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.

Having accurate data and good data is the foundation in delivering success. You have to be able to quickly answer this question: “For every dollar I put in market, how much am I bringing back to the organization?” If you can't answer this with confidence, then you can't even begin to drive success of your programs.

We all know when we put garbage in, garbage comes out. Reports are great but only if the input of the data is accurate. Which is why it is critical to focus on the data structure to make sure we have a good foundation to surface up the data. And ensure you have the right connectors that allow marketing top of the funnel/mid-funnel metrics to your company's revenue data.

Marketing leaders will ask each other: “How do you do lead gen” and think there’s a special channel they didn’t know about. Unfortunately, I wish it was that easy. What I’ve found is that the ingredient to building a world-class marketing organization is how a company uses martech to effectively automate workflows and track ROI.

Your reporting and data visualization should be able to help you answer these high level questions:

• What is marketing’s impact to the company’s pipe gen?

• What channel or tactic drives the most pipe gen?

• Which grouping are your highest converting leads?

• Are your strategies delivering quality leads, pipeline and positive business outcome?

• What is the audience mix in your strategy? (i.e: how much new business vs. cross-sell/upsell/upgrades is your team bringing in)

Having the right data is critical because: 1) We need to know where our business stands, 2) if things look off we can investigate and react early before it becomes a firedrill, and 3) identify which strategy works and which doesn't.

Look at marketing performance based on the revenue it's generated. Then break that down by Geo, campaign, and tactic. From there you will know what's working and what's not. Make recommendations for what you will continue to do and optimize, also what you are going to kill because of low performance.