Demand Gen CoE Part 1

Realizing as a first-time marketing leader that I'd implemented the wrong strategy

The year is 2020. It’s March – the pandemic has just started. And you’ve just accepted a new offer to be a founding member of the marketing team for a B2B SaaS company.

Hi. This was me. 👋 And here’s a few of the things I really f*cked up early on. Learned from. And then rebuilt.

How B2B buyers discover, research, and evaluate products has completely changed, but most B2B go-to-market strategies haven't. This change was largely initiated by two macro-level shifts in consumer behavior which drastically transformed digital buying.

To be fair, my entire adult life has squarely been in the digital buying era, but somewhere between 2015 and 2020 we moved from the website era, to the dark social era. I had graduated college in 2015 and joined the workforce consuming everything I could about marketing. So I learned marketing in this “access to information” era. Access to information lended itself well to a lead-gen model. Come 2020 as I was accepting a new role as a founding marketing leader, I’d stepped in and sure enough started building my entire lead gen playbook.

6 months in, I realized it wasn’t working.

Here’s snippets from the Demand Gen Center of Excellence that I wrote as an internal document to explain to my founders, executives, and peers why our strategy wasn’t working, and what we were going to do about it.