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 "junior card" and the "new card"
• Reach out to experts (i.e. people who are acknowledged as best at the things you're trying to learn, or are in companies that are doing those things really well) to ask questions and understand
• Just go out and experiment and learn, because the chances of you getting the right answer without just going for it are going to be low

As always, the key in this learning isn't to understand the what, but the why behind it. If you talk to experienced people, and ask the right questions, you quickly learn the following:

• What they're doing that's working, and why it's working
• What they tried in the past that didn't work
• Where nuance matters, and what's seemingly insignificant is actually significant

You can then map that back against what you're learning about the uniqueness of your company, and begin to put together a sense for what fits/doesn't fit. 

From there, you can go for it and learn.

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 know cross-functional teams like sales, finance, ops, product, etc. Know your data really well. If you know your numbers well and can come up with creative ideas to positively influence those numbers you will indispensable to your boss and eventually find yourself in meetings with your boss's boss.

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 and develop hypotheses about what might work to drive the top of the funnel. 

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 like a windy road, rather than a straight path forward.

Understand that you are constantly learning and evolving in demand generation. Get comfortable with constant change and be adaptable.