What recommendations do you make in order to assure the continued success of your strategies?

Great question! It’s helpful to approach your demand generation strategies from the perspective that it is constantly evolving. Approach it from a growth mindset. This is not a “set it and forget it” scenario.

Here are a few recommendations to get started:

• Speak with customers. First and foremost, speak with customers when you can. Learn from customers. Listen to sales calls. Whatever you need to do to hear it directly from customers because that’s how you’ll truly understand what value means to them (not you).

• Reporting. Consistently evaluate tracking, reporting and identify gaps as time progresses. It’s not a matter of if, but when tracking breaks or needs to be updated.

• Experimentation. Think by way of experiments. One of the keys to success in demand gen is to come from a place of ongoing experiments trying to solve customers’ problems.

• Stay curious. Similar to what I’ve mentioned about what the best demand generation candidates have in common, it’s critical to stay curious and continue to learn and grow. For example, are you experimenting with technologies like AI and ChatGPT right now?

• Collaboration. Keep communication open with your stakeholders. What’s working and what’s not working?

Great question! It’s helpful to approach your demand generation strategies from the perspective that it is constantly evolving. Approach it from a growth mindset. This is not a “set it and forget it” scenario.

Here are a few recommendations to get started:

• Speak with customers. First and foremost, speak with customers when you can. Learn from customers. Listen to sales calls. Whatever you need to do to hear it directly from customers because that’s how you’ll truly understand what value means to them (not you).
• Reporting. Consistently evaluate tracking, reporting and identify gaps as time progresses. It’s not a matter of `if`, but `when` tracking breaks or needs to be updated.
• Experimentation. Think by way of experiments. One of the keys to success in demand gen is to come from a place of ongoing experiments trying to solve customers’ problems.
• Stay curious. Similar to what I’ve mentioned about what the best demand generation candidates have in common, it’s critical to stay curious and continue to learn and grow. For example, are you experimenting with technologies like AI and ChatGPT right now?
• Collaboration. Keep communication open with your stakeholders. What’s working and what’s not working?

It somewhat depends on the specific strategy, but in general there are two things to look at:

1. Inspect regularly: bear in mind, some things take time to materialize, so know when to look. But you can also speed that up by looking at both leading and lagging indicators. Are things working initially as expected - e.g., are you engaging the right target audience. Keeping an eye on things early and often will help you know if you're on the right track vs. waiting potentially too long before realizing your strategy didn't work as expected!

2. Get sales feedback: make sure you review performance and get feedback from sales; depending on the strategy, they may have talking to prospects in which you can get valuable feedback. So often marketing's metrics think things are working as WE want them to, but sales may be super frustrated because for some reason something is missing the mark or expectations weren't aligned. A classic example of this could be a lead gen program such as content syndication. Leads may be flowing through and sales thinks they are ready to begin prospecting - we know with CS leads that's rarely the case as they need further nurturing. So while that doesn't mean the strategy was a failure, if you didn't check in with sales you may not realize that they actually think it's been a total failure and waste of their time!

I think this is a really great question, and a too often overlooked area for really drilling down into your team's success.

You of course have to have product-market fit, the right positioning + messaging, and the right creative campaigns. But, you will not be able to create a predictable, scalable demand generation program if you do not have the muscle of reviewing, recapping and iterating on your top campaigns.

When I was at Eventbrite, our team pioneered the concept of quarterly demand generation retrospectives, breaking down functional performance across email, social, web, campaigns, webinars, content and paid. When I was at Envoy, we partnered closely with the BDR team to create aligned DG:BDR retros that dove into our time to first touch, sales outreach response rates, and top sequences. These performance reviews allowed us to find areas for optimization and improvement on both evergreen campaigns like paid search, paid social and email nurture. We also got ideas for new creative campaigns that we could try to improve mid-funnel conversion rates.

One pro tip: As you build your strategy for your quarterly campaigns, make sure you plan to have at least a 30-day retro + report out for any major initiatives.