AMA: Salesforce Vice President, C-Suite Marketing, Kexin Chen on Developing your Demand Generation Career

My first job out of college was an account executive role selling advertisement to SMB. Ultimately I leaned towards marketing because I liked that 1) it was an at scale play. Instead of 1:1 conversations, you're engaging your market in a broader motion. 2) I liked the creativity and psychology behind marketing. To be successful at creating demand, you have to truly understand your audience, their pain points and motivators to create campaigns that will compel them to want to learn more about your product/company.

Ultimately the challenge is going to be the hard skills and translating a 1:1 customer engagement strategy to 1:many. Often times, having a long history in sales won't translate to being able to analyze for a key goal or KPI and then know how to optimize via marketing tactics. A way to get started is: 1) Hone into which field in demand gen you're interested in pursuing. It may be easier to tackle via digital marketing where there are a ton of courses out there. There likely is a technical gap so having proficiency by taking trainings and certifications on areas like SEO, SEM, PPC, etc will help. Finding ways to play with the tools will be helpful as well. Maybe take up helping a charity or a friend with their digital marketing so you can apply what you're learning as well and speak to the experience in interviews. 2) Instead of a quota, you're held accountable to the overall business performance. When you interview, can you articulate how your business is driving from awareness to consideration and then through the entire lead flow? (IE: marketing qualified lead > sales qualified lead > meeting > opportunities, etc?). Take a current demand gen expert at your company out for coffee and ask to understand how they run the funnel end to end. What tactics do they use and where in the customer lifecycle. Then leverage the skills you've learned above on the different tactics to map how you'd tackle if there was a breakdown in conversions at any given spot of the funnel.

For anyone who wants to understand demand gen, I think about these two areas: 1) Customer Segmentation and Personalization. 2) Reporting, Analytics and Measurement. 1) With the pace of emerging technology particularly GenAI, it is more important than ever to experiment and understand the strategies available for hyper-personalization. Customer expectations have increasingly changed based on the high levels of data and information they have readily available at their finger tips. To tailor a digital experience that evokes an emotional connection at the right time is one that requires a deep understanding of the customer. To create this hyper personalization at scale, you'll likely need to lean on GenAI and before you can do that, creating a sound data strategy with understanding of your audience segments is step #1. 2) One of areas I enjoy with demand gen is you're generally held to a KPI. Whether you're looking at the macro level of ROI or drilling down to lead conversion, there is an outcome that helps set the strategy and decision making in place. Understanding the KPIs your demand gen counterpart is building towards will help create further shared goals.

GenAI is advancing quickly and for those who are playing and experimenting, they'll have an advantage over those who aren't. Being able to learn how to prompt will be a critical skill so finding ways to explore with ChatGPT in your personal life is a good way to test if your company hasn't provided access yet. There is also a ton of advancement with personalization and creative. Check out Midjourney, Pencil, Krea as just a few to start.

If "manager" is reference people management, I believe the most important skill sets are primarily soft skills. It's a focus on empowering your team and knowing when to lead from the front vs leading from the back. Highly recommend taking a "situational leadership" course. However if you're referencing "manager" from an individual contributor standpoint, I believe: Soft Skills: * Critical thinking * Growth mindset * Effective communication * Executive presence Hard Skills: * Customer and Audience Segmentation * SEM, Display * Email automation * Content Strategy * Measurement and reporting * CRM basic * AI prompting

When I interview, I like to ask two questions: 1) Do you like to ask for permission or do you like to ask for forgiveness? 2) What is a childhood trait you have maintained through adulthood? There have been a variety of answers - none are wrong. However I am trying to gauge for whether they 1) have a bias for action and 2) a growth mindset. For the demand gen field, technology proficiency is table stakes. To be able to adapt and leverage the latest tech to advance your marketing, it requires demand gen experts who are astute to spot shifts in their audience's behaviors and be able to then quickly form tests for piloting new ways to engagement. This requires being ready to jump to test new tactics for a first adopter advantage. To do this, it requires intentionally being comfortable with letting go of campaigns and programs that no longer drive high growth.

