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

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: 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. Is there opportunity ...Read More

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 ey ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 d ...Read More

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 dem ...Read More

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 generatio ...Read More

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 Segmenta ...Read More

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. ...Read More

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 digi ...Read More

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 you ...Read More