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Kanchan Belavadi

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

May 7 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. As a hiring manager, what do the best demand generation candidates have in common?

    Kanchan Belavadi
    Kanchan Belavadi

    Snowflake Director Field Marketing - GCC, India • 2y

    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.

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  2. I’m the first Demand Generation hire in my company. What advice would you give to someone tasked with establishing this function in an existing business structure?

    Kanchan Belavadi
    Kanchan Belavadi

    Snowflake Director Field Marketing - GCC, India • 2y

    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, ma ...Read More

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  3. What does your demand generation team org structure look like?

    Kanchan Belavadi
    Kanchan Belavadi

    Snowflake Director Field Marketing - GCC, India • 2y

    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 ...Read More

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  4. How do you communicate demand generation updates and activities to the rest of the company?

    Kanchan Belavadi
    Kanchan Belavadi

    Snowflake Director Field Marketing - GCC, India • 2y

    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 Democ ...Read More

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  5. How do you break down responsibilities and KPIs between demand generation and product marketing?

    Kanchan Belavadi
    Kanchan Belavadi

    Snowflake Director Field Marketing - GCC, India • 2y

    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.

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  6. What are the core roles you consider essential on a best-in-class demand gen team?

    Kanchan Belavadi
    Kanchan Belavadi

    Snowflake Director Field Marketing - GCC, India • 2y

    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 ...Read More

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