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

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. 1. 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 relative to your current priorities they'll be fine with it or help you reprioritize. Shiny object syndrome is a thing, don't let it get you. 2. Ensure there's a funnel there - If any of the products absolutely lack the basics required to drive growth then focus on building those. I strongly believe in not letting perfect be the enemy of great. Build the MVP to ensure something exists end to end then move on to the next. 3. Be thoughtful about what work you do - With everything in place you can start thinking about what work needs to be done, what the impact COULD be (finger in the wind is fine), and what the level of effort is. That will help you build initial prioritization. 4. Group the work to minimize scope - When you create one piece of work, lets say a piece of content, what you have created likely contains all the pieces you need to help update a related landing page, add depth to ads, review the product page, or revamp internal enablement. I coach my teams to look for every possible way to take advantage of the work they do. 5. Measure what you do - I think the biggest part of my careers success has been my obsession with knowing the results of my work and trying to beat them. Not just because of the competitive benefits of racing my past successes but measurement, moneyballing my work, has been a huge driver in helping me understand what work is and isn't worth doing. This is how you learn what works for your current company and team, make sure you measure it and then benchmark your results and future expectations, then rethink your approach to prioritizing based on this. 6. One foot in front of the other - It is super easy for smaller teams to feel overwhelmed and like the work is never going to end. All you can do is get the next thing done, and the next, and.. you get it. The work is never going to end, but your work day does. Keeping yourself healthy will actually improve your results, you are the asset not the marketing. A campaign launches two days late there is little impact, you feel completely drained and burned out for two months and the impact is HUGE. I realize this didn't really answer your question about short term vs long term directly but I've used the word "priority" a lot because that's what will help you there. Short term growth often means paid growth that stops when the money stops, you'll have to prioritize that based on impact but you can consider impact over time as well. The foundation for the long term has to be there, your products have to be well positioned, you have to have content that speaks to your audience, relationships with your customers have to be built, etc. So for longer term projects think about longer term results (what will this get me in its lifetime?), for short-term think in the sense of what you get for the time you're spending on it and the cost of that spend. I hope this somewhat answered your question.

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 do best, then you help those who don't fit transition, then you begin rebuilding. For me it's less about the specific roles and more about the types of folks in those roles. Though of course roles do play a role. Here's some thoughts to consider. 1. A balance of veteran and early career folks. As Andy Jassy is fond of saying "there is no compression algorithm for experience." While I love having folks looking to grow their early stage careers they can't get the support they need in doing so if they don't have experienced people around them. 2. Balance out strengths / weaknesses. This applies to myself and everyone on the team. I like to think about longer horizons and bigger ideas and I look to build teams that have others who are good at making those ideas doable, those who can define the first steps. If I have folks who are highly analytical I look to hire folks who like to get stuff done. Whether we're talking team of two or team of 50 be really thoughtful about this, educate your folks on their personality types, use tools like Strength Finder or Meyers Briggs. 3. Cover the foundational needs. In a smaller team you need breadth of capabilities to cover your critical roles, SEM, social marketing, content, brand/design, etc. There are unicorns out there who can do more than one of these relatively well and get you out to the next phase. You don't have to have industry experts in each, just talented folks who can get you from here to there. 4. Don't get overspecialized. As orgs grow we want to hire people to focus on just one thing. This is great from a responsibilities perspective but it does begin to limit your agility over time. So when possible I like to ensure there's cross training and sharing of projects across functions. Not only do you usually get a better result but then the team also builds a mutual understanding of each others roles, and a stronger bond. I've done this even in teams of 30+ with great effect. You asked for org structure but this is hard to do without context. Here are some common roles/teams I see in growth orgs. These can be filled by people or agencies. * Content marketing * SEO * Customer engagement / Lifecycle marketing * SEM * Web - Engineering (Front end, back end, QA) * Web - Conversion rate optimization * Web - Product Management (someone absolutely needs to think of your website as a product) * Technical product management (think martech admins) * Paid Advertising (all non SEM spend) * Social * Brand Marketing (less often, usually this is sperate from DG/Growth) * PM / PMO (this is often an underrated role, so much more gets done when it's managed well) * Product Marketing (in larger orgs this also tends to be separate but highly connected to growth) There's so much more I'm leaving off, I don't want to just spout off every marketing role that exists but that covers my most common list.

