What is one lesson you learned the hard way as a leader in Demand Generation and why was this important to you?

The one lesson I learned the hard way as a Demand Gen leader was that I was not as knowledgeable about my target audiences as I thought I was. I kept seeing different people respond differently to various assets and did not understand why. I learned that it was important to thoroughly understand the audience before building or when optimizing the campaign. It can't just be work from a 3rd party paper (e.g. - Forrester), it has to be true on the ground insights (from Sales or a Research team). 

This was so important to me because I sometimes did not see the results I had hoped to see. Moving forward, I kept in constant contact with Sales to understand what they were hearing from prospects/customers. 

Operating in a silo from sales and not treating them as my first team.

B2B demand gen marketing- developing pipeline for sales is our job. If we are not in lockstep with sales, and don't show up as one team, we end up with an unhealthy tension that pits teams against eachother.   

I have only made this mistake once, where I hit my MQL/Sales accepted targets and when we didn't hit our deal target for the quarter, I did not take accountability for the full funnel, and left sales to take responsibility. Marketing and sales need to have trust, sales needs to know that marketing understands how they qualify, sell, and close deals. Marketing needs sales to provide feedback on programs, narratives, campaigns so we can continually iterate and drive growth. In order for this to happen, marketing needs to be accountable from awareness--> closed won--> churn.

One lesson I learned the hard way is relying solely on data and not incorporating qualitative data from customers and/or sales teams. I often get deep into the weeds of what the data is telling us, but pairing it with qualitative data is powerful.

Why is this important to me? Ultimately, building and marketing products that do not exceed what customers are looking for defeats the purpose. What better form of intel than at the source? This does not mean only building what customers ask for because you may be able to deliver a valuable product that they didn’t even think of. What it does mean is using this to inform what problems you are solving for customers.