How do you collaborate with other teams, such as sales or product, within your organization using your tech stack to align demand generation efforts with overall business goals?

Demand generation often serves as a bridge between sales and product, but the way I collaborate with each team can vary significantly. Here’s my high-level approach:

• Understand business goals and metrics: Focus on understanding the goals and metrics each team owns. Sales typically tracks revenue-related KPIs like pipeline and bookings, while the product team focuses on adoption metrics - such as activation and retention - and usage, including breadth and depth. In self-serve model, product might also prioritize the growth of paying customers and self-serve revenue. To align demand generation efforts, work to establish shared goals or, at minimum, clarify how marketing supports these objectives.

• Use BI reporting for alignment: I eliminate silos with joint dashboards built in Tableau and Looker, tailored to each team’s needs - real-time pipeline for sales, usage trends for product. Understanding how data is captured ensures reporting aligns with their priorities, keeping everyone on the same page.

• Create consistent rituals: We review these dashboards in weekly or bi-weekly cadence with respective teams, spotting business trends and adjusting demand gen/ sales/ product strategies.

Note: You can also create separate reporting for operational purposes, tailored for the marketing team to use alongside joint dashboards

Example of marketing/ sales alignment:

• Marketing contributes % into the overall pipeline.

• Marketing/ sales meet weekly using Tableau, pulling data from Salesforce and other sources and analyze top-funnel (eg. leads, MQLs, SQLs) and down-funnel metrics (eg. meetings, Stage 1 opps), tracking conversion rates between stages. This reveals issues - like slow MQL-to-SQL progression - prompting discussions and joint solutions.

Example of marketing and product alignment:

• Marketing plays a crucial role in driving customer acquisition and activation.

• Collaborate with the product team to use Tableau or another tool to track and visualize performance metrics end-to-end, from acquisition through to retention and paid conversion.