AMA: Wistia Director of Acquisition, Sam Clarke on Demand Generation 30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan

The most effective way to scale a demand generation team after hire #1#1 is by partnering with freelancers and/or agencies. When you first join a company, understand its best and worst-performing channels. Then, compare that performance to your competitors. If your competitors are all benefiting from channels you are underperforming in, those are the areas to experiment in. First, I will run a pilot test in each one of those channels myself. Then, whichever channels show promise, I will look for external support to help scale them further. For example, if I am experimenting with paid search, I will create the first branded and non-branded campaigns just to see if there's any ROI. If the answer is yes, I will then transition into a strategic role and find an agency to help with the execution of it.

Scheduling one-on-ones with your new colleagues is one of the first steps to tackle in your 30/60/90 day plan. In fact, those conversations should influence what makes it into your final draft. You should lean on the team that has seen it firsthand versus thinking you have all the answers. When I first join a company, I make sure that I schedule meetings with at least one representative from sales, customer success, finance, business intelligence, product, and engineering. I also ask these very same questions to every single direct report. Finally, I make sure to interview the longest-tenured employee at the company. 1. What is the best thing that the demand generation team is doing right now? 2. What is something that the demand generation team is not currently doing that you think we should be? 3. Are there any challenges currently facing the organization that the demand generation team should know about? 4. If you had to choose three thought leaders in our industry, who would you choose and why? 5. What are the top three publications/websites in our industry that are frequently read by our target audience? 6. What are the three most common problems customers are trying to solve with our product? 7. What are the three most common objections we face when selling to prospects? 8. Who do you think I should talk to next at this company and why?

As a Demand Gen Marketer, you need to make sure that your 30/60/90 day plan is skewed towards learning about the company/space. The more time you can devote to understanding the business/space/customer, the better you'll be at your job in the long run. That said, I do sprinkle these "quick wins" into my 30/60/90 plan to ensure I'm moving performance in the right direction. I find the campaigns below to be low-effort yet impactful. 1. Run an a/b test on your website's pricing page. Chances are this is one of your best-performing pages when it comes to traffic and impact on conversion. Test something above the fold and you should come to statistical significance within ~45 days. 2. Send out a closed-lost/expired MQL survey. Ask every MQL that didn't convert in the last 3 months to complete a survey in exchange for a $20 Amazon/Starbucks gift card. The questions should be geared towards learning what initially made them interested in your product and why they didn't end up purchasing. Make sure you ask them if they went with a competitor and if so who. If they didn't purchase another product, re-route them to the sales team with their survey answers. If they did, tag them in your CRM to follow up in 9 months. 3. Run an email campaign that generates new reviews. Determine your business's most important keyword that you currently don't rank on page 1 for. Identify the review site (G2, Sofware Advice, etc) that is ranking the highest for that term and ask your customers to write a review on that site. Pull a list of customers with NPS scores of 9/10 and send them an email prompting them to review in exchange for a gift card. While you might not currently rank for that important search term, you can be visible on the website that ranks for it. 

Your first month should be 80% focused on learning the business and 20% focused on finalizing your 30/60/90 plan. For the remaining two months of the quarter, you should be 40% focused on continuing to learn the business and 60% focused on executing your plan. In the first 3 months... 1. Schedule one-on-ones with every team member you will interact with weekly. 2. Map out your existing funnel by taking the steps a prospect would. Make sure you complete every funnel step yourself, from landing on your website to demoing with sales to putting in an actual credit card. This will help you identify areas that need fixing. 3. Hop on 5-10 sales calls with actual prospects. Record the questions they ask and the responses by your sales team. Ask to be bcc'd on all emails to those prospects. 4. At least once a week, get into the support ticket queue and answer questions. Leverage your existing help center to see if you can come up with the answer yourself, before relying on a team member. In the first quarter... 1. Set KPIs by month for the rest of the year. 2. Deliver a "what's working" and "what's broken" presentation to senior management. Ensure that the team has visibility into how the current funnel is performing and where the opportunity is. 3. Identify one channel that is underperforming and launch a campaign to turn it around. 4. Identify a channel the company hasn't yet experimented with and kick off a test. 5. Kick off a campaign that will improve the lead-to-closed won conversion rate. 

If you are the first demand generation hire at a company, chances are you are going to need to advocate for some immediate changes to your funnel. They probably hired a demand generator because something needs to be addressed. However, question everything and confirm what needs to be addressed yourself. Start by mapping out the funnel in detail. Figure out every entrance into your website and then map out each following step. In addition to the mapping, record the conversion rates for each one of those steps. Then schedule a meeting with senior leadership across the company and walk them through the funnel. Highlight all the areas where the conversion drops the most and then recommend process changes, fixes, and tests to address them. This exercise not only helps you work out your 30/60/90-day plan but also generates unanimous buy-in from the team.