What should you aim to do in your first month and your first quarter?

In your first month you should aim to soak up as much knowledge as you can. Develop a deep understanding of your customers and the business. Start capturing the ideas that will naturally come to mind. Sometimes you may have a starter project during the first month too.

In your first quarter you should aim to ship something meaningful that will impact the bottom line. Be able to report on the outcome and desired impact.

I see the first month as building the foundation to hit the ground running within the first 90 days.

Your first month should be 80% focused on learning the business and 20% focused on finalizing your 30/60/90 plan. For the remaining two months of the quarter, you should be 40% focused on continuing to learn the business and 60% focused on executing your plan.

In the first 3 months... 

1. Schedule one-on-ones with every team member you will interact with weekly. 
2. Map out your existing funnel by taking the steps a prospect would. Make sure you complete every funnel step yourself, from landing on your website to demoing with sales to putting in an actual credit card. This will help you identify areas that need fixing.
3. Hop on 5-10 sales calls with actual prospects. Record the questions they ask and the responses by your sales team. Ask to be bcc'd on all emails to those prospects. 
4. At least once a week, get into the support ticket queue and answer questions. Leverage your existing help center to see if you can come up with the answer yourself, before relying on a team member. 

In the first quarter...

1. Set KPIs by month for the rest of the year.
2. Deliver a "what's working" and "what's broken" presentation to senior management. Ensure that the team has visibility into how the current funnel is performing and where the opportunity is.
3. Identify one channel that is underperforming and launch a campaign to turn it around.
4. Identify a channel the company hasn't yet experimented with and kick off a test.
5. Kick off a campaign that will improve the lead-to-closed won conversion rate. 

When you are coming in new to a role, your first month should involve getting a lay of the land. Understanding and reviewing past metrics, meeting with stakeholders, learning your team and company's strengths and weaknesses, OKRs, etc. 

Once you have identified the above, you should then start building a 6-month roadmap. In this roadmap make sure you are kicking off multi-channel programs and campaigns. Start with the easiest to execute and continue to build on it. 

A great example of this is starting with a solid eBook. From that eBook you can create a blog, design an infographic, create an email/BDR campaign and then run a larger-scale webinar on the topic. Build your hero asset and then launch multiple variations. Make the squeeze worth the juice. 

First week should be in listen mode, understand the business priorities, current environment, challenges and needs. Speak to as many of your stakeholders as you can, especially on the sales side. It will help you understand the business, as well as help to identify the areas that need work.

The first month should focus on planning some quick wins that you can deliver in the first 90 days.

After the first month, finding ways to operationalize those tactics by leveraging existing assets and resources (without disrupting existing systems or independent of building new ones), will be key to establishing your credibility with the key stakeholders.

In your first month/first quarter as a demand generation manager, there are several key things that you should aim to do, in order to hit the ground running and make a positive impact:

1️⃣ Learn everything about the business and the product.

In your first month, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the business and the product, in order to understand the key challenges and opportunities to develop effective demand-generation strategies. This might involve learning existing market research, analyzing customer data, and engaging with other teams and departments, such as product marketing, marketing, product management, sales, to learn about the product, the market, and the competition. Learn, absorb and make notes about fast wins and bid bets for demand gen.

2️⃣ Build strong relationships with cross-functional teams.

Demand gen is focusing on developing and executing integrated marketing campaigns that drive leads and sales. Those campaigns often depend on other teams to be successful. So it is critical to build meaningful relationships with marketing, sales, PM. In the early days of your new role, make an effort to get to know your colleagues from cross-functional teams. Learn about their backgrounds, interests, and experiences. This might involve having one-on-one conversations, attending team meetings and events, and asking questions about their work and their roles within the organization.

3️⃣ Develop a high-level demand generation plan.

In your first quarter, you should draft your plan of work that outlines the key strategies, tactics, and goals for generating demand. Should you focus on running demand gen experiments? Should you spend more time with CRO or maybe optimize some specific steps of the funnel? Which channels, tactics, and resources should you use? Align on your tactical and strategic plan with your manager (Head of Marketing) and get feedback from the teams who will be helping you out.

4️⃣ Get small wins. 

Figure out where you can improve the process and how can you drive revenue right now. Fast wins allow you to get hands-on and show your value to the business. You can consider non-obvious paid channels, like ads on Product Hunt, or jump into CRO project your team is already doing.