How when you are looking at resumes, when people are interviewing, right?When you're going through multiple rounds of interviews as we do as marketers, right?How do you pick winners for your marketing team?And then we'll switch and get more to Demand Gen, but first let's start there.

Sure. Absolutely. That's a great question. So, you know, obviously you're, as you're reviewing resumes, you're looking for the folks that, you know, their experience and their skill sets most align with your job description and your requirements, right? But then there's also kind of key things that I look for. Obviously I think as marketers, you know, we're an external facing function and so it's very important that, you know, a marketer has excellent communication written in verbal skills. That's obviously a given, I feel like. I think marketing more than ever is very much being positioned as a revenue driving function, right? And so I think for any marketer, regardless of what, you know, sub function, if they're able to demonstrate results that directly influence a pipeline or revenue in any sort of capacity, I think that's really important, even if, and if they're not, you know, if they're able to demonstrate just results, you know, I took steps X, Y, and Z in order to achieve step A, that's really important as well. And then if you want, do you want me to just jump into demand as well?

Go for it.

From a, from a demand perspective, obviously data-driven is very, very important. For demand marketers in particular, I really look for folks that demonstrate some sort of a understanding of the buyer's journey, the concept of a buyer's journey, and really aligning your marketing touch points to various points within that journey by persona is even better. A lot of times that's not necessarily something that you can determine as part of the resume review. That's something that you have to ask direct questions and ask, you know, for, you know, examples of how they've been able to interpret their campaigns or their tactics in support of the buyer's journey. But I think that that is really critical. I think in addition, having someone that is also just customer centric in general. So again, it's aligning, you know, do they demonstrate the propensity to be able to align their tactics and their strategies to the buyer's journey?

But it's also about, it's also about, you know, do you make it easy to do business with you? Right. So as a prospect, if you're, you know, running a demand gen campaign, you know, are you making it easy for your prospects to engage with you and your tactic? Are you, you know, are you, are you requesting certain information from them? Are you minimizing the amount of clicks that it takes for them to consume the content or get to whatever landing page that you're pointing them to? I think, you know, thinking operationally, even like at an event is the onsite registration process seamless and quick, right? People want to be able to reg and get in real quick. So thinking about like, is this operationally, am I making it easy for a prospect or a customer to engage with my activity, my campaign?

And then lastly, from that perspective, I think it's really important to think about your internal customers as well. So your SDRs, your field sales team, your finance product, those are all your internal stakeholders. Right. And so it's thinking about as a, as an internal customer of mine, how do I make sure that I'm partnering with them in a way that is going to support, you know, both of our objectives in a, in a streamlined and efficient manner, we never want to be creating more work for people internally. So, you know, just thinking about that as you're crafting campaigns and you're moving through from, you know, development to execution is really critical too.

I love that. I love that last point because a lot of what marketers are struggling with at every level, right? At the staff, at the managerial, the director or the VP is internal optics right now of what is our marketing worth? Because they're having to ask that question across every department in the company in very uncertain financial times. Right. But I'm going to, we'll come back to this, we'll come back to conversion, right. And how teams do really well internally, externally to drive that, that demand gen result. Right. But I want to ask a question that you touched on in three different points in that answer, but I'm going to ask it more directly.

Most startups and certainly mid-sized companies, right, are honestly struggling with diversity and inclusion, especially on the sales side. It's really just not very good at all on the sales side, but on the marketing side, you mentioned personas. And I think a lot more research in tech is showing that they're actually very diverse personalities, folks on the spectrum, folks who look like, well, like you and me, right. That are actually the buyers, the decision makers sometimes hidden within larger organizations. How do you, how do you help bring that perspective or that diversity inclusion when you're hiring for only a few roles and you don't have a large team to build?

Yeah, that's such a great question. I think, I think it starts from the very beginning where you're sourcing your candidates from, right. I think if diversity and inclusion is really important to you as a hiring manager and to your business, hopefully as well, I think you're actively working with your, your HR business partner to discuss, Hey, where are you sourcing the candidates from? Can we make sure that we're looking at different marginalized communities to be able to source the talent? That's really important that we're doing that. I think that's part of it. I think also as you're going through the actual hiring and the interview process, it's working, you know, don't be afraid to have a conversation also with the candidates themselves around, Hey, what can I do to better support your specific needs throughout this process?

For example there might be some really, really basic accommodations that you can make for your candidates during the interview process, such as like, Hey, we need to turn on closed captioning as we're doing an interview over zoom or you know, Hey, I would prefer I do best in a one-on-one interview session versus a panel of interviews, right? So those are just really basic, easy, free accommodations that you can make to help support diversity and inclusion initiatives as you're looking for, for candidates. And I think it's also really important too, as you're having that dialogue in the hiring process to be able to articulate to your candidates, you know, what types of resources you do have available at the organization and what you as a hiring manager are personally willing to support as well in relation to different diversity and inclusion initiatives for that person to help make them feel seen and make them feel successful.

I honestly have almost nothing to do here. You're segueing into my next question automatically, and I swear to the audience, she didn't know this, but you just mentioned what I was going to ask next is once we've got folks in the resources that a company can provide, that a marketing leader can, you know, put towards their team, what are the best ways for demand gen marketers to develop their skills, to get better at what they're doing? Nobody has it all, but is it courses, is it events, is it like cross functional project? What works for developing talent?

Yeah, that's such a great question. And it's like so near and dear to my heart. I think in order to be, in order to successfully develop the talent on your team, you have to be hyper invested in their success as a, as an individual, as a professional, right? So that means having really open and transparent conversations with each of your team members around, Hey, you know, here's where I think you're really, really strong. Here's where I think there's an opportunity for growth. You know, is this something that would give you energy? Is this something that motivates you? What is it that motivates you ultimately, where do you see yourself maybe in two years or 18 months in this ever changing environment, you know?

So having, having