What truly makes a demand gen team effective?
The answer lies in your strategies and how you structure your demand generation team to drive results.
Building a great DG team involves more than hiring good people; you must think carefully about roles, processes, and teamwork.
Understanding these basics will help you improve your results and reach your business goals.
This article will share essential tips to create a demand generation team that enhances engagement, generates leads, and increases sales.
Let’s get into it 👇
What is the importance of a demand gen team structure?
Here’s the important question:
How can a team’s structure help facilitate those all-important DG efforts?
A well-structured demand generation team is essential for achieving business goals, generating quality leads, and boosting revenue.
Liam Bartholomew, Cognism’s VP of marketing, said:
“With demand generation, two things are critical: consistency and volume. You must have this ‘always on’ motion for churning out and distributing content. So that’s why it’s important to have a structure.”
Fran Langham, Cognism’s Global Head of Demand Gen, added that it’s essential to have a structure, as the way a DG team operates isn’t the same as your everyday B2B marketing model:
“Demand generation works differently than a traditional lead generation or marketing team.”
“It’s very collaborative, so you must integrate the different functions to work together daily. The changing nature of marketing has emphasised the need for a structure.”
Here’s why a demand gen team structure matters:
Role clarity
A well-structured team clearly defines roles and responsibilities, ensuring each member understands their specific contributions to the overall demand generation efforts.
This clarity helps to minimise overlaps and gaps in responsibilities, leading to more efficient workflows.
Specialisation
Different aspects of demand generation, such as content marketing, social media, email campaigns, and data analysis, require distinct skill sets.
Structuring your team allows for specialisation, enabling team members to focus on their strengths and areas of expertise, which can lead to better outcomes.
Collaboration and communication
A structured team fosters better communication and collaboration among members.
When each team member knows their role and how it fits into the larger goals, it encourages teamwork and information sharing, leading to more innovative and effective strategies.
Performance measurement
With a clear structure, setting performance metrics and accountability becomes easier.
DG managers can track progress more effectively, identify high-performers, and address issues promptly, ensuring that the demand generation efforts are supporting the revenue pipeline.
Scalability
As the company grows, having a structured demand generation team allows for easier scaling.
When roles and workflows are clearly defined, onboarding new team members and integrating them into existing processes becomes simpler, maintaining continuity and effectiveness.
Strategic focus
A structured approach allows your team to align their efforts with the overall business strategies.
By having designated leaders or specialists for each segment of demand generation, your DG team can ensure that their activities contribute directly to your company’s goals and objectives.
Four qualities every demand gen team needs
Every demand generation team should possess a combination of the following:
- Strategic thinking.
- Creativity.
- Analytical skills.
- Collaboration.
Strategic thinking helps your team understand market dynamics and target audience behaviours, while creativity is essential for crafting compelling campaigns that resonate with your potential customers.
Analytical skills are crucial for measuring the effectiveness of a demand generation team’s marketing efforts and making data-driven decisions that optimise performance.
Collaboration among team members and other departments, such as your on-demand sales team and product development, fosters a holistic approach to aligning your B2B marketing initiatives with your company’s revenue goals.
Ultimately, these qualities allow a demand gen team to effectively drive leads, nurture prospects, and contribute to sustainable business growth.
How Cognism structures its demand gen team
You might be wondering:
‘Where can I start?’
‘What works and what doesn’t?’
Well, the best way to answer is by showing you!
Here’s a ‘before and after’ of how Cognism’s demand gen team used to function and how it operates now:
Before…
Liam said:
“The structure before was based entirely on the sales team and the split between commercial and enterprise.
“This didn’t work for us, as you can’t successfully split your budgets between the two segments. We found a crossover of work and couldn’t differentiate between the messaging. Of course, this is different from company to company, but based on our experience, this approach didn’t work.”
Fran mentioned it was difficult to liaise with the content team, and there was often a disconnect:
“Previously, we had a demand gen team that worked with a content team that was often far away from the work we were doing. For example, we didn’t always know if the content in the wider team could be fed into campaigns we were working on.”
And after!
The problems outlined above motivated Liam and Fran to examine the DG team and its structure.
Eventually, they concluded that there needed to be a focus on Cognism’s two core personas: sales and marketing.
And each persona has a pod.
So, we wanted to know more about the thinking behind this.
Liam said:
“The structure of a demand gen team can differ in every business: you could split it by company size, product, or even segment.”
“But for us, it was imperative that we integrated our key personas into everything we were doing in demand gen.”
Enter the pod model…
Both pods have:
- A Demand Gen Manager.
- A Demand Gen Executive.
- An SEO and Content Executive.
