AMA: Stack Overflow Vice President, Demand Generation, Eric Martin on Demand Generation Career Path

I wish I had a rosier outlook, but I think demand gen is actually going to get gradually more challenging as time goes on. I think that the profession itself is going to need to move away from things like PII exchange through gated forms, and focus more on value delivery to the viewer/reader/consumer. Global digital privacy regulation is more likely to expand than contract at this point. I think the way companies measure demand generation is going to need to evolve as well - with broader full-funnel attribution being more socialized, accepted and understood at the highest levels in the company. One area where many demand gen leaders underinvest is strengthening finance and marketing alignment. Everyone talks about sales and marketing alignment - that's just a must to have a functional revenue team. How to strengthen that bond with finance? Educate them on marketing's broader contribution, and demonstrate that you have the respect and feel the responsibility for what is usually a large portion of variable company spend.

I have one question that I love to ask in all of my in-depth interviews: "What is the challenge you are looking for at your next opportunity to help you grow to the next level in your career?" The best answers are those that sound intentional, thoughtful and deliberate. "I want to grow in my ability to do (x), and through this role, I'll be able to take on challenge (y) to help me get to the next step on my career path to (z)."

The leap from manager-level to director-level demand gen leadership might be one of the biggest lifts in career development. Being a manager, coaching, and making sure your team is performing well and achieving goals are manager-level skills. Being able to develop a vision, strategy and creating a plan to executing on it is director-level. Directors are often given more substantial resources and budgets, and therefore held accountable at a higher level much more often. I think one of the most overlooked skills needed to leap from manager to director is effective executive-level communication. From a people development perspective, it's possible you'll also have direct reports with direct reports - so you'll need to help them guide and coach their own teams.

There is definitely not a single career path for demand gen. Everyone must carve their own path based on the existing skills they have today, and being honest about what they really want to do in the future. I began my career with a heavy focus on developing my skills with marketing tech and operations, and invested heavily in enterprise marketing skills - such as developing a total addressable market and go-to-market strategy, account-based marketing and paid media management. A good overall basic framework is the "T-shaped marketer" framework. (Google it!) It is a good starting point for understanding all of the disciplines of demand gen and understanding how deep and wide you want to go in your skillset.

This could be an extremely long answer, but I'll condense it to having the ability to manage large cross-functional projects and finding a mentor (or two) to help guide you along your path. Managing cross-functional projects may seem like a boring answer, but it's absolutely critical to get things done in a revenue organization. Modern revenue teams in SaaS, for example, have many functions: Sales, marketing, customer success, revenue operations, and enablement are some of the key areas. In the beginning of my career, before I went into marketing, I was actually an IT consultant for large investment banks. I worked on large multi-million dollar data center projects that included at least ten different workgroups. This taught me the importance of creating a vision and inspiring follership, time management, efficient resource utilization, and holding cross-functional partners accountable when necessary in order to keep a project moving. A great example of applying this to demand gen is introducing enterprise (or account-based) marketing to an organization. This transforms not only how you serve the broader revenue team, but how you integrate a target account model to existing sales, CS and operations functions. The more predictable half of the answer is finding mentors that inspire you. Connecting with mentors that can help guide you through your career and make the tough choices about where to invest your time and energy are essential. Sometimes they're people you work for, sometimes they're people you've worked with, and sometimes they're just people you know. But identifying people to help you hold yourself accountable for your career growth will be essential to growing into a leader.

In order to become a demand gen leader, you need to understand how to empower your team to execute to the best of their ability, and also forge a professional development path for every team member. Sure, there are skills like effective budgeting, managing cost efficiencies of channels, and typical manager-level skills such as performance management and coaching. But ultimately, a demand gen leader has many similarities to a CMO: the people that are on a demand gen team have many disparate disciplines, and you need to at least understand the key success drivers of each of those disciplines. It's common for medium-sized (~10+ full time people) demand gen teams to require smaller sub-teams for marketing operations, campaign management, paid media, events and field marketing. Understanding how to grow each function to meet the needs of the business is table stakes for a demand gen leader. What helps teams get to the next level is being a demand gen leader that focuses on the professional development and growth of everyone on your team. Ensuring that everyone has clarity into where they want to go next in their career, and giving them the resources they need to create their own specific path from the role they are in today to where they want to go next.

Absolutely! I think every CMO has their core strength, and usually builds their team around the expertise they need to get the job done. I've worked with brand-focused CMOs, demand-focused CMOs and product-focused CMOs. Each brings unique leadership ability to the table, and their strengths are usually intentionally sought out by the executive teams that bring them on. A larger company might not need growth as much, and might need a strong PR strategy - they might seek out a brand CMO. Series A company looking for pipeline and rapid growth? Demand CMO. Have a mature product and trying to improve pricing and packaging? Product CMO is probably the best fit.

Billboards, just like most people in the industry I'd imagine. I love OOH because good OOH is fun and creative. But it's an investment you really don't need until you truly need to invest in your brand to establish/maintain a leadership position or differentiate from the competition. I look forward to seeing more innovation and real world applications in the OOH space - from mobile, to augmented reality, etc.