It's fantastic that in these times of efficient, sustainable growth, demand generation marketers are highly sought after! Ultimately I think it comes down to what the business needs aligned to the top talent's expectations of where they want to grow. Gratitude and reward can come in multiple forms: Applause, Access, Appreciation (persona, private thank you notes/emails), and Awards. As managers during these times, it's difficult to have the latter of promotion, raises, and spot bonuses, so how do you understand your talent well enough to know of the former types of gratitude, does one hold significant weight with them? I also believe in transparency and ultimately maintaining a strong trusted relationship with my talent vs. keeping them on the team. I always let my team know what is in my control vs what is out of my control. I also offer that if for any reason they see their dream job outside of my direct team, I'm there to support them and coach them towards obtaining it. I've had members leave and return under my management years later and I've done the same in my career.

Data quality issues. From duplicate records, invalid contact info, and missing fields. The lack of and inaccurate data can create a ton of manual work for the team.

I don't think there is a single career path for demand gen. I have members across team who have come up via martech, digital marketing, sales, product marketing, field marketing, content, sales strategy. You name it! Regardless of the path, I think it's the ability to focus on understanding the customer and their behaviors. Own representing the voice of the customer and be the expert who can create the plan to share with them the right message, at the right time, on the right channel. Keep an eye on the revenue and how to turn your levers to reach the targets.

I'm pretty loyal and like to spend a few years at a company since I believe it takes at least 3 years to settle and see your impact to fruition. I'm at a Fortune 500 and still the fruits of my labor are finally unfolding from work I put in place 6 years ago. For this reason, my general framework is: 1. What am I looking to do 2 roles from now? Helps me get out of a specific time frame and more focused on what I aspire to be doing and the skill sets I need to learn to get there. 2. Is there opportunity to learn and grow within my current company to gain the skill sets I need for that next role? If so, I likely will stay. It's easier to lean on the internal network you've built than starting from scratch. I focus on sharing with my management and stakeholders where I aspire and the skillsets I need to learn to ensure I am intentionally moving towards that path. If the growth opportunity doesn't exist to learn the skill sets you want at your current company, decide how long of a timeline you want to wait to see if anything changes before you actively pursue new opportunities and go. 3. Assess and have a pulse on the market. I like to take a recruiter's call at least once a year. Even if I'm not interested in a new job, I think it's helpful to understand your value in the market. It also often leads to fun conversations with counterparts of yours at other companies. I also find that it helps reinvigorate my commitment and loyalty to my current company because along the way, it's a reminder of how great your current role and company is. 4. I am a hyper rational person. When it comes to big decisions that I've written extensive pros and cons lists about, my executive coach challenges me to close my eyes, envision each scenario if it has already occurred and see how I feel. Based on the feelings, go with that route.

I think it depends on what level you're coming into the role and the expectations set by the company. For the foundation of any hire, I believe effective communicator, growth mindset, and curiosity are critical traits. For a company looking for an SEM expert with high growth YoY, it'll be important to ensure the hard skills are in place. Similarly for a company just starting to scale their demand gen marketing function seeking a people manager, I'd index towards domain expertise vs. soft skills. If the team has in place strong demand gen experts and is looking for someone to learn and ramp into the role, it could work. Asking questions on how long the person would have to ramp and what hard skills are required will help set up the candidate for success.

There are so many great paths into demand gen. I actually think spending 1-2 years (at most) in a Sales Development or Business Development Representative role is an interesting path into demand gen vs going directly into marketing. It provides a strong foundation and understanding of how to tap into the customer's mindset and how the sales cycle works. The hard skills can be learned. The soft skills learned from being in a sales role are transferrable to every job. Also a sound demand generation strategy often will involve a sales team so understanding inbound and outbound sales teams' mindset can provide a good foundation.