Liam explained:
“Each pod can own the content, the entire journey, and messaging for the respective persona. There’s ownership and accountability this way.”
“With this approach, you can truly scale your process. You’ve got a team thinking about how to grow and scale the content without any other distractions. So it’s efficient, too.”
Fran agreed:
“If you’re a company marketing to more than one persona, the pod model is useful. Because these people can live and breathe the persona every day. There’s a clear and consistent focus.”
And why is there a separate content person in each pod?
“With the activity in the pods, it’s not just about blog writing or thinking about the content you’re putting out there. It’s also about the channels, the best formats, and how to distribute it in the best possible way. And this is as much a content role as a demand gen role.”
Liam agreed:
“Let’s say you want to write about five pillars of outbound for a campaign. Having specific people on the DG side for this purpose helps. Because you can have someone think about how to repurpose the content, not just in the usual sense, but also for the use of it for a campaign.”
“This differs from the wider content team focusing on more journalistic or broader SEO content.”
Fran added:
“There are other benefits I’ve seen with this approach. For example, the focus on the ICP has meant the quality of the content has just been better.”
“There are also no silos in teams because there’s an SEO and Content Exec in each pod. There’s a joint focus between demand gen and content.”
You’ll also notice Cognism’s demand gen team has a website expert, and Liam stated why:
“We can assess, evaluate, and track the website journey. And this allows us to identify whether we have to tweak it - this creates a percentage difference in conversion rates that can help us move the needle.”
Not sure how to measure the success of your demand gen strategy? Hit play below to learn more! ▶️
Tips for building your demand generation team
When building your team, consider the following demand gen best practices:
1. Asses and establish
Start by identifying your organisation’s specific goals and what skills are necessary to meet those objectives.
Do you need more content-focused roles, or is there a greater demand for data analytics and technical expertise?
Once you know this, you can establish clear roles for your hiring process.
But remember, while flexibility is necessary, defining specific roles and responsibilities within the team is equally essential.
This clarity helps avoid overlaps and ensures everyone understands their contributions towards collective goals.
2. Think about your hiring process
You’ll find that to grow and structure your team, you’ll need to source some talent. You won’t always have the right people in-house.
Firstly, you’ll want to embrace diversity.
Look beyond traditional B2B experience when hiring.
Candidates from different backgrounds can bring fresh perspectives and innovative approaches that may enhance your team’s creativity and effectiveness.
For Fran, it’s about thinking outside the box when hiring new DG talent.
“We’re increasingly learning that B2B is behaving more like B2C. So, if it’s changing that much, on paper, should we necessarily have to hire those exclusively with B2B experience?”
“I think that hiring people from different backgrounds (i.e. outside of B2B) adds diversity to the team, both culturally and in terms of ways of work. For example, we just recently hired a Head of Paid Acquisition who used to be a lawyer.”
“I’ve found these candidates to be better than those who have had four or five years of experience in a B2B marketing role.”
For Liam, there are two things that people should consider when hiring: flexibility and knowing your limits:
“First, I would say that you don’t want to overspecialise from the beginning. You want generalists - people who can manage all sorts of things.”
“Aim to have someone with experience in content, paid social, events, and distribution. These broader skill sets are important because if you specialise too early on, you might have someone with excessive bandwidth, meaning you can’t build out the team flexibly.”
“The second thing comes down to bandwidth. Know what you want to achieve and base your hiring budget around it.”
“For example, we knew we wanted to run a sales podcast, newsletter, and bi-weekly live events. So three people were necessary to cover this ground.”
“It essentially comes down to trying to do as much as you can and then fill in the gaps where resources are required.”
The bottom line?
Have a trial-and-error approach to determine what you’re missing in the team.
3. Communication
Communication is essential for a demand generation marketing team.
If you’re implementing Cognism’s pod structure, Fran said:
“The tricky thing is that there are many moving parts within demand gen. We want to work with the wider teams and collaborate within our own team. Again, this is why structure is so important: communication can happen easily.”
Consider expanding your marketing and sales tech stack to align your sales teams with your demand gen pods.
Here’s Fran’s advice:
“The nature of the content and the pain points in these pods are very different. So there’s not always a lot of detailed teamwork between the two.”
“But more broadly, there’s alignment or joint work in terms of uncovering new channels and discovering new types of activity there.”
“For example, we’ve uncovered a new tool called Wynter, where you can stress test new messaging. This is something both pods use. So when it comes to ways of work, the pods work together and share ideas.”
Now, as much as we all hate Zoom brain - regular meetings are essential!
Here’s how Fran sets up meetings:
- Weekly pod meeting (sales and marketing pods together).
