AMA: Qualia Director, Demand Generation, Laura Lewis on Demand Generation 30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan

Establishing the function is a different beast than coming into an organization and reviewing data to find the red and focus on improvements there. There might not be data if the function is new. If that's the case, the most important thing to do is to get data. Work with an Operations partner - or learn some technical skills - or hire a consultant to help - to make sure you have a funnel. It can be the original SiriusDecisions waterfall - there's no reason to go crazy at this point. All you're ...Read More

It depends on your company and your market. As a baseline guide, I map Demand Generation resources to sales teams. If there are 2 products being sold by 2 different sales organizations, you need support for both products and both sales teams. That might be 2 Demand Generation Managers - one for Product A and one for Product B. In a situation where there is only a singular product or sales team, I look more at the approaches. Are we doing ABM for our Enterprise accounts, but still running Integra ...Read More

I have some standard 30-60-90 bullets that I apply to any new role. Roughly, those look like this: 30 days - "Listen and Learn" Complete formal onboarding Get to know my team/boss/peers Schedule introduction meetings with cross-functional peers Understand my job description and key responsibilities Review current performance data, budgets, and plans Understand company long-term goals and strategy and how I fit in there 60 days - "Find the Red" Continue with 30 day items Dig deeper into metrics, ...Read More

Meeting with cross-functional partners when joining a new company is so important, especially if you're working remote. It helps to build general rapport and understand where each person fits into the organization and how you'll be working with them. It also can help you further identify what initial projects might be - what are the main pain points for these people? Questions will vary depending on the role of the person you're meeting with, but there are some that are universal. I'll ask every ...Read More

Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for this one. I have never actually had success with a 3rd-party demand generation agency! I truly believe this is a role that requires a level of project management and organizational understanding that you cannot outsource without heavy involvement from someone internal to the organization. And now with generative AI entering marketing workstreams, nurture emails can quickly written up by AI and then edited by an internal human in much less time than i ...Read More

Being new to demand generation makes this question difficult! If you are brand new, learn learn and learn some more. Look at the data - not just marketing data like open rates and click rates, but sales data as well. Understand how much pipeline is being generated, where it is coming from, what success looks like and where your current gaps to achieving success more often look like. Understand what things that marketing generates convert more, or convert less to pipeline. And then once you under ...Read More