What hard skills are must haves to be a demand generation leader? What are nice to haves?

Here are the skills I think you need to be a great demand generation leader:

• Deep understanding of the sales process

• Ability to connect sales and marketing

• Email marketing

• Google Analytics

• SEO

• Systems: Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, etc.

• Knowledge of ABM programs

• Understanding customer personas

• Able to manage multiple tasks and projects

• Project management

• Experimentation mindset

And here are the skills/knowledge that will make you an exceptional demand generation leader:

• Social media and content marketing

• Webinars and live events

• Brand strategy and marketing

• Excellent analytical and communication skills

• Detail-oriented, organized

• Knowing how to communicate impact

As a DG leader, you play a critical role in supporting Sales by driving the acquisition and conversion of prospects into leads and converting them into customers. Here are some hard and nice-to-have skills (the list isn't extensive)

Hard skills:
Vision and experience building a multi-channel demand gen strategy - Having a good understanding of the levers that are available to you is necessary to build out your plan. This includes understanding your target persona so you can address their pain points, behaviors, and the channels they like to consume content.
Data driven decision-making - This skill has become very important as finance and executives are interested in ROI and the results of your programs, so being comfortable around metrics/numbers and the ability to have deep inspection of funnel conversions will help you diagnosis and evolve your strategies.
Strong cross functional collaboration - In this role, you are often the go between with Sales, Product Marketing, and Content teams.

Strong communicator - Getting buy-in and alignment are important, so if you are able to provide the strategy, successes, and challenges to executives, they will more likely support your requests for resources.

Nice-to-haves:

Deep technical proficiency with marketing tools - basic knowledge is adequate

Advanced graphic design skills

In-depth product knowledge

Sales-specific skills as you won't be negotiating or closing deals.

What hard skills are must haves for a demand generation leader?

• Curiosity. While a soft skill, a curious, growth mindset is critical for a demand generation leader. This is how you can stay humble, but also continue to allow for growth in yourself and your team.

• Data analysis / data-informed. Don’t just be data-driven, but rather be data-informed. Put your curiosity to work and think deeply about what the data is showing, coming to your own insights, and visualizing the data.

• Storytelling. Being a demand generation leader means you need to tell meaningful stories with the data and give it life. You can’t just throw data points out there without having a why to them or desired outcomes.

• Informed by customers’ actions. As concerns around cookies and privacy continue to grow, it’s important to know how to use the zero party and first party data your customers provide to make smarter business decisions.

• Forward thinking. The demand generation space is evolving - fast. You have to be forward thinking and educating yourself and your team. You have to level up in areas such as knowing how to apply algorithms to your data, understanding what is trendy and not going to stick versus has potential, and other repeatable, scalable marketing motions.

• People management. Emotional intelligence is critical as well. You have to understand how to lead, inspire, and empathize with your team while creating a safe space for communication.

What are nice to haves for a demand generation leader?

• Tactical knowledge about areas where you don’t gravitate to that can be filled in via a different team member. Remember, you can’t accelerate at every single facet of demand generation. You can however, have just enough knowledge to know the north star direction.