AMA: Snowflake Head of Enterprise Marketing, India, Kanchan Belavadi on Demand Generation 30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan

The most important template is the Campaign calendar (of activities) – that everyone can track. A good campaign calendar gives a clear view of 1. All active campaigns 2. Gives a clear timeline 3. Identifies owners 4. Lists outcomes expected 5. Outlines asks and challenges My favourite is the product launch checklist, simply because it has too many moving parts and is a very critical finale to a product that is usually long in the making. A good checklist again lists owners, timelines, dependencies and next steps.

Align with the business objectives! That’s the framework. Understand and fix the gaps. You deliver whatever the business needs. Sometimes, they may already have it, and just not know it, so as a demand gen manager, your job becomes to sift through the existing resources and deliver to the business. If it doesn’t exist, then identify the most effective way to deliver it. * Are they asking for more leads? Plan to deliver more leads (because you are new and need to establish credibility), but meanwhile, start checking what happens to the leads once you pass them to SDR/Sales? Are SLAs met? Who nurtures them? What are the top reasons you win and top reasons you lose deals? Are you targeting the right personas? Question and iterate. * Is lead quality an issue? Is conversion an issue? Get more specific feedback to understand the issue and go back to the drawing board if the persona/messaging needs to change. Agree and sign off with sales on the criteria for leads and the stage at which they will be passed to them. Monitor continuously throughout the funnel. * Are they asking for help with email templates? Understand what is currently available. Reuse if possible, revamp if needed Prioritize based on the business needs in order to see impact.

A start up without a demand gen manager has been relying either on organic leads or has been trying ad hoc tactics to boost the funnel. * Know the current environment: It is important to understand the full extent of the existing campaigns, processes and their effectiveness. Engage with the sales teams to understand their priorities and areas where they need help. * Understand the business objectives: The next step would be to understand the business objectives from the leadership and align accordingly. For example, if the need of the business is to boost top of the funnel, then the first 30 days would focus on setting up those campaigns. However, if the challenge is conversions, then the first 30 days should focus on the middle of the funnel with SDR/AE. * Execute: The 60 day plan should be about setting up processes and frameworks and the next 30 days should see launch of new campaigns in order to get those quick wins and monitoring their effectiveness with the help of the processes set in place.

Quick wins will look different from organization to organization, depending on the company's need and stage. As you engage with different teams in the first few weeks, you will get clarity on where the fires are. Some quick wins can look like: * Revamp Email messaging: Do you need to revamp the email templates? * Build Customer advocacy: Are there no customer stories? * Upgrade Call scripts: Are the call scripts used by SDRs outdated? * Update content: Does the website have old outdated content? * Repurpose content: Is the content always long form, can it be repurposed into blogs or byte-sized quotes for quick consumption? * Website retargeting: Do you want to re-target website visitors? * Improve conversion: Do you want to focus on improving conversion?

Some of the questions you can ask your stakeholders can be structured around these: * What can I do to make you successful? Or What do you need from me? * What has been working so far? * What is broken? * What can we do better? * Where are the gaps? * Where do you want to be in 6 months/1 year? * What are customers saying about us? Or Can we get customers to become references? * What is your biggest pain point?

First week should be in listen mode, understand the business priorities, current environment, challenges and needs. Speak to as many of your stakeholders as you can, especially on the sales side. It will help you understand the business, as well as help to identify the areas that need work. The first month should focus on planning some quick wins that you can deliver in the first 90 days. After the first month, finding ways to operationalize those tactics by leveraging existing assets and resources (without disrupting existing systems or independent of building new ones), will be key to establishing your credibility with the key stakeholders.

The most effective way is to scale in a way that best fits the organization’s needs and abilities. * Build vs fix: You might want to scale the function that is either doing well or is a critical need. For example, if social campaigns are effective and you know what needs to be done and how – then hire someone so you can scale it and hand it over. That will free your bandwidth to build and scale other tactics and programs. It can also be the reverse, e.g. if the SEO is not effective and you need to build content that works, you can either outsource or hire. * Inhouse vs outsource: The next step in scaling becomes a build vs outsource decision. Whether you want to build content, SEO, design, etc., internally or externally will determine how you scale our team. * Cross functional hiring: Once you decide to grow in house, then ensure to hire a good cross functional team covering all areas and then scale each function based on scale.