- Bi-weekly sprint sessions establish your team’s tasks for the next two weeks, and they are all tracked in Asana.
- Weekly 1-2-1s with each pod member, but as placeholders.
Concerning the last bullet point:
“I’m a big believer that the meeting is there, but we don’t always have to use it. Because I don’t like setting meetings for the sake of it. So we work on a more ad hoc basis for meetings.”
Lastly, you’ll want to collect regular feedback from your team on how they are finding the processes and strategies. This practice helps identify areas for improvement and empowers your team to contribute ideas and solutions, fostering a sense of ownership.
4. Integrate technology
Speaking of your B2B marketing tech stack, having the right tools can help streamline your process and enhance your team’s efficiency.
You’ll want to use marketing automation tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and data analytic solutions to track leads, automate repetitive tasks, gain deeper insights into customer behaviour and campaign performance, and streamline workflows.
Moreover, the strategic integration of AI and machine learning can significantly refine your DG targeting strategies, leading to higher conversion rates and fostering sustainable business growth.
For instance, Cognism is a must for our demand generation team. Using it, we generated a 64% lift in click-through rates.
Here’s a playbook detailing how we achieved this: LinkedIn Ads Playbook.
4. Measure your team’s success
You’ll need to prove to the board that having a DG team is worth it. That means showcasing your team’s success.
This involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect the effectiveness of marketing strategies in generating leads and nurturing prospects.
Metrics such as lead conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and sales qualified leads (SQLs) provide crucial insights into your team’s performance.
However, it’s not only about revenue.
Measuring demand generation metrics also helps inform your team about campaign performance improvements and provides insights into resources that may need reallocation.
Additionally, analysing the return on investment (ROI) from various campaigns helps to assess which channels and tactics are most effective in driving qualified traffic and engagement.
By continuously optimising these measurements and leveraging data-driven insights, a B2B demand generation team can refine its approach, better align with sales objectives, and ultimately contribute to sustained business growth.
5. Foster continuous learning
Providing access to training resources or attending conferences can enhance their skills and keep the team competitive.
Fostering continuous learning for your B2B demand generation team ensures they remain agile and adept in a rapidly evolving marketing landscape.
Encourage team members to develop professionally and stay updated with industry trends.
Some examples include attending workshops, online courses and industry conferences.
This motivates your team to improve constantly and fosters a culture of innovation and adaptability.
DG team members will be keen to share what they’ve learned with the rest of the team, which will lead to the implementation of new strategies and tactics.
💡If you’re looking for a great resource for your pod, check out our Demand Gen Playbook Course.
6. Earn the right to secure a team
This is useful, especially for marketers operating under a traditional B2B lead generation model.
It’s centred around proving the benefits of demand gen, as Fran notes below:
“To start with, ungate some content. And spend some time distributing some of your best content where your audience is hanging out.”
“For example, if it’s video content, share it in a feed on LinkedIn and run it to a valuable blog that is completely ungated. With these activities, check if engagement, time on page, inbound velocity, and demos are going up.”
She added:
“At the end of the day, senior leadership shouldn’t have an issue with you building out a DG team if you can prove the results and show that your audience is at the heart of everything you do.”
“And remember: don’t panic! I didn’t switch everything off overnight. It took me 8 or 9 months before I made the complete transition - that bought me time to convince senior leadership.”
Key takeaways
Here are the key points to remember when structuring your demand generation team:
- It’s essential to have a structure because demand generation activity requires a collaborative approach.
- Organising is crucial because content quality, consistency, and volume measure DG’s success.
- Centre a DG team around what makes sense for your business. For example, a persona or company size split.
- A well-structured demand generation team typically incorporates a blend of diverse roles that work collaboratively to drive awareness, engagement, and, ultimately, conversions.
- Key roles include demand generation strategists for campaign management, content marketers for audience engagement, and data analysts for tracking performance. Specialists like paid media experts, SEO pros, and social media managers can also improve the team’s effectiveness in reaching different target audiences.
- Think about communication within the DG team and with the broader marketing team. Encourage open communication between roles to foster creativity and innovation in campaign development.
- It’s vital to ensure a culture of collaboration within the team. A collaborative environment enhances the effectiveness of individual roles and leads to holistic strategies that capture every aspect of the demand generation funnel.
- Don’t have meetings for the sake of it, only when necessary.
- Consider how you’ll demonstrate the importance of a structured DG team to senior leadership: prove that demand generation is the way forward and lead generation is a thing of the past.
- Finally, consider how you’ll hire your team. That’ll help you make the most of the structure.
And there you have it - everything you need to know to build and organise a demand gen team!
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