I’m the first Demand Generation hire in my company. What advice would you give to someone tasked with establishing this function in an existing business structure?

• Make sure reporting is set up to measure what’s important and is agreed upon across sales & marketing
• You can’t wait till the martech stack is built or the website is perfect or your strategy is complete to start generating demand. You’re going to have to build the race car while you are racing. You need to capture/generate demand while you are standing up new process, getting new martech in place, etc.
• Set up a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders- actively setting and managing expectations with your stakeholders is key to building trust.

Focus on small, incremental improvements with frequent check-ins and meaningful status updates for the whole org. 

Focus on the teams you will be presenting your results to and fully understand the audience and their OKRs. Make sure what you share aligns to their OKR otherwise you will lose them and their partnership. 

For sales, their objectives are to close deals -- you should share with them

1. The work you're doing to educate potential buyers of what we do

2. The work you're doing to get visitors on your website or your targeted ICPs to convert into a lead

3. The work you're doing to help move prospects down the funnel while sales is working them in parallel

This will get you some strong, enthusiastic partners and alignment with the other leaders. 

Understand what's currently working when you come in, and accelerate it.

If you're in an established business, they must be doing something right to be generating demand and revenue right now. Understanding what that is will help you from a prioritization and early impact standpoint. 

Over time, understanding why helps you identify other areas of impact that you can spin up that match where prospects are and the internal GTM flywheel.

As you take charge of the function,

• Start with understand the current landscape across the business and marketing – what is currently working, what is the need of the business, etc.

• The next order of business would be to establish short term and long term goals.

  • Short term goals, will help you establish credibility with the business and show some quick wins.

  • Long term goals, is where you will get to establish the function and show significant impact to the business.

• As you go about the above, make sure to set up regular reporting so that everyone is aligned and aware of the goals you are working towards.

Congrats on being the first demand generation hire! I recommend focusing on getting a lay of the land, prioritization and iterating as time progresses. You won’t be able to do everything immediately, but don’t let that stop you!

• Communication. Be sure to establish clear communication with your stakeholders. Understand what is currently working and what isn’t working in the business. Establish an ongoing cadence to sync up cross-functionally.
• Understand your customers. To create a successful demand generation strategy you need to have a deep understanding of your customers. Listen to sales calls. Speak with customers. Truly understand what problem you are solving for your customers.
• Reporting. You’ll need to do an inventory of tracking, reporting and gaps. This will be necessary so that you can facilitate read-outs of the demand gen programs you run.
• Documentation. As the first demand gen hire, people are going to be curious and ask questions. Document processes and frameworks that would be helpful to communicate with others.

This list is not exhaustive, but it will give you a solid foundation to grow from.