AMA: New Relic Former VP, Growth Marketing, Andy Ramirez on Building a Demand Generation Team

I really try to keep this simple. I know this isn't always possible but if you can prioritized based on two facets: Does the thing not exist and NEEDS to exist. For example you might be selling a consumer good and you don't have an email letting customers know to review your product and where they can get support. Or you have a SaaS app and you don't have a welcome email for new customers. There's some tactics/deliverables that just have to be done. What is the potential impact. You have to do y ...Read More

This is another question that is highly dependent on the needs of an organization, the current state of their growth team, and what resources they have today, etc. When I start the build, or rebuild, of a team the first thing I do is get to know the current players. I have learned through the years that too often teams that aren't working well have talented people doing the wrong job. I like the old analogy of the team being a bus, you have to know who belongs on the bus and in what seat they'll ...Read More

I recently posted that I haven't seen anything capture the publics imagination like ChatGTP since the first iPhone was announced. I'm tempted to say that generative AI has surpassed even that in the buzz and hype it's created. That seems well deserved however, it is already impacting demand in a number of ways I can see and I can imagine there's many more I haven't seen and infinitely more we haven't made real yet. The first impact is on the execution and scale of demand gen marketing. Just abou ...Read More

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. 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 ...Read More

There is a phrase my team will tell you they're tired of hearing: "You have to market the marketing" The purpose of this isn't just recognition of the work the team does, though there's nothing wrong with that. When you regularly communicate what is launching, what completed, what your results are, wins/losses, learnings, etc. you engage those around you in the marketing. You give them confidence that their work is being put forth to the market. You get feedback and ideas. Often times marketers ...Read More

The marketer in me always wants to answer this question with "you rely on your experience and knowledge of your category, audience, and product to help you define the best message for your audience." The scientist in me has seen evidence that your best guess is a roughly 50/50 coin flip. Ok, better than that but you're still guessing. So my answer here is experiment, experiment, experiment. Don't think of this as daunting, expensive, or even time consuming. Showing two treatments to two people a ...Read More

For existing customers one of the fastest paths to growth I've seen is creating virality. Find a way to get other users into the product and getting some value. Many B2B services offer read-only users that can see dashboards, reports, comment on stuff, whatever it is. Those users then become potential multipliers of access, which then can inform additional teams at an organization that might need to use a platform, etc. All the other tactics you listed are valuable in different ways for differen ...Read More

Timebox input and quantify the impact. Art, music, and marketing are totally subjective. Not every thing is going to work for everyone, and not everyone's subjective opinion is universally applicable. When possible while building campaigns, websites, videos, events, whatever, be clear with anyone that should have input when those input periods are and that input outside those periods will be captured for the next iteration unless earth shattering. Ask input providers to quantify it. Those provid ...Read More

There are entire industries built around this question. I wish I could say my fondest wishes have been answered by any solution out there. Honestly this is another place I'm hopeful for the promise of AI. It should be possible to feed ALL of my data from all of my sources to a single entity and have it make all of the connections then answer my plain English questions. I'll most likely get more than a few companies reaching out to me saying they have exactly this solution, but I've yet to have t ...Read More