What have been some of the biggest things that have helped you get to a demand gen leadership role? (This can be skills, team members, career development opportunities?)

I think coming from field marketing has been a huge driving force into helping me getting a demand gen leadership role. 

Field marketing opened up doors for me to:

1) Build massive integrated campaigns that coordinated with the whole GTM team (Sales, SDR, CSM) to come together to pull these off successfully. There were also activation of a lot of channels to make these programs successfuel so strategizing email outreach, sales outreach, direct mail, tie ins with webinars, website, and more helped me always think of things as connected. 

2) Field marketers know something can always go wrong. Whether the event is in-person or virtual, I always knew how to think on my feet and problem solve. So now as a demand gen leader, if I see a program underperforming that we need to improve quickly, I am ready to think of fast and creative ideas so hopefully bring the program back to life. 

3) The team members that helped me land a demand gen role are the marketing ops and content marketing folks I teamed up with at my last role. Learning how to effectively communicate the success of my programs using metrics and words has helped me exponentially!

This could be an extremely long answer, but I'll condense it to having the ability to manage large cross-functional projects and finding a mentor (or two) to help guide you along your path.

Managing cross-functional projects may seem like a boring answer, but it's absolutely critical to get things done in a revenue organization. Modern revenue teams in SaaS, for example, have many functions: Sales, marketing, customer success, revenue operations, and enablement are some of the key areas. In the beginning of my career, before I went into marketing, I was actually an IT consultant for large investment banks. I worked on large multi-million dollar data center projects that included at least ten different workgroups. This taught me the importance of creating a vision and inspiring follership, time management, efficient resource utilization, and holding cross-functional partners accountable when necessary in order to keep a project moving. A great example of applying this to demand gen is introducing enterprise (or account-based) marketing to an organization. This transforms not only how you serve the broader revenue team, but how you integrate a target account model to existing sales, CS and operations functions.

The more predictable half of the answer is finding mentors that inspire you. Connecting with mentors that can help guide you through your career and make the tough choices about where to invest your time and energy are essential. Sometimes they're people you work for, sometimes they're people you've worked with, and sometimes they're just people you know. But identifying people to help you hold yourself accountable for your career growth will be essential to growing into a leader.

Attaining a demand generation leadership role is certainly not attainable on an island by yourself. There are some responses to this question that are a given such as the support of others. This is such a critical element of growth, but I won’t solely focus here.

• Support of others. As noted above, relationships are critical to growth. Lead from the perspective of elevating others.
• Desire for growth. The desire for continued growth has been consistent fuel for me. Let this help guide you on what is required to get to the next level.
• Education. Do you want to be a demand gen leader in a specific industry? Or perhaps for a specific aspect of demand gen? Education is key. This means education in your skill set, in gaps that have been identified, and leadership skills.

I encourage you to think about your end goal and work backwards from there. What do you need in order to reach the end goal? It will most likely fall into one of the three buckets I’ve noted.

When I interview, I like to ask two questions:

1) Do you like to ask for permission or do you like to ask for forgiveness?

2) What is a childhood trait you have maintained through adulthood?

There have been a variety of answers - none are wrong. However I am trying to gauge for whether they 1) have a bias for action and 2) a growth mindset.

For the demand gen field, technology proficiency is table stakes. To be able to adapt and leverage the latest tech to advance your marketing, it requires demand gen experts who are astute to spot shifts in their audience's behaviors and be able to then quickly form tests for piloting new ways to engagement. This requires being ready to jump to test new tactics for a first adopter advantage. To do this, it requires intentionally being comfortable with letting go of campaigns and programs that no longer drive high growth.