The Top 20 Demand Generation Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2023
View the most recent year here: 2024
Overview
The way we acquire job knowledge has changed. We learn more from each other than we do at school. The Demand Generation Mentor List shows you the top 20 demand generation practitioners to learn from to develop your career. All of these leaders have contributed content that Sharebird users find helpful.
Methodology
Sharebird's algorithm ranks contributors based on how helpful our users perceive their demand generation - related content to be. We do not handpick people. To be considered for this list, mentors need to be current demand generation practitioners and in a leadership role. We look at the following factors with Sharebird content: views, saves, and followers. We then apply a proprietary algorithm to calculate content credibility and helpfulness. Views show us content relevancy, saves show us content quality, and followers show us content credibility.
Sharebird does not accept payment to be included on this list, which allows us to maintain objectivity and independence. We update this list every year. For any questions about this list, please contact [email protected].
About Sharebird
Sharebird is where leading executives answer your questions. Get easily digestible tips and insights from leaders at the fastest-growing companies, so that you can solve your hardest work challenges and reach your career potential.
In Alphabetical Order by Company:
Adam Kaiser
6sense VP, Growth Marketing
Career Path Tip: As your progress in demand gen or any role, always ask yourself, where can I add value? Then, throw the idea of that's not my job out the door, look at every touch point in marketing, and look at how you and your team's efforts can scale across every touchpoint. It's not about a pile of siloed tactics. It's about creating compelling prospect engagement that drives outcomes. And for that, you need to think holistically, and you need to think big!
Dan Ahmadi
Branch VP Demand Generation and International Marketing
Career Path Tip: Your manager wants to see you grow and thrive. Be open with them-- tell them how you're looking to grow and sign up for challenges that give you that opportunity. Growth is uncomfortable, but pays back dividends to your career forever. Making an impact is not only about working hard, it's about making a meaningful difference to your business. Measure everything you do, hold yourself accountable, and let your passion lead the way.
Jessica Gilmartin
Calendly Chief Marketing Officer
Career Path Tip: A former manager once told me that Strategy is the art of prioritization and it's always stuck with me. Place all your resources behind a few big bets and remove as many priorities as you add. It takes more courage but if you build your plans correctly it will make much more of an impact.
Erika Barbosa
Counterpart Marketing Lead
Career Path Tip: Your career is a journey not a destination. Approach it with curiosity and empathy, framed in an always learning mindset.
Kayla Rockwell
Databricks Senior Group Manager, Demand Generation
Career Path Tip: The best demand generation professionals do these two things with excellence. 1. Build extensive and strong cross-functional relationships; we are seldomly successful without the ability to deeply influence a variety of cross-functional players both inside and out of marketing. 2. Operate from a place of curiosity. Be curious about trends, data, conversion rates, tactics, channels, audience engagement, technology, etc. The best practices you uncover when you're curious will take you far.
Laura Hart
Figma Senior Director, Growth Marketing
Career Path Tip: When first starting out or when you have a lean team, I've found starting with an account-based customer marketing approach is the best way to drive meaningful impact and quick wins for your CSMs and on your company's bottom-line.
Abhishek GP
Freshworks Inbound Growth
Career Path Tip: At the core, a demand gen leader is a caretaker of prospect attention. The key to becoming successful in demand gen is to build your career as a fox as compared to a hedgehog. This means that you are able to fashion a career that, over time, helps you seamlessly navigate discussions that span across creative, media plan, use of econometrics to prove value, channel scaling and optimisation, campaign storytelling and design, data and technology, sales engagement and internal narrative-management. The secrets are perseverance, curiosity and humility.
Kathy O'Donnell
Gong Senior Director, EMEA Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking career growth is about moving up levels. As a hiring manager, I look for skills and attitude over titles. Get involved in cross-functional projects to broaden your knowledge and learn key skills like leading without authority and stakeholder management.
Sheena Sharma
JumpCloud Vice President, Revenue Marketing
Career Path Tip: I fully believe that marketing and demand generation should be really focused on driving meaningful results for the business. I see a lot of folks talking about demand generation having a revenue target. I think that's a relevant lagging indicator, but a really hard leading indicator to drive. You want to be able to have controls on the inputs in order to be fully responsible for a metric.
Monica Myers
Lattice Director of Demand Generation
Career Path Tip: Map your work to measurable business outcomes as often as possible, and leverage that as a way to make sure your priorities are aligned with the priorities of the company. It's a helpful forcing function to make sure that your time is spent on what is going to drive impact, and a useful framework when deciding how to prioritize competing initiatives.
Nicolette Konkol
Morningstar Global Head of Demand Generation
Career Path Tip: An often overlooked but invaluable skill to learn is how to proactively set and manage expectations with stakeholders. Sounds simple but it’s a differentiator that builds trust and can propel your career.
Sruthi Kumar
Notion Account-Based Marketing - Lead
Career Path Tip: Being a well rounded demand generation marketer is more than just building a healthy mix of channel usage, but also being able to work cross-functionally. Running a standalone program is not enough, you need to work with your SDR team on follow-up, work with your sales team on why current opportunities will benefit, your customer success team on why customers will care. All the best demand gen marketers I know are the ones who are open to learning from their cross-functional colleagues and anyone in their network!
Keara Cho
Salesforce Sr. Director, Field Marketing
Career Path Tip: Yes, you can be good at your job and hit all your customer acquisition and upsell goals but what will set you apart is your ability to understand the business, ask the tough questions, try new things and act as a trusted advisor to your sales/product counterparts. To lead a high performance team you have to be a servant leader - take care of your people first and the results will follow.
Moon Kang 🚀
Showpad Director of Digital Marketing & ABM
Career Path Tip: Demand gen is a very fun and interesting path but don't forget that demand gen doesn't stop at simply generating demand with awareness campaigns. It's important to focus on capturing demand and aligning with your sales counterparts to ensure the demand you are capturing actually turns into opportunities and dollar signs for the business. Do not create a silo for yourself and your team where you simply pass over leads without creating a proper journey for your prospects from the first ad impression to their signature on the contract.
Krista Muir
Snowflake Senior Manager, Streamlit Developer Marketing
Career Path Tip: Find a mantra that will ground you and protect your self-confidence. For me, my mantra is: “this is how it goes”. It means in any situation, I’ve prepared as best I can, and I’m ready for anything. When I’m out of my comfort zone, or make a mistake, I tell myself: “this is how it goes” because I know inside of me, I have tools to address the problem. An actress at heart; demand gen excellence is like truly embodying a character. You know your numbers, you’ve gotten curious about “why”, you empathize with customer pain points, you breathe life into the unknown. So when the spotlight is on, or the script gets thrown out, you are ready to improvise, and any imperfections are simply part of the story.
Joann Guo
Spotify Associate Director, Growth Marketing
Career Path Tip: When it comes to building your next campaign idea, it's important to be data informed but not data paralysis. It's always tempting to ask for more data, but you don't need all of the data before making a decision. Sometimes you will have to trust your gut and launch as an experiment. If successful, iterate and scale. If it fails, learn from it and move on.
Liz Bernardo
SquareWorks Consulting Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Learn to live beyond your job title and embrace unexpected roles and responsibilities when those doors open. If you see something broken, take the initiative to fix it and be the "chameleon" the organization needs. Always leaning in is the surest way to make connections and create new opportunities for yourself.
Eric Martin
Stack Overflow Vice President, Demand Generation
Career Path Tip: A good overall basic framework is the "T-shaped marketer" framework. (Google it!) It is a good starting point for understanding all of the disciplines of demand gen and understanding how deep and wide you want to go in your skillset.
Tamara Niesen
WooCommerce CMO
Career Path Tip: Don't just put yourself in the customer's shoes, put yourself in their journey [map]. If you are in a B2B Demand Gen role, think about how your organization makes investment decisions, especially around software and tools - there is likely a pain being felt by the existing solution or lack thereof, and there are likely a lot of people that need to be convinced, and there is an ultimate decision maker. If you needed this software/tool, what would you need to do to get approval? How are your DG efforts playing a role in that journey- how would you personally respond if you received your ads, content, etc? Think about how YOU might want to be educated by others, and what might convince you to fill out a form, or take a call with a sales rep. Buyers, buying groups, decision makers- they are all human and consumers. Use this gut check for every campaign, program, ad, etc...
Pamela King
YouTube Marketing Lead for NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV
Career Path Tip: Demand Generation is a collaborative practice -- embrace partners across all stakeholder groups (especially your Sales teams and prospects/customers). As Marketers, we tend to stick in our own bubble and generate strategies and campaigns to meet specific goals. It's good to meet with your partner teams to gather up-to-date insights on your target audiences, competitor strategies and general market updates. Keep fresh to build your strongest work.