What is your advice for creating and/or improving the demand generation process when joining a small but growing team?

Build a demand playbook. This forces you to get under the hood on how demand is created at your organization. Map out the entire process from awareness to advocacy, and everything in between. This will help you understand if there are any gaps in the process - for example, is demand gen (or even the organization) only focused on new customer acquisition but doesn't have a process for expanding or retaining? 

Compare that with the data - digging into conversion rates throughout each stage. I call this "fixing the leaky bucket." I've created more revenue and profit through fixing leaks in the bucket than any cool new program created. Trust me, it's there - you just have to know where to look!

Another benefit of the playbook is it aligns everyone around a common set of operating practices. This is so helpful as you create scale, but also as you onboard new employees or agencies into your mix.

There are three items I would recommend evaluating when joining any small but mighty demand generation team:

1. Reporting & Infrastructure - Identify how leads are flowing from the website and offline programs through to the sales team. Many times there are issues in this process - incorrect scoring, gaps when syncing from marketing automation to CRM, undefined sales follow-up processes, missing tracking on conversion to opportunity. Making sure that you fully understand how this all works is critical and improving pieces here can have an immediate uplift on pipeline.

2. Best Practices - If the team is newer to Demand Generation, help to implement templates, processes, and guidelines for how everyone should be operating. Literally build a process document, a marketing calendar, and a results template. Overview these on team calls and have others speak to their own work in these formats.

3. Optimization - Pick one channel at a time: ads, or emails, or social, or the website. Dig in and find areas to improve these. Perhaps your ads are missing keywords, or your email template is outdated. Work on one channel at a time to improve results.

Creating and/or improving the demand generation process all starts with getting a current lay of the land. Assess where the team currently is and identify areas of opportunity. I love digging into data and understanding the status of tracking, performance, goals and gaps. This is foundational groundwork.

What low-hanging fruit have you identified? You’ll want to consider what type of framework you want to utilize such as a 30-60-90 day plan. Map this out in phases along with what is needed and the dependencies. You won’t be able to do everything immediately. Think through how this upgraded process will fit in with the growth of the team and its trajectory.

Depending on the level of the role, I would also consider having 1:1s with team members to get their perspectives on what has been working and what has not. Are you identifying patterns of feedback from these conversations? This may surface an area that you’ll want to consider as part of the upgraded process.