I really try to keep this simple. I know this isn't always possible but if you can prioritized based on two facets: 1. 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. 2. What is the potential impact. You have to do your best to "moneyball" your day. Too often I've looked back on a deliverable and thought to myself, "what was I thinking, I should have known this had so little impact" and if I'd thought about it I likely wouldn't have prioritized it. One other note on this, and I'm a strong believer, do not let perfect be the enemy of great. Especially in the early days. I'm not saying throw quality out the window, but you have to balance scale with quality.

Across every role in growth there's one common trait I try to ensure. The ability to look at seemingly disparate data, make sense of it, create hypotheses, and prove or disprove them. Lots of people will answer yes to this if asked as a yes/no question, but the ones that truly get it can articulate examples. These are the folks that take data and turn it into action. I have often seen people be really good at collecting and presenting data, but not be as good at the "so what" part of it.

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 are oddly shy about their work, I think mostly because we get so many subjective opinions from people who maybe don't fully understand our space. But we do ourselves, and our potential results, a disservice when we let fear prevent us from being open.

A fully burdened CAC/LTV (cost of acquisition vs lifetime value) model. This is very hard to do and even harder to do right but it is the only way to truly understand if the investments you're making are paying off. If you can't do it on an ongoing basis at least revisit it a few times a year. Make sure that what you're bringing in is net positive to the company within a reasonable payback period.

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 about every one of my peers is experimenting with it in some way to increase scale. I see companies using it to write social posts, emails, ads, blog content, etc. Some very lightly, some are full tilt publishing thousands of articles generated by it without so much as a review. Even if you take a safe route you can still use it to help generate the first versions of a lot of what we do, which will significantly shorten how long it takes to get stuff done. In fact, the first study on this shows a 14% efficiency and effectiveness boost. Another impact is search. And this one scares me a little. Microsoft has already integrated it into Bing. I'm sure more will come. Why this scares me is that many companies rely on the traffic they get from search and the next step they can get someone to take on their website. With ChatGPT answering the search query many users won't need to visit the site at all. Imagine for example that you tell Bing "I need a New York cheesecake recipe?" In the past the result would likely be a recipe website, on Google the top result is allrecipes.com, but now the result is a plain text recipe without ads, without the inevitable "history of cheesecake" intro that SEO focused websites have to add to their content to rank. That's great for users but now the recipe website can't entice you to buy that mixer you've always wanted, losing their revenue. The third is enablement and support of customers. The models are incredibly accurate about how to do even some complex tasks like coding, or product specific tasks. I've literally had them help me write code that fully functions. If you have a product or service that users need to understand or might need a little help using you used to have to throw people at a chat window on your website. Now you can start with generative AI and it will likely cover the majority of questions your customer will ask. Now, it wouldn't be fair to answer this question by myself, so let's ask ChatGPT4 (yes I'm paying personally for access and I'd recommend it to others). Prompt: How do you think ChatGPT will impact how you do demand generation? As an AI language model, I don't "do" demand generation myself, but I can provide you with insights on how ChatGPT might impact demand generation for businesses and marketing professionals. 1. Content Creation and Optimization: ChatGPT can help create and optimize various types of content, such as blog posts, social media updates, and email campaigns. By using the AI's natural language capabilities, marketers can generate high-quality, engaging content that aligns with their target audience's interests and preferences, resulting in increased traffic and lead generation. 2. Personalization: ChatGPT can enable more personalized marketing efforts by analyzing customer data and tailoring content to specific segments or individual users. This level of personalization can lead to higher engagement rates, better customer experiences, and improved conversion rates. 3. A/B Testing: ChatGPT can assist in creating multiple variations of marketing content, allowing businesses to conduct A/B testing more efficiently. By identifying the most effective messaging and content, marketers can optimize their demand generation campaigns for better results. 4. Chatbot Integration: ChatGPT can be integrated into chatbots to improve customer interactions on websites or social media platforms. By offering personalized responses and engaging with users in real-time, chatbots can help capture leads, answer questions, and even guide users through the sales funnel. 5. Social Media Monitoring: ChatGPT can be used to analyze social media conversations and identify trends, sentiment, and user preferences. By gaining insights into what potential customers are discussing and looking for, marketers can tailor their demand generation strategies to better target their audience. 6. Market Research and Analysis: ChatGPT can help with market research and analysis by gathering and synthesizing data from various sources, such as competitor websites, industry reports, and customer feedback. This information can help businesses identify gaps in the market, new opportunities, and areas for improvement, ultimately informing their demand generation strategy. 7. Time and Cost Savings: By automating various tasks related to content creation, personalization, and analysis, ChatGPT can help businesses save time and resources, allowing marketing teams to focus on higher-value tasks, such as strategy development and relationship building. While ChatGPT offers numerous benefits for demand generation, it's essential to remember that AI is a tool to support marketing professionals, not replace them. Human expertise, creativity, and strategy will remain crucial in developing and executing successful demand generation campaigns.

