How important is it in your opinion to partner with other departments to run successful Demand Gen campaigns? Sales, CS, Operations?

Depending on your organization’s goals bringing in sales, CS, and operations can be key to running successful Demand Generation campaigns. I have more experience working in the B2B Enterprise space and the relationship with Sales and CS has been important to success.

• In large-scale Enterprise sales (where deal lengths can extend beyond a year), the Field (sales, sales engineers, etc.) is critical to moving a deal from TOFU opportunities to POC and closed-won opportunities. Sales can help you understand the core influencers and buyers in the sales cycles and the problems customers are trying to solve. It’s important to align on the top accounts and how you are best positioned in the market.

• Customer Success becomes more important in B2B buying cycles because customers who churn are very costly to the business. In addition, happy customers will buy more over time. If you have a large product portfolio, CS can be another seller for you, helping drive additional upsells and cross-sell opportunities in the buying cycle.

Both of these teams help accelerate opportunities and can provide a unique perspective you may not have considered in past Demand Generation campaigns. 

Partnering with other internal departments is incredibly important for success in marketing. You should be meeting with your counterparts on other teams regularly. Some topics to discuss and stay aligned on:

• With Sales - How is pipeline build looking? Are leads converting the way you expect? Are there gaps to reaching targets currently? What are reasons opportunities are being closed lost today?

• With CS - Are retention numbers on track? Are there key feature or other requests from customers? Are there gaps to reaching targets currently?

• With Operations - How are the numbers trending? Are all reports working as expected, are there more reports needed? How is the database quality? Is there opportunity to improve processes to get better results?

It’s not just important—it’s non-negotiable. Demand Gen doesn’t operate in a silo. Without strong cross-functional alignment, we’d just be a lead factory dumping names into the system with no real impact on revenue.

Sales is the most obvious partner. If they’re not bought into our campaigns, conversion rates will suffer. We need to be in lockstep on lead definitions, follow-up cadences, and messaging alignment. I’ve seen situations where marketing thinks they’re driving a ton of pipeline, but Sales isn’t following up properly—or worse, they don’t see the leads as valuable. That’s why we must maintain a tight feedback loop and ensure Demand Gen isn’t just about generating leads but generating the right leads.

Customer Success is equally important. Acquisition is only half the battle—retention and expansion are what drive long-term growth. CS teams have direct insight into what keeps customers engaged, which helps us create better lifecycle and upsell campaigns. Plus, they’re the best source of customer stories, which we can use in our marketing to build trust and credibility.

And then there’s Operations. If Sales and Marketing aren’t working off the same data, we’re in trouble. Marketing Ops ensures that lead scoring, routing, and attribution models are all functioning properly so that Sales and CS teams are set up for success.

In some orgs, Strategic Partnerships are also a critical piece of the puzzle. A lot of our Demand Gen efforts are tied to our partner ecosystem, so alignment here is key to making sure we’re factoring in their goals and relationships into our campaigns.

The bottom line? Demand Gen is a company-wide function, not just a marketing function. If we’re not deeply aligned with Sales, CS, Ops, and Finance, we’re just running campaigns in a vacuum. The more tightly integrated we are, the more successful we’ll be.