How does demand generation differ between a small and large company?

I've been in both situations, and you really do need the same talent to be successful, it's just how you prioritize and ultimately staff that can be different. 

For example, you'll often see at small companies a sole digital marketer driving demand which unfortunately is mostly through top-of-funnel lead gen activities. Of course you can do more full-funnel with digital, but you're missing so much opportunity if that's your only skill set. 

In a small company, if you have someone who knows tech (e.g., SFDC and Marketo), plus knows how to work with sales and create campaigns - then you can work with that plus an agency to provide some additional support.

That scenario works the same even without the technical skills - you would just need to augment with likely either external agency support or sometimes you can find that type of expertise within Sales Ops.

When your team gets larger, you can start to create more nuanced skills - SEO, paid media, campaign strategists, campaign planners, marketing ops, CRO/web, ABM (though this should really be an inherent skill of any good DG marketer) ... the list could go on. 

Always start by understanding your buyers and then determine what your needs are - with a smaller team your focus should be on setting up some repeatable demand levers (think content syndication, LinkedIn, paid search) where you can partner with some folks to establish strong full-funnel evergreen content that can buy you some time to grow revenue and ultimately grow and scale your team.

Smaller companies have less budget, and therefore marketers must be scrappier. They need to find ways to build awareness for the company overall, in parallel with supporting short-term revenue targets.

Larger companies have more budget, and marketers can focus more on channel optimization to drive leads in support of short-term revenue targets. The larger reach of campaigns, thanks to their budget, helps to keep an awareness drumbeat in the market.

Demand generation differs between small and large companies significantly. There are more differences than similarities. From my experience of working at everything from startups to enterprises and all sizes in between, here are a few highlights of the differences:

• Budget. This is not always the case, but the larger orgs I’ve worked at have generally had larger budgets. This means more channels and bigger teams. This also means you are more likely to work cross-functionally with procurement, finance and BI teams. Compared to a startup, you may only need to work directly with one or two people.
• Resources. Oftentimes you’ll find you have more resources at a larger org. At small companies, you typically have to wear many hats. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to do this at larger orgs, but it’s more common at smaller companies.
• Go-to-market (GTM) motion. The demand generation tactics that support the GTM motion will differ between small and large companies. This is largely due to the differences I previously noted about budgets and resources.

Overall, while demand generation differs between small and large companies, you’ll also find it can be significantly different based on the business, sales motion, industry etc.