Get to know your VP of Demand Generation

Get to know your Vice President of Demand Generation

This blog series explores the roles and responsibilities of every member of the VP-suite to help leaders understand their executive peers.

Market share growth is a primary objective for businesses of all sizes. It is a key driver that determines the enterprise value (EV) for companies in private and public markets. In today’s post, we’ll explore the one role designed to drive market share growth — your VP of Demand Generation (VPDG).

Understanding your VP Demand Generation

To be a highly effective demand generation leader, it is important to consider your company’s overall strategy and top line targets. Mapping out a growth plan is a team sport with your VPDG orchestrating the strategy and tactics across various departments and players. Read along to see how your VPDG collaborates across the org, implements processes, and uses technology to reach his or her goals.

People

I have seen great success when VPDG reports to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) but actively obtains insights from the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Chief Customer Officer (CCO). When VPDG works cross functional with staff to understand their needs and learn from their observations it helps to fine tune desirable purchase intent signals and develop a repeatable growth model that can be well understood by the CEO and executive team.

VP of Demand Generation Collaborating With People

Specifically, successful VPDGs work closely with the following groups:

• Partners. Online or offline, lead generation providers, resellers, distributors, affiliates, advertising networks and entities that can reach your desired customer profile to drive awareness and marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
• xDR. Staff typically labeled as a “lead, business or sales development representative,’ who work to extract purchase intent signal and deliver sales accepted leads (SALs).
• Account Executives. Drive SALs towards business and define desirable prospect and customer attributes that can fine tune purchase intent signal to build a repeatable growth model.
• Sales Engineering. Demonstrate product value in sales demos and proof of value or concept (POV or POC) and help identify key capabilities to highlight to show value earlier in the funnel process.
• Customer Success. Ensure that existing satisfied customers drive expansion and referrals for net new business and identify desirable attributes to fine tune purchase intent signals.

This collaboration will increase the likelihood of building and maintaining the right team for growth. But a good team must have a good process for scale.

Process

Your VPDG should understand the growth process end to end. Ideally, this process is unique to your business and can become a massive competitive advantage that maximizes your market share position.

VP of Demand Generation Working The Process

To illustrate the importance of process, let’s look at a high level one that can be applied to most enterprise software as a service (SaaS) businesses.

• Step 1: Who phase is foundational to determine the target audience(s) that include buyers, users, influencers, evaluators and blockers.
• Step 2: Aware phase creates company and product awareness with key audiences and provides a low purchase intent score MQL that should be nurtured.
• Step 3: Educate phase informs prospects on company and product value and provides a low to medium purchase intent score MQL that should be nurtured.
• Step 4: Engage phase uses an xDRs to engage with prospects and determine if they meet the sales accepted lead (SAL) criteria before being routed to sales.
• Step 5: Show phase is where sales demonstrates product value throughout the company’s sales stages.
• Step 6: POV (Proof of Value) phase is where sales aims to get prospect “buy-in” of product value.
• Step 7: Close phase is where sales “wins business” and gets new customers on board.
• Step 8: Expand phase is where sales drives upsell, cross sell and referral for additional business.

A fine tuned growth process should result in optimal use of staff, resources and budget and puts your business in a position for high growth. But in order to scale, technology must play an instrumental role.

Technology

Your VPDG must develop his or her own unified purchase intent system of record. First, he or she must unify data from marketing, sales, and service systems. Second, your VPDG should overlay additional tools, like predictive analytics, to further identify purchase intent signals. Lastly, your VPDG should refine existing purchase intent algorithms, and define new ones, that will more effectively identify “ideal” prospects and customers to target for growth.

VP of Demand Generation Leveraging Technology

Let’s look at a basic set of systems you may see in an enterprise SaaS company. They include systems for:

• Marketing. To target key audiences, manage awareness and education, and score MQLs.
• xDR. Track engagement with prospects to determine if SAL criteria is met.
• Sales. Measure likelihood of opportunities converting to business.
• Service. Manage outstanding customer issues to ensure satisfaction.

These systems, should make up your company’s proprietary, unified purchase intent system of record, that should eventually result in:

• Automation. Eliminating or reducing manual qualification tasks,
• Economics. Lowering cost per lead,
• Quality. Accurately detecting purchase intent signals,
• Scale. Capacity to drive more quality pipeline, and
• Speed. Building qualified pipeline faster.

Sequencing technology investments should be tempered by your VPDG given company’s growth stage and available budget.

Summary

Your VPDG must look at people, process and technology elements holistically to supply both quality and quantity of qualified leads that can drive drive top line growth for your sales organization. Your VPDG plays a critical role in building a growth engine and building a long standing business, so make sure you work with the right one for your business.

Here are ten questions to help you better partner with your VPDG.

1. What are the 12, 24 and 36 month growth targets?
2. What type of growth model makes sense for us?
3. What type of people do we need?
4. Where are the gaps in our skills?
5. What type of process do we need?
6. Where are the points of friction in our funnel?
7. What type of technology do we need?
8. Where do we have manual tasks that can be automated?
9. What is the current algorithm for identifying our ideal prospect?
10. How does our growth budget map to our growth targets?

Freddy Mangum has held various C-level roles in high-growth companies that have experienced successful exits. The intent of this blog is to help the fellow leaders better understand one another so that they can execute more effectively and build great businesses. Freddy currently advises C-suite staff on go-to-market and mentors founders through programs like the Stanford Incubator (StartX).

Want to read other blog posts in this series? See Freddy Mangum’s articles on Medium here.