AMA: Gusto Head of Demand Generation, Jordan Hwang on Building a Demand Generation Team

For me, the best demand generation candidates are growth-oriented, have customer empathy, and have a strong quantitative bent. For growth-oriented, this means that they likely have some combination of the following: Natural curiosity - What's working/not working? Why? What can I do differently? Self-awareness - What could I/we have done differently?  Drive - A desire to make their numbers, regardless of the circumstances For customer empathy, this means that they understand who the customer is, ...Read More

Known impact above all else.  Find the most impactful thing to work on as quickly as possible. To get there, I use the following. 1. Create a short list of items to focus on by using: Critical thinking (i.e. who's my desired customer, what matters to them, where do they hang out, etc.) Pattern matching (i.e. other businesses/business models do it this way Historical data (i.e. what's working in the past) 2. Use the above and start small and scrappy Forms before databases One-offs before template ...Read More

The biggest thing that many demand generation teams miss is a Revenue metric. Typical ones to think of are: ARR Customers Pipeline ($ based) # of Opportunities For many demand generation teams, there's a tendency to believe that their job is done when the lead is there (MQL, PQL, etc.). The reality of the situation is that the job of the entire function is to drive impact across customers and revenue. If we're providing low quality leads that doesn't ultimately translate into pipeline and revenu ...Read More

Our demand generation team has three major pillars: Website - responsible for our corporate website. While they care about impact, they also need to service other needs for the company beyond pure demand generation. They're held to a slightly different standard, as a result. Acquisition - responsible for acquiring new leads. We have it split between Organic (SEO), Paid, and Channel (BD partnerships) Customer Marketing - responsible for educating and upselling/cross-selling customers There's mult ...Read More

For me, it all boils down to what's the most impactful. Generally speaking, we find more short-term and long-term success by going for depth vs. breadth. The key question to answer is: How do you know where to place your bets? I like to use a betting framework for this. The key is to understand, as cheaply as possible, what's the most likely to return against the use of resources (people, effort, money, etc.). We can understand this through the use of money or data (qualitative and quantitative) ...Read More

I generally like to communicate through two types of vehicles: Weekly progress updates - this is meant to convey what's happening now Performance metrics (absolute numbers, performance vs. goal, YoY %) Drivers of above performance (i.e. what's causing it) Adjustments that will be made given the drivers (i.e. what are we doing differently?) Where we're stuck (i.e. how readers can assist) Monthly progress updates - this is meant to convey overall progress against a larger strategic plan Performanc ...Read More

My general framework is as follows: PMM is likely to bring the best holistic qualitative insights to the table from the work that they're doing Demand Generation is likely to bring the best live quantitative data to the table from the work that they're doing Because of that, it's a give-and-take from a responsibility standpoint.  Both PMM and Demand Generation should bring ideas to the table around what can/should be tested They should be able to workshop those ideas together for refinement. Exa ...Read More

Be comfortable being junior, and the first demand generation hire.  This means that you're acknowledging two things: You don't have a lot of outside experience to draw on You don't have someone inside the company who will be able to provide you with a lot of coaching/guidance If you acknowledge that, though, that gives yourself the permission to do much of the following: Ask a lot of internal questions that help you learn (Why do we do this? Why does that work?) - feel free to play both the "jun ...Read More