What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first demand generation manager at a company establishing the function?

In order to prioritize needs/deliverables you first have to understand the associated goal(s). Based on this, you can work backwards to better understand what will drive the desired outcome.

It’s easy to quickly become overwhelmed as the one demand generation manager. Prioritization is key. Ask questions about deadlines. Be sure to have a solid understanding of scope while also managing scope creep.

Lastly, it’s important to clearly articulate blockers, dependencies, and set realistic expectations.

The prioritization should align with your business objectives. Those overarching goals decided by your sales and marketing leadership team should formulate a foundational layer for you to build from.  

From there you can prioritize the programs based on the largest gaps that need to be filled. Are you needing Leads? Content? Events? Sales Materials? Digital or ABM programs? You don't have to focus on one thing at a time, so make sure to be able to multitask. 

Sorting priorities from most critical to least then executing will help you make the quickest impact to fill the business need. 

Align with the business objectives! That’s the framework. Understand and fix the gaps. You deliver whatever the business needs.

Sometimes, they may already have it, and just not know it, so as a demand gen manager, your job becomes to sift through the existing resources and deliver to the business. If it doesn’t exist, then identify the most effective way to deliver it.

• Are they asking for more leads? Plan to deliver more leads (because you are new and need to establish credibility), but meanwhile, start checking what happens to the leads once you pass them to SDR/Sales? Are SLAs met? Who nurtures them? What are the top reasons you win and top reasons you lose deals? Are you targeting the right personas? Question and iterate.

• Is lead quality an issue? Is conversion an issue? Get more specific feedback to understand the issue and go back to the drawing board if the persona/messaging needs to change. Agree and sign off with sales on the criteria for leads and the stage at which they will be passed to them. Monitor continuously throughout the funnel.

• Are they asking for help with email templates? Understand what is currently available. Reuse if possible, revamp if needed

Prioritize based on the business needs in order to see impact.

Known impact above all else. 

Find the most impactful thing to work on as quickly as possible. To get there, I use the following.

1. Create a short list of items to focus on by using:

• Critical thinking (i.e. who's my desired customer, what matters to them, where do they hang out, etc.)
• Pattern matching (i.e. other businesses/business models do it this way
• Historical data (i.e. what's working in the past)

2. Use the above and start small and scrappy

• Forms before databases
• One-offs before templates
• Do what's unsustainable

3. Measure the results from the above and find what works

4. Begin understanding why it's working

5. Use the above to understand where it makes sense to build infrastructure to support. Infrastructure is meant to make things easier and more scalable. There's no point in doing that on something that's not important.

Once you have that, it becomes a prioritization conversation around the asks. Would your CEO rather that you spend time on something that's delivering known results, or pet projects? Do any side projects conflict with what you've learned from the above?

I really try to keep this simple. I know this isn't always possible but if you can prioritized based on two facets:

1. Does the thing not exist and NEEDS to exist. For example you might be selling a consumer good and you don't have an email letting customers know to review your product and where they can get support. Or you have a SaaS app and you don't have a welcome email for new customers. There's some tactics/deliverables that just have to be done.

2. What is the potential impact. You have to do your best to "moneyball" your day. Too often I've looked back on a deliverable and thought to myself, "what was I thinking, I should have known this had so little impact" and if I'd thought about it I likely wouldn't have prioritized it.

One other note on this, and I'm a strong believer, do not let perfect be the enemy of great. Especially in the early days. I'm not saying throw quality out the window, but you have to balance scale with quality.

Establishing the function is a different beast than coming into an organization and reviewing data to find the red and focus on improvements there. There might not be data if the function is new. If that's the case, the most important thing to do is to get data. Work with an Operations partner - or learn some technical skills - or hire a consultant to help - to make sure you have a funnel. It can be the original SiriusDecisions waterfall - there's no reason to go crazy at this point. All you're looking for is a starting point. In parallel, however, you need to also launch campaigns. This can be difficult when data is nonexistent or lacking, but your primary function is to drive business and build pipeline and a gap in activity will lead to a gap in results.

Demand Generation to build an audience is a slower roll than to market to an existing audience. To build an audience, look at SEO, content syndication, databases, paid search & social, and find partners to run webinars and newsletter sponsorships with. Use AI to help write content to increase your throughput as a small team. Then, once your metrics are available and you've begun building an audience, you'll have more of an opportunity to market to them directly and work on optimizing existing efforts.