AMA: DigitalOcean VP Revenue Marketing, Steve Armenti on Demand Generation Strategy

Always base it on revenue performance. When evaluating any channel think about the customer acquisition cost in that channel compared to the total lifetime value of any customers required from that channel. If those economics are not positive, you shouldn't be in that channel. There is too much pressure these days to be in every single channel. It's not necessary. What I've found is 20% of the channels you're in drive 80% of the revenue results. So keep testing until you find that 20%

Regional sales teams

Sales ops

Finance

PMM

Marketing ops

Demand gen

Paid search

Paid social

Content syndication

Sponsored events

Partner co-marketing

SEO

Basic email platform engagement. But most importantly, Are emails qualifying leads for outreach. Do emails speed up the qualification process. Do leads that engage with emails perform better in the sales cycle

The most common I would say are company size, company industry, Geo, recent funding, hiring, acquisitions, tech install. Then on lead title, job function, seniority.

Step zero. Those things are really critical in order for demand to really work. I like to build a pitch deck and go around socializing my strategy and my forecast internally. I talked to sales, finance, product marketing, and even product. Just find the supporters in your company that are excited about what you're doing

This is tricky because lead generation providers want you to measure based on CPL or mqls. That's wrong. The truth is that none of these leads will be qualified or sales ready at the start. It's your job to identify your ICP and work with these vendors to receive leads that match your ICP. So I analyze vendor performance and match rate of my ICP. I also evaluate them based on lead quality, rejection rate, and data quality

It depends on the duration of your customer life cycle. Since I've been in mostly B2B where the sales cycle is 6 plus months, I would focus on one and then the other.

I look at historical conversion rates or make an educated assumption on conversion rates, and then I look at my demand generation budget and back into the expected performance from that budget. I then compare that to the total sales or business Target for the year. I socialize that percentage as the marketing generated revenue number. If the company wants me to contribute a higher percentage to the total revenue then I need more budget. And that's really clear based on the model

Nand generation is going out into the market and generating interest in your product. Growth marketing is a process in which you develop a hypothesis, test that hypothesis through AB testing, measure the results, continuously iterate.

It's pretty unique to company and your industry. But a good rule of thumb would be 60% brand and 40% demand

Start with the customer. Who are they, what do they care about, what are their problems, they trying to solve for, Jobs are they trying to get done. Then look at product differentiation, messaging. Bring that together and analyze how the sales team has historically reached out. What are they saying, what kind of messaging are they using, what's working and what's not. Consider the skills and seniority of the sales team that is reaching out to leads.

The biggest success I had was using AI I to map existing lead job titles to a specific taxonomy that I created. By organizing leads into that taxonomy, I was able to Target more precisely which type of leads I was paying for. This worked well because it reduced the number of junk leads and improved the cost efficiency of that campaign

Look at marketing performance based on the revenue it's generated. Then break that down by Geo, campaign, and tactic. From there you will know what's working and what's not. Make recommendations for what you will continue to do and optimize, also what you are going to kill because of low performance.

One of the biggest variables is do you have product market fit. It's really hard to sell a crappy product to people that don't want it. So before any company should invest in demand generation, they need to take a look in the mirror at their product. Second, they really need to understand the customer and their pain points. Just