheap likes from engagement farms. 2. Frontend Email Metrics: Between email preview panes skewing results and well-documented issues stemming from privacy updates introduced in iOS 15, open rates have become far less relevant in recent years and are no longer sufficient to understand if your message is resonating. 3. CPL & Raw Lead Metrics Without Context: Lots of marketers fall into the trap of driving down CPL at the expense of lead quality. There's no faster way to lose the trust of your sales colleagues than flooding them with low-quality leads & expecting them to convert.

You get a really good sense early on when something is working. Honestly, the best teams sometimes know as they’re building it that they’ve landed on something great. I’m terrible at that; predicting success before launch isn’t my strong suit. If I make a call while we’re building, you might actually be better off betting against me. But once it’s in motion, I know how to read the tea leaves and pick up on signals quickly. That ability to decode early indicators is what increases velocity. It’s not about waiting for a fully matured dataset; it’s about recognizing pattern recognition moments when engagement trends, qualitative feedback, and conversion behaviors start pointing in the right direction. I think experience and data obsession both play a role in this. But it’s also a skill anyone can develop. If you know what signals to look for, whether it's increased deal velocity, compounding engagement, or Sales leaning in harder than usual, you can start scaling smartly and fast instead of waiting for a perfect data set to validate what’s already obvious.

Enterprise demand gen is complex. Buying committees are large, and the buying cycle is long. According to a Google/Bain study, B2B buying committees have an average of 17 stakeholders, and on average, it takes 40 touchpoints for each of these buyers to influence the B2B buying decision. Below are four steps to help you get started. * Step 1: Start with creating the content by persona mapped to the buyer's journey. Create content for primary and secondary persona. According to Gartner, B2B buyers have six jobs to be done to make a purchase 1. Problem identification 2. Solution exploration 3. Requirements building 4. Vendor selection 5. Validation 6. Consensus creation Use this as a framework to create content. This will serve as the foundation for your campaigns. Also, in the age of AI overviews and search GPT, consider structuring your website to follow the above framework. * Step 2: Invest in integrated, multi-channel digital campaigns to drive awareness and engagement with an ABM mindset * 1:1 ABM campaigns targeted at 10-50 strategic accounts * 1:few ABM campaigns targeting up to 300 accounts grouped by vertical/industry * 1:many ABM campaigns targeting up to 5000 accounts based on ideal company profile (ICP) criteria * Step 3: Build a webinar program * Top-of-funnel thought leadership webinars * Middle-of-funnel How-to webinars * Bottom-of-funnel Demo webinars * Step 4: Plan offline tactics such as highly targeted executive roundtable events and direct mail campaigns to accelerate the pipeline and drive closed won deals

This is the million-dollar question! It’s a real challenge for many companies, as it touches on all the complexities of attribution. 1. I would start by defining a straightforward way to track each channel’s performance across the funnel stages—Leads, MQLs, and SQLs—for different channels (events, paid, product, organic, etc.). 2. Next, analyze past results to identify where you have control over volume, and adjust planning for the upcoming quarter based on these insights. 3. For ongoing tracking, the team should sync regularly on KPIs with sales and hold a mid-quarter review to refine goals and make necessary adjustments. KPIs and Goals live into a central updated document everybody can check.

* Start With Company Goals: Align OKRs with overarching business objectives (e.g., pipeline targets, new market penetration). * Set Cascading OKRs: Break down the company’s goals into actionable demand gen objectives. For instance: * Objective: Generate $2M in pipeline this quarter. * Key Results: Launch 3 campaigns, achieve $500k pipeline per campaign, drive 100 SQLs. * Project Mapping: Each OKR ties to specific initiatives. For example, a webinar might target pipeline generation for a specific segment.

This has changed depending on the company I've been a part of, and the strategy of that company. I've seen a few models, which have included: 1. Global Demand Generation & Regional Field Marketing - Demand Generation is responsible for overall, global marketing for products, while Field Marketing is focused on specific regions, dedicated to localizing campaigns and handling in-country events. 2. Demand Generation & Account-Based Marketing - Demand Generation is focused on a 1:Many approach, usually through advertising, virtual events, webinars, and website optimization. The ABM team carves out a small group of high-value accounts to receive dedicated messaging and high-touch campaigns. 3. Demand Generation & Corporate Marketing - Demand Generation handles all marketing programs, but works with specialists across marketing to make those programs happen. These might be website specialists, social media specialists, designers, or digital marketers. DG ensures the specialists have what they need to post or run their channels. 4. Just Demand Generation - Usually found in a smaller company, in this model DG handles everything related to programs and managing the channels. They might work with external contractors or another in-house marketer for help with areas where they are not the expert. While model 4 is seen more often in smaller organizations, each of the other models can fit multiple people in multiple roles with varying responsibilities. Success should always be measured the same way - on pipeline and revenue, and the leading indicators (such as leads) that bring these two outcomes about.

Having accurate data and good data is the foundation in delivering success. You have to be able to quickly answer this question: “For every dollar I put in market, how much am I bringing back to the organization?” If you can't answer this with confidence, then you can't even begin to drive success of your programs. We all know when we put garbage in, garbage comes out. Reports are great but only if the input of the data is accurate. Which is why it is critical to focus on the data structure to make sure we have a good foundation to surface up the data. And ensure you have the right connectors that allow marketing top of the funnel/mid-funnel metrics to your company's revenue data. Marketing leaders will ask each other: “How do you do lead gen” and think there’s a special channel they didn’t know about. Unfortunately, I wish it was that easy. What I’ve found is that the ingredient to building a world-class marketing organization is how a company uses martech to effectively automate workflows and track ROI. Your reporting and data visualization should be able to help you answer these high level questions: * What is marketing’s impact to the company’s pipe gen? * What channel or tactic drives the most pipe gen? * Which grouping are your highest converting leads? * Are your strategies delivering quality leads, pipeline and positive business outcome? * What is the audience mix in your strategy? (i.e: how much new business vs. cross-sell/upsell/upgrades is your team bringing in) Having the right data is critical because: 1) We need to know where our business stands, 2) if things look off we can investigate and react early before it becomes a firedrill, and 3) identify which strategy works and which doesn't.

Typically a content marketing function is measured on the engagement with the associated content put into market via paid, owned, earned tactics (i.e. content/asset downloads, social media engagements, webinar views, etc.), however when associating that content to demand generation programs and campaigns, It's important to understand how that content is impacting and driving the business. Essentially, how many MQLs did that content produce and ultimately what is pipeline associated to the content. I think it's also important to understand how marketing content is driving business outcomes via a direct attribution, as well as influenced attribution as customers will engage with multiple pieces of content throughout the customer journey. However, if your company is not at the state of having a sophisticated multi-touch attribution model that provides a weighted measure of the content's impact, you'll have to align on a first-touch or last-touch model to determine which content gets "credit" for driving downstream impact. It's also important to understand the type of content your organization is creating and the purpose of that content. For example, thought leadership content is not typically intended to drive short term pipeline, but it can impact a weighted multi-touch attribution model. Content on a company's website also has a very different purpose which is to engage and convert customers/prospects to the next action in the customer journey. Therefore it's very important to align on clear expectations of the purpose of the content being produced before it goes into market.