AMA: Snowflake Head of Enterprise Marketing, India, Kanchan Belavadi on Building a Demand Generation Team

A demand gen team in today’s world cannot exist without a content creator and a digital/SEO lead. These form the core and other functions can be build around them. So if you are starting from scratch, hire these 2 roles before you move on to other roles. A content creator should be able to build diverse pieces of content, which can be leveraged across different platforms. They should be able to understand what works in the market and align product messaging accordingly. A digital/SEO lead should be able to take that content to market and drive inbound as well as outbound leads to create a funnel.

Product marketing focuses on more on product adoption and sales enablement related metrics, as well as content related metrics if they are actively creating content in that org. Product marketers focus on strategy, messaging and are actively involved in product launches. Demand gen teams are very funnel oriented and drive metrics like MQLs, SQLs, Opps, Pipeline, etc. That said, they need to be very tightly aligned as product marketing needs to feed into demand gen activities.

A demand gen team is extremely focused on revenue growth and all functions within demand gen should be lock in step to drive that growth. A basic structure to start would look like this: * Demand gen leader: Set the GTM strategy and direction * Content Creators: Build content across different platforms * Product Marketing: Create the ideal customer profile, messaging and value prop * Digital/Social marketing: Run SEO, social channels, content syndication If you are a mature and established org, and have the luxury, you can add the following: * Marketing ops: Track campaign progress and ROI * Sales Enablement: Help sales leverage the assets created and align with the messaging

Alignment with sales is extremely critical for marketing to succeed. And alignment begins with communication. * Publish a marketing calendar in advance, where everyone can view the activities that are coming up, irrespective of their degree of involvement. This helps the broader team feel a part of the program, as well as uncover new ideas from different cross functional teams * Share a weekly update over a call or email/newsletter highlighting the key demand gen metrics that are being tracked * Democratize access to marketing dashboards, so that everyone can view data in real time * Quarterly and annual wrap up reports help present an overall picture, especially in context of the goals set at the start of the quarter/year

As you take charge of the function, * Start with understand the current landscape across the business and marketing – what is currently working, what is the need of the business, etc. * The next order of business would be to establish short term and long term goals. * Short term goals, will help you establish credibility with the business and show some quick wins. * Long term goals, is where you will get to establish the function and show significant impact to the business. * As you go about the above, make sure to set up regular reporting so that everyone is aligned and aware of the goals you are working towards.

The biggest skill is an ability to learn. Learning and staying agile and relevant is extremely critical, as we operate in a highly evolving space, these day. Learning has become critical to stay abreast of not only the latest tech, but also of customers’ areas of interest. The next thing that good demand generation folks have is an ability to read data and contextualize it. This will help understand trends and patterns and identify customer behaviour, which can shape your campaigns.