What does your demand generation team org structure look like?

Our demand generation team has three major pillars:

• Website - responsible for our corporate website. While they care about impact, they also need to service other needs for the company beyond pure demand generation. They're held to a slightly different standard, as a result.
• Acquisition - responsible for acquiring new leads. We have it split between Organic (SEO), Paid, and Channel (BD partnerships)
• Customer Marketing - responsible for educating and upselling/cross-selling customers

There's multiple teams that live within those major pillars that are structure more tactically, but the three pillars comprise the major differences in expectations and OKRs that would be associated there.

This is another question that is highly dependent on the needs of an organization, the current state of their growth team, and what resources they have today, etc.

When I start the build, or rebuild, of a team the first thing I do is get to know the current players. I have learned through the years that too often teams that aren't working well have talented people doing the wrong job. I like the old analogy of the team being a bus, you have to know who belongs on the bus and in what seat they'll do best, then you help those who don't fit transition, then you begin rebuilding. For me it's less about the specific roles and more about the types of folks in those roles. Though of course roles do play a role. Here's some thoughts to consider.

1. A balance of veteran and early career folks. As Andy Jassy is fond of saying "there is no compression algorithm for experience." While I love having folks looking to grow their early stage careers they can't get the support they need in doing so if they don't have experienced people around them.

2. Balance out strengths / weaknesses. This applies to myself and everyone on the team. I like to think about longer horizons and bigger ideas and I look to build teams that have others who are good at making those ideas doable, those who can define the first steps. If I have folks who are highly analytical I look to hire folks who like to get stuff done. Whether we're talking team of two or team of 50 be really thoughtful about this, educate your folks on their personality types, use tools like Strength Finder or Meyers Briggs.

3. Cover the foundational needs. In a smaller team you need breadth of capabilities to cover your critical roles, SEM, social marketing, content, brand/design, etc. There are unicorns out there who can do more than one of these relatively well and get you out to the next phase. You don't have to have industry experts in each, just talented folks who can get you from here to there.

4. Don't get overspecialized. As orgs grow we want to hire people to focus on just one thing. This is great from a responsibilities perspective but it does begin to limit your agility over time. So when possible I like to ensure there's cross training and sharing of projects across functions. Not only do you usually get a better result but then the team also builds a mutual understanding of each others roles, and a stronger bond. I've done this even in teams of 30+ with great effect.

You asked for org structure but this is hard to do without context. Here are some common roles/teams I see in growth orgs. These can be filled by people or agencies.

• Content marketing

• SEO

• Customer engagement / Lifecycle marketing

• SEM

• Web - Engineering (Front end, back end, QA)

• Web - Conversion rate optimization

• Web - Product Management (someone absolutely needs to think of your website as a product)

• Technical product management (think martech admins)

• Paid Advertising (all non SEM spend)

• Social

• Brand Marketing (less often, usually this is sperate from DG/Growth)

• PM / PMO (this is often an underrated role, so much more gets done when it's managed well)

• Product Marketing (in larger orgs this also tends to be separate but highly connected to growth)

There's so much more I'm leaving off, I don't want to just spout off every marketing role that exists but that covers my most common list.

A demand gen team is extremely focused on revenue growth and all functions within demand gen should be lock in step to drive that growth. A basic structure to start would look like this:

• Demand gen leader: Set the GTM strategy and direction

• Content Creators: Build content across different platforms

• Product Marketing: Create the ideal customer profile, messaging and value prop

• Digital/Social marketing: Run SEO, social channels, content syndication

If you are a mature and established org, and have the luxury, you can add the following:

• Marketing ops: Track campaign progress and ROI

• Sales Enablement: Help sales leverage the assets created and align with the messaging

Past demand gen teams I've managed typically looked like this:

• Acquisition: paid media, content syndication, ads

• Lifecycle: email marketing, nurtures, onboarding, customer comms

• Website: content, navigation, CRO, analytics

• Field marketing: events, webinars

• Marketing ops: automation, systems, tools, APIs

• Analytics: data science, engineering, analytics, reporting

Today, we have 2 people on our team: one dedicated to new business and one dedicated to customers. In the past, I have structured Demand Generation in other ways - from regional support, to regional + global coverage, to functionally based on channel. The most important thing will be to find what works best for your company and your business model.

It is normal, however, to start with one or two "full stack" marketers who are responsible for all channels and the associated project management. As the team grows, specialists can be brought in to run each channel (ie, an email specialist, an advertising specialist).

This is a tricky question to give a general response to! Let me start by laying out the strategy for how to approach this question as there isn’t a “one size fits all” response. Some of the variables to consider are the business objectives, industry, and business size, among many others.

• Align the team org structure to the goals and go-to-market motion. My approach for the teams I have managed was largely dependent on the orgs and what we were trying to accomplish. In this step, you are reframing the question to understand the nuances.
• Consider budgets, current headcount and associated skill sets, and any gaps in skills versus requirements. Do you have the budget to build out the team? Or are you working with a lean team due to the budget?
• What is your go-to-market strategy? A growth team for a PLG company will look very different from a demand gen team for an enterprise.

Said differently, think of the demand generation team org structure based on what is needed to support your go-to-market motion. Once this has been defined, the roles within the org will be much clearer.