The way that Customer Marketing teams and functions should be staffed and organized will vary greatly from company to company, especially when looking at more traditional B2B or sales-led organizations vs Product-led organizations. In my experience, though, the best way to orient the team is around three core responsibilities: * Activation & Engagement: Measurement of activation metrics and time to activation, often in the form of lifecycle marketing. Driving customer education and programmatic communication that support enterprise onboarding, end-user training materials, and aircover to gain as much traction within paying accounts as possible. * Upsells & Expansion: Driven through targeted programs that aim to increase revenue from existing enterprise accounts through targeting new teams, referrals, and surfacing new MQLs to account managers. Can be done through Customer Advisory Boards, 1:1 Account Events, Customer Webinars, and account-based acquisition campaigns. * Advocacy: Measurement of output-based programs that develop champions and put your customers on a stage like case studies, referencable logos, and customer stories across channels (webinars, events, content). 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. Identify the top renewals or any accounts at risk of churning and create targeted account plans to save and expand each. This will provide the frameworks and structures to scale as the team grows.

Have a beginner's mind. What worked in the past might not work in your new position (or it may? But you have to test it first before implementing something full blown). The challenges you have faced leading other teams are not going to be the same set of challenges you will face in your new role. I will think about my conversion path and buyer's journey before I even think about what go-to-market channels I need to build or optimize. Step 1: I would start off by listening to all the functional leads in your new company (sales, product, support, ops). I will then sit down with the data science team or someone from ops to help you draw out the exact conversion, purchasing and upsell funnel for your prospects and customers. Step 2: Identify from a marketing perspective when the key events happen (ie. web conversion, sales opp win/loss, what causes someone to convert, when upsells happen, what causes attrition...you get the point). Then figure out where the bottlenecks are that are preventing your users from taking the action you want them to take. Step 3: Once you have a good grasp on your bottlenecks and conversion point then you can start thinking about (in priority order) how these channels can be used to drive conversions and sales: 1) website/SEO, 2) email/marketing automation, 3) paid digital strategy, 4) sales alignment/training, 5) content buildout 6) webinars/events. 

1) BE CLOSE TO THE NUMBERS. I cannot stress this enough. I was once told that this was my weakest spot–being metric driven. I quickly tried to rectify this and what I realized is that numbers could be my best friend. Once I got closer to the numbers, I was able to reframe them to tell the story I wanted to tell. (This is the hard skill I leaned into when I wanted to transition from field marketing to demand gen). 2) Be comfortable with writing. Sometimes on your teams, you won't always be the one producing content, but I do believe demand gen should be strong writers. This is the team that knows how to get people to sign up for a webinar and download a piece of content. If you are not close to your solution/product, team up with your PMM team and refer to messaging briefs to be able to write the content that are going to convert people into leads! Some of the strongest demand gen people I know all have different strengths, so nothing is a nice to have. It's just what makes them special. I know folks who are really strong writers, very creative, and very savvy with marketing tech. Lean into your strength and it will BECOME the hard skill the CMO/VP of Marketing interviewing you NEEDs on their team.

1. Sales Leadership If you're in the B2B SaaS space, you'll know that marketing alone does not generate deals. We engage prospects and customers, bring them to the surface, and rely on AEs and sales development to mature that relationship, converting them to meetings and subsequently, deals. If your target account list is not aligned with Sales, the efforts get largely wasted. ABM works when Sales is ready and excited for each of those accounts to engage. Ultimately all accounts on the ABM list should either be assigned to an AE or on a target list, ensuring strong alignment between teams. 2. Sales Development Digging deeper on the above, it's imperative that Sales Development is also bought into the ABM strategy. It could have a major impact on their workflow, from lead assignments, qualification thresholds, and follow up SLAs. In my experience, I've found the best partner here to be the outbound SDR team, as they're incentivized to work the same accounts in the ABM list. Also, it's important to consistently surface the efforts being made to warm these accounts, as well as to analyze and prove that a warm account has a higher likelihood of converting than a cold one. If you do run the numbers and don't find that trend, it's likely that something is broken, or your thresholds for account activation are set too low. 3. Business Development / Partners Partners can make a huge difference when trying to break into major accounts. The BD team can be an excellent partner to provide inputs from partner organizations as to which accounts may be more susceptible to purchase new technology, as well as which ones have strong partners involved already.

I believe that all integrated campaigns should exist to drive pipeline & revenue (there is an exception though: when this is not true is when you are creating a category). The biggest difference between these two goals is the volume and the type of buyers you choose to ignore or add to your campaign strategy. For example, an integrated campaign strategy that is focused on meeting pipe goals (assuming limited funds) is focused (more) on two buyer stages - Consideration & Intent. It therefore already assumes that the majority of buyers are aware of the product category and the existence of possible solutions in the market. * Your biggest leverage point here is to make yourself known in specific buying situations (eg. 'we are an affordable alternative to XYZ', 'we are easier to use compared to ABC'). Think of these as inputs to your ad creatives, content assets, etc. * You contain these seemingly disparate buying situations into a 'Campaign theme', a singular go-to-market messaging that focuses the collective energy of all GTM teams in your organization * You now create the right mix of offers that get your buyers to self-select themselves into the demand funnel. What is the type and number of webinars, owned vs 3rd party events, content assets, Demos, Free Trials, Free for forever plan, etc? * You develop a media plan that lays out these offers in a certain sequence, and the time period and is promoted using specific tactics. Since your focus is pipe-gen, it's important to have an educated pov on gated vs ungated content strategy. This, usually, is not as big a concern area in a Brand marketing campaign.

This is a great question! I can't tell you the number of times I've created content because someone in the C-suite thought it would be a good idea, or because a sales reply simply couldn't close a deal with a highly customized 1-pager. The truth is - content should be created with a purpose. Here are the questions I like to ask when conducting a content audit: * Does this content answer questions our customers are asking? Does it help our customers & prospects accomplish their goals? * How does the reader feel after consuming this piece of content? Does that feeling align with what our goal was when we created the piece? * What is the purpose of this piece of content? Is it still serving that purpose? * How often is this piece of content used, by who, and in what capacity? * When was the last time this content was refreshed? Is this something we want to be a staple in our library? * In what other forms does this content exist (blog, podcast, short video, webinar, etc)? If the answer is none, should it be created in smaller, more digestible snippets? 

This question has a lot to unpack. Influencing change takes a LOT of time, but I would recommend starting with first principles. 3 things I would start with: * I gotta say marketing sure did a good job of marketing ourselves! However, “ABM” is not a marketing thing; it’s a holistic revenue strategy. The first thing I usually do is internally rebrand “Accunt-Based Marketing” to be a target account strategy. * “Seek first to understand.” That will mean building relationships cross-functionally to establish trust and credibility. You’ll need key stakeholders to advocate for this strategy when you’re not in the room. Understand what’s important to those teams first: whether sales, e-staff, revenue ops, customer success, and product. * With Sales & Customer Success: Learn how they are approaching their accounts today. What’s working well for them, what do they need help with? What account insights can you surface that they wouldn’t otherwise have? * With Product / Product Marketing: How does the voice of the customer inform product development? What market trends are you seeing from your ICP? * With revenue ops: Depending on the maturity of the organization, you’ll need their alignment to identify ICP criteria to build out target account lists and partner on campaign measurement. This account-centric view will require a different way of measuring traditional lead > opportunity reporting. Can we measure account engagement today? * For Finance: You’ll need their support for any new budget, which means you’ll need to do some math to speak their language. Can you show them customer acquisition costs (CAC) for target accounts vs. non-target accounts? * Then, you’ll likely need to show results before you tell. Introduce an experiment that you can manage without fancy technology. Start with a hypothesis around a very crisply defined account list, brainstorm with others around a mix of tactics / messages / channels that you can measure, and chip away to learn what works. Share progress often.

This is a tricky one as the business can often communicate all of these features and products are equally important. In reality it often creates too many messages for your audience if you try to go after them all at the same time, not to mention it will quickly burn one to two people out! Consider spending time with product marketing to map out a focus over the next quarter or two. Really force the conversation around prioritization. Pick a product or two or combo of features and ladder them up to a theme or concept. Figure out the story you want to tell and execute on that whether that be through ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc. Then repeat for the next quarter. Your prospects and customers will benefit from a focused and directed journey. Ideally the product or feature you focus on in one quarter should lead to the focus for the next quarter so it feels cohesive. Last thing to note, creating an effective an efficient always on engine will significantly ease this burden. I recommend an 80/20 split. 80% of your efforts should be focused on driving always on (trial, ebooks, whitepapers, web, etc) and 20% should be focused on Point in Time (PIT) (webinars, trainings, hands on). As your portfolio of always on assets grows it will naturally cover more products.

This is a great question and a tough one to answer! Every org should develop this based on need. If I were to design a Demand Gen org for Global, it would look like this: * Demand Gen Strategy & Operations: You need one (or multiple people depending on the size of the org) to own the general Operations for the team. Meeting scheduling, global team interlocks, OKR setting, etc. * Demand Gen Analysts: This team will own the campaign data and so your focus can be on deriving insights and demand gen orchestration. * Global Interlock Lead: This person should own the relationships with the regions and the process of how assets get localized and delivered to the global teams. Is there a regular meeting cadence? How do you introduce new campaigns to the global teams so they are aware? * Campaign Leads/ Orchestrators: These are the Demand Gen warriors who own building their campaigns end to end. You can consider dividing this team up by segment type (Prospects vs. Customers, specific target audience segments, etc.). * Content Strategists: This team can own building the content and ensuring they are including global insights to make it relevant for global teams. Often the pitfall when building global demand gen teams is that the teams build for the region they are in and are not considerate of how to extend the message to be global. This team can own building assets such as infographics, webinars, etc. 

Across every role in growth there's one common trait I try to ensure. The ability to look at seemingly disparate data, make sense of it, create hypotheses, and prove or disprove them. Lots of people will answer yes to this if asked as a yes/no question, but the ones that truly get it can articulate examples. These are the folks that take data and turn it into action. I have often seen people be really good at collecting and presenting data, but not be as good at the "so what" part of it.