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 this be true. Part of this isn't their fault, privacy concerns have made it nearly impossible to connect a lot of data, so even the machine can't do it and if it could it would probably be running afoul of some law. I do think there's a solution in the future, that both protects individual privacy and allows marketers to make sure they understand the ROI of their spend across channels, campaigns, creative, and audiences. So, the answer I'll give for now is; start with what you can measure and work your way down. In the early days get traffic. From there form fills, add to cars, purchases or signups. Track conversions using simple methods like thank-you page views. Utilize UTMs or other tracking mechanisms and capture them into your CRM or back end data warehouse. Then little by little connect the dots deeper and deeper until you get to lifetime value. I'd also say to not stop continuously learning. It is very easy to have a campaign launch with amazing top of funnel metrics, high signups or high purchases, but then find something downstream that tells you that the quality of these customers is so low that the campaign is not an ROI driver. I constantly question data, when I think I'm certain I actively work to disprove myself. As one co-worker put it I'm a "data monster" ... but I want to know, I need to know. The trick is, do not let not being certain stop you from doing what you need to do. Make decisions with the best data you've got, then validate your decision and evaluate your data. If you learn something that changes your direction that's ok, you still did what you thought was right for the business. It's all any of us can do, and it's better than analysis paralysis.

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 and asking them to pick their favorite is an experiment in which one works better. You have to pick how much input you need to put something out in front of customers. Once you do get it in front of customers be sure to treat that as a test as well. The best battle plans rarely make it past the first engagement. Try multiple variations of ads, use A/B testing and personalization tools on your website, never stop experimenting. In a larger org I would recommend dedicating a team specifically to experimentation, testing everything from design and user experience to messaging and audience alignment.

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 providing suggestions should attempt to quantify the impact of that change. When I ask folks to do this they most often say "small"... which then makes it easy for me to let them know I'm grateful for the input but I can't prioritize it now and that we'll keep it in mind next go around. Input is dangerous in that those providing it rarely understand the total impact of their requests along with that of all other input providers, and if you don't have a very clear boundary your team will die the death of a thousand cuts trying to address it all. It's counter productive.

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 different users, but for me the fastest path is sharing the value of the product itself. For new customer adoption, to me the fastest path to product adoption is a good, easy to understand, and easy to extract value from, product. You have to make it easy for users to get to a point where they can be wowed by the potential of what you offer. That's easy to say for a SaaS product that does something really straightforward like identify all the pictures of hot dogs in your photo library, but what about super complex products that take configuration and work to get initial value from? You have to find a way to get that value easy to achieve or understand. Some companies do this by manufacturing an experience through things like clickable demos that shows placeholder data, setup, etc. to give an example of what a great experience looks like before then having customers begin their own journey. Some companies do this with great positioning, if you get somebody bought in on why they NEED your product, really bought in, you'll find them much more forgiving if it takes work to setup. And of course I'm thinking only SaaS here because that's my default. This changes significantly for companies selling manufactured products, services, etc. I could write for hours more and still not fully answer you.