Do you have any advice for a junior who is a first demand generation hire?

Be comfortable being junior, and the first demand generation hire.  This means that you're acknowledging two things: You don't have a lot of outside experience to draw on You don't have someone inside the company who will be able to provide you with a lot of coaching/guidance If you acknowledge that, though, that gives yourself the permission to do much of the following: Ask a lot of internal questions that help you learn (Why do we do this? Why does that work?) - feel free to play both the "jun ...Read More

Absorb as much as possible right now. Take advantage of every opportunity to learn about things beyond just demand generation. Areas like automation, analytics, AI, and sales are critical parts of demand gen. If you want to be a leader, think about being good at several things vs perfect at one thing. If you want to be a true subject matter expert, then the ladder. I would find a mentor within the company, or outside, who can provide guidance, support, and insights as you face challenges. Get to ...Read More

Learn the metrics up and down. I'm not just saying the metrics of your role like funnel conversion rates, cost per click, cost of acquisition, etc. You need to understand the business metrics, how many customers does your company have, how do they churn out, if you sell consumer goods how many repeat buyers, average sale, abandonment rates, fraud rates, etc. No matter what business you're in the more you understand of everything around your part of the funnel the better you can make correlations ...Read More

My advice for someone who is more junior and/or a first demand generation hire is: 1) Be curious, and 2) Be humble. You are going to learn a lot, but also need to be humble about what you don't know that you don't know. Be closely acquainted with the numbers and metrics. Understand how to articulate what success looks like and be able to adjust it based on your audience. Be curious about the disciplines you naturally gravitate towards and experiment. Recognize that your career path will feel lik ...Read More