Emily Chisholm

The demand creation that gets talked about a lot is highly orchestrated campaigns, but that's not the only way to build awareness and create demand. A lot of demand creation can be low budget. Hands-down the best long term strategy to increase your audience in B2B is to help your target market do their job better. So, host webinars (make friends with internal experts who can serve as thought leaders for webinars), post blog posts, and keep the social media drum humming with highly useful content ...Read More

In my experience, it's thought leadership. Importantly: GREAT thought leadership. Give away your special sauce. Be so transparent about your expertise that you give away value for free. Don't underestimate the emotional safety that people feel when they find someone who is clearly an expert. Think of it like a car manual. They're helpful if you need to know how much to fill your tires, and you might do that yourself, but for most people that's where the penchant for machinery ends. Technically y ...Read More

This is easiest when you have some historical accounts. Ultimately, the strategy shouldn't be built by your ideas, it should be informed by your customers. If blog posts are great for website visits but do nothing for demo requests over the course of a year, maybe pare back from 4 posts to 1 great one a month. It's hard to argue with data, so when setting expectations, don't give your opinions, just give facts. Take the time to comb through what types of campaigns generate what, and design the c ...Read More

The tension eases when sales sees brand work paying off in their own pipeline. The foundation is a strong working relationship with your reps—when they trust you, they give brand-building activities room to breathe. The practical bridge is thought leadership content that prospects actually want to attend. Choose topics carefully and make them genuinely useful, and you get the best of both worlds: the content builds long-term authority, while also warming prospects and making reps' conversations ...Read More

Test! Build a good case for why you think something would make for a worthwhile test and try it out. Be upfront that it's a test, what your hypothesis is and why, and that it could very well generate nothing. Better to be in a culture of testing than one of accountability to what doesn't matter. You'd be surprised how many ideas you can pull straight from conversations with customers, too. Steal, steal, steal. No one gets prizes for having the best original idea. You win in demand gen by doing w ...Read More

Test it against real accounts and see where it lands. The fastest gut check: run your model on accounts you already know, and if it surfaces a low-fit account as a top prospect, you know the model is off. That kind of face-validity test is also how you build trust with sales—they can see for themselves whether the scoring matches their instincts about good accounts, which makes alignment a shared exercise rather than a handoff. Keep the inputs to verifiable data. The biggest trap is building a s ...Read More

I treat sales as a standing source of customer intelligence, not just a downstream recipient of leads. That means consistently asking reps what prospects and customers actually care about—the objections they hear, the language buyers use, the problems that keep surfacing on calls—and feeding that directly into messaging. The key is involving them early, during messaging development rather than after a campaign is built. It's a lot cheaper to pressure-test a topic in a 15-minute conversation than ...Read More

Remember that you're all on the same team—that mindset solves more forecasting disputes than any model does. The fastest structural fix is a strong RevOps analyst sitting between the two functions. A good one will save you enormous headache by giving both sides a single source of truth, so you're not arguing about whose numbers are right before you can even talk about what they mean. And attribution doesn't have to be perfect. That's genuinely fine, as long as you and sales agree on the level of ...Read More