AMA: Heap Chief Marketing Officer, Micha Hershman on Influencing the C-Suite

As a startup grows, the dynamics of demand generation and key stakeholders involved in the process will indeed change significantly. It's a great question and something to be prepared for. Some thoughts: Early stage (seed/startup) key stakeholders: * Founders/CEOs: Expect Founders to take a very active role in demand generation at this stage. Brace yourself - they will have many opinions and very strong opinions. * Sales leadership: Collaboration with sales is crucial to align messaging with customer needs and provide fundamental enablement. * Marketing: Of course, you should expect work closely with product marketing and content creators. Growth stage key stakeholders: * Marketing team expansion: As demand generation efforts scale, expect to interact with specialized roles in demand gen, content marketing, and digital marketing. * Sales team growth: With increased pipeline expectations, the sales team will likely expand to deliver higher volumes without sacrificing quantity. * Customer Success: At some point retention becomes important (50% or more of revenues for high NRR companies), and customer success teams will want your support for content development, advocacy programs, and often technical operations support. Maturity stage key stakeholders: * Executive Leadership: As the company matures, C-level executives will be more involved in setting high-level strategies and ensuring alignment between departments. * Finance: Budgeting becomes more sophisticated, and finance teams will play a key role in setting targets, allocating resources and measuring marketing efficiency. * HR: Hiring and retaining top talent, including marketing professionals, is crucial. Recruiting teams will want your partnership in building the "recruiting brand." Enterprise stage key stakeholders: * Corporate Communications: Ensuring a consistent brand image and messaging across the organization becomes increasingly important. Expect to work more closely with PR and analyst relations folks. * Legal and Compliance: Especially in industries with strict regulations, legal teams become more involved in ensuring marketing materials comply with standards. Expect to be looped into key legal challenges, to audit marketing materials and to make broad changes to your collateral to ensure compliance with the law. * Partnerships and Alliances: Building and maintaining strategic partnerships can become a significant part of demand generation efforts. If you haven't had a Partner Marketing or Sales team, expect to loop them in closely to your messaging, enablement and demand generation efforts. Global expansion key stakeholders: * International Marketing: If your company expands globally, marketing efforts need to be tailored to different regions, requiring the development of and coordination with regional marketing teams. Working through what efforts are centralized versus decentralized will be a major strategic decision for your team. * Localization: As you enter new markets, collaboration with localization teams or third-party services becomes crucial for adapting content to local languages and cultural nuances.

Another great question, one of the most sensitive and difficult! Handling a situation where two senior executive stakeholders disagree can be challenging, but it's critical that you develop the skills to navigate these moments diplomatically to ensure alignment and build your own reputation as a bridge-builder. Some thoughts: 1. Listen actively: * Seek to understand the perspectives of both stakeholders. Listen to their concerns, goals, and expectations carefully. Ensuring that they feel heard and respected is your first and foremost goal. 2. Search out common ground: * Identify areas of agreement or shared goals. This can be a foundation for building a unified strategy and serve the broader objectives of the company. 3. Take a data-informed approach: * Gather and look at supporting data wherever you can. Metrics can bridge gaps between differing opinions by providing an objective basis for decision-making. 4. Facilitate a discussion: * Arrange a discussion where both executives can express their views openly. Facilitate the conversation to the best of your abilities, ensuring that it remains constructive and focused on finding common ground. 5. Clarify objectives: * Move quickly to establish a set of shared objectives, finding compromise where necessary, and ensuring alignment with the broader business goals. Make sure both stakeholders understand the potential impact on the company's success and see it the same way. 6. Highlight risks and mitigations: * Acknowledge and address concerns raised by each party. Help them to do the same. Discuss potential risks associated with the proposed strategy and work together to develop mitigation plans to alleviate their concerns. 7. Propose compromises: * Where possible, suggest compromises that incorporate elements from both perspectives. This will go a long way to demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to find solutions that benefit the organization as a whole. 8. Align with higher-level goals: * Remind both stakeholders of the higher-level goals of the company and how the proposed marketing strategy contributes to achieving those goals. Reinforce the importance of unity in decision-making and the downsides of divided leadership. 9. Document agreements and decisions: * It's critical to ensure that any agreements or decisions resulting from discussions are documented and shared with both stakeholders. This will help maintain clarity and drive accountability moving forward. 10. Iterate and adapt: * Be open to iterating on the proposed strategy based on feedback and changing circumstances. Flexibility can be key in navigating complex situations. Want more? I recommend this excellent, short article from HBR on handling emotionally charged negotiations: https://hbr.org/2023/12/how-to-handle-an-emotionally-charged-negotiation?tpcc=orgsocial_edit&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin

This is another hard one. Securing incremental resources for your marketing efforts involves making a compelling case to your executive leadership team. And sometimes these asks are absolutely critical to achieving the big, hairy ambitious goals you are being asked to achieve. Consider this step-by-step approach to making your case: Understand your needs: Start by thinking through exactly what resources you need and why. Whether it's a larger budget, additional staff, or access to new tools, developing a detailed and realistic (read: don't pad) understanding of how these resources will help you effectively make your case. Align with business objectives: Be sure your argument demonstrates how the incremental requests align with the broader business objectives and strategic goals of the company. I'd almost always recommend you start by emphasizing positive impacts to revenue growth - it's a language that everyone speaks. Build a business case: This is a critical skill to learn, early in your career! Write out a concise business case that outlines the expected return on investment (however your company prefers to measure that) for the proposed resources. Use historical data to support your projections wherever possible (and industry benchmarks where you cannot) and demonstrate the potential impact on the KPIs that you know matter most to your exec team. Highlight past successes: If you've got them, include similar, previous, successful initiatives that resulted in positive business outcomes. This helps build credibility and confidence in your team's ability to effectively utilize additional resources. Address pain points: Identify the pain points your team is facing that could be alleviated with additional resources. Clearly articulate how resolving these issues will lead to better business outcomes. Benchmark against competitors: If it's relevant, provide clear examples of what your competitors are doing. Prioritize: Prioritize your resource requests based on their impact on critical company objectives. Do your best to connect your request to established company priorities and justify how your ask contributes to achieving these goals. Demonstrate scalability: If you can, illustrate how the proposed resources will enable efficient scalability. For growth-stage companies, this is an especially powerful argument. Show a path to success: Outline a roadmap for how the additional resources will be utilized and the expected milestones along the way. This helps the executive (and finance!) team understand the timeline involved in achieving success. Share in advance and request a meeting: Sharing your materials - or at least an exec summary - in advance can help executive stakeholders come prepared. Make your case in a short, dedicated follow-up meeting. Ensure that key decision-makers are present, and allocate sufficient time to thoroughly discuss your proposal. Be open to questions, feedback, and compromise: Super important! Anticipate questions and be prepared to address any concerns the executive team may have. Be open to feedback and willing to adjust your proposal based on the discussion. My goal and rule of thumb is always to aim to get 80% of what I have asked for :) Follow up: After the meeting, follow up, and summarize the key points discussed, including the requested resources, their justification, and the expected outcomes. Recap any decisions that were made in the meeting and answer any outstanding questions. Where possible, repeat what next steps you agreed to. Remember, effective communication, data-driven insights, and a strategic approach are key elements in securing additional resources for your marketing efforts. Tailor your message to resonate with the priorities of the executive leadership team and emphasize how the investment will contribute to the overall success of the organization. You got this! P.S. Extra credit - finding a champion on the exec team (or someone close to them) can make or break your efforts. It's worth taking the time to figure how who can help be your advocate!

Tough one – unfortunately common and much easier said than done. Of course, managing competing priorities and ensuring focus in demand generation require effective communication and alignment with the executive team. Here are some proven strategies to work collaboratively with the CEO and executive team to prioritize and stay focused: Regular communication: Meet weekly with your Marketing leadership to discuss priorities and understand theirs. If there's a conflict, use this time to discuss and align. If oversubscribed, ask what other work this should replace. Listen carefully then ask better questions: Executives love to ideate, and most don't think their jobs involve providing a thoughtful filter. Get better at gently interrogating their thinking: Is this a nice-to-do or a must-do? Is this a now or a later project? What other work would you trade-off to make this happen? Listen carefully - executives often don't remember that their words carry weight and are just happy to be heard and considered. Speak their language: Use the metrics your leadership cares most about – the ones in your department OKRs or KPIs. Speak their language and address what matters most to them (hint: it's often pipeline and revenue). Leverage the work from your PMM friends to show how your efforts are 100% aligned with ICP, persona, geo, and vertical. If they're not aligned, you have a problem :) Plan 80% of your work: Marketing should plan the bulk of its work, providing momentum, alignment, and clarity to the team. Be clear with your team that you expect 20% of the work in any quarter to be fluid. This sets expectations and minimizes frustration when new priorities and challenges arise. Prioritize Ruthlessly: There are more good ideas than resources. Prioritization is an important skill. Work with your leadership team to develop a shared framework – the Eisenhower Matrix (effort & impact) is often a low-effort, common way to prioritize. Want to go further? Add a column for "confidence" to your matrix. Establish a running "marketing backlog" of great ideas. Meet with your leaders monthly to "groom" the backlog, make priority decisions together, and allocate resources. By improving communication skills, planning work thoughtfully, and making it clear that you're reserving capacity for late-breaking requests, you can protect your team and ensure the executive team feels heard.

This is an important question. Do it right, and you can accelerate your career, secure more exciting projects, and earn the trust of your leadership. Here are a couple of things I would tell my younger self: Speak Their Language: Your head of marketing and head of finance have a point of view on how to evaluate return on investment. Do you know what it is? Every person and every company does it differently: ROI, LTV/CAC, payback period, etc. What framework you use – and how it's calculated – does matter. But the first and most important thing you need to do is show that you understand their perspective. Demonstrate ROI: The next step is to get good at showcasing the return on investment of your demand generation efforts. Use data to illustrate how your marketing initiatives directly contribute to the company's bottom line (yes, MQLs matter, but more important is pipeline $ and closed won revenue). This tangible connection between your activities and financial outcomes is likely to capture the attention and support of senior leaders around the organization. If you can't show direct revenue attribution to revenue, can you create some proxy calculations based on established conversion rates? Build productive relationships (Eh... mostly with Sales): Highlighting the alignment between marketing and sales efforts is essential. Ensure you are targeting the same ICP, persona, geo, segment, and vertical. Emphasize how your demand generation activities contribute to pipeline and closed won. A united front between marketing and sales, especially in a B2B context, is likely to be a top priority for the C-Suite, making this alignment a powerful point of influence. Bonus points: go and EARN political capital by being selflessly helpful before you stomp in and SPEND political capital by demanding something. There's no end of good answers to this question, but personally I'd tell my younger self to learn what matters most to the business and then figure out how to provide it.

Three common mistakes come to mind when Demand Generation managers are trying to influence the C-Suite: Focusing too much on the top of the funnel: Awareness, traffic, and net new leads are important. However, if they don't convert to pipeline and revenue, your efforts won't carry much weight, and you'll develop a reputation for focusing on "vanity metrics." Avoid this at all costs; it will impose a major tax on your career. Failing to understand the whole: We have to stay focused on our task—generating pipeline for the business. But if we don't understand the part we play in the entirety of the Go-To-Market (GTM) motion we will be forever constrained to low-level IC status. Failing the funnel math: You may think adding $1M to your paid budget is a good idea. Still, if you don't understand how those 4500 leads convert to 140 MQLs, 120 SALs, 40 meetings, 20 opportunities, and ultimately $200K in revenue, you are going to upset your executive team, damage the business, and sink your career. Understand your conversion funnel and get familiar with the downstream impact on revenue. Everyone in the C-Suite cares about efficiency, unit economics, and conversion. Work to develop that same level of awareness in yourself and watch your career skyrocket.