AMA: Former DigitalOcean VP Revenue Marketing , Steve Armenti on Building a Growth Marketing Team

It's tough question. It's really a team effort. You have multiple disciplines like performance marketing, field marketing, analytics, ABM, email marketing, MarTech. Each of these plays a really important role. If I could only have 1 hire and still needed to drive demand, I'd choose a growth marketer who has experience in performance ads, email marketing, website CRO, and inbound marketing tactics.

First, define roles and responsibilities of the team. Outline roles, create detailed job descriptions, and ensure alignment between resources. Create a clear vision, set measurable goals, and establish a process to be able to track performance over time. Implement training and development curriculum to allow for career growth. Define individual KPIs, track individual performance through personal OKRs, and implement a performance evaluation process that measure performance against team goals. Establish a culture that has a healthy respect for the growth mindset and allows for testing and iteration.

Absorb as much as possible right now. Take advantage of every opportunity to learn about things beyond just demand generation. Areas like automation, analytics, AI, and sales are critical parts of demand gen. If you want to be a leader, think about being good at several things vs perfect at one thing. If you want to be a true subject matter expert, then the ladder. I would find a mentor within the company, or outside, who can provide guidance, support, and insights as you face challenges. Get to know cross-functional teams like sales, finance, ops, product, etc. Know your data really well. If you know your numbers well and can come up with creative ideas to positively influence those numbers you will indispensable to your boss and eventually find yourself in meetings with your boss's boss.

I would focus on ruthless prioritization of projects that directly influence the KPI you are held accountable to. Long term expansion is out of the picture right now. If you don't hit your goals you will not grow or expand. So roll your sleeves up and hustle. Regarding the complex product, I would think about the 2-3 most valuable features that customers can't live without and are sticky once you get a customer. Divide up your team depending on your goals. Let's say it's acquisition. Have one person focusing on messaging and positioning. Another person on demand gen. Work super close together to build campaigns and make sure everything you do is driven by a data point or insight. Focus your efforts along the customer journey where you have the least coverage. Have a testing mindset. You aren't trying to scale anything just yet, try several things and measure the impact before you go all in. Once you start finding some success and give yourself a little buffer room on your goals, you can start thinking about scaling the team or scaling programs. As you scale, so do processes, which means more overhead, more administrative, more "work" managing the work.

Past demand gen teams I've managed typically looked like this: * Acquisition: paid media, content syndication, ads * Lifecycle: email marketing, nurtures, onboarding, customer comms * Website: content, navigation, CRO, analytics * Field marketing: events, webinars * Marketing ops: automation, systems, tools, APIs * Analytics: data science, engineering, analytics, reporting

Tie it to revenue. If you're a team of one you have to ruthlessly prioritize your time. If what you're being asked to do doesn't directly influence the creation of revenue, you should question whether it's worth doing. Create an objective process for how you can say no to things. Take a look at the RICE method or similar methods. If you have a framework / eval process, share it with people. If someone asks you to do something, explain your process for why you can't do it.

Net new expansion revenue. Most demand gen teams are positioning at the top of the funnel and driving net new logos. I think more demand gen teams should be focused on customer expansion and given the resources to do so, such as: * Targeting capabilities * Customer data and CRM * Predictive modeling * Personalized communication * Alignment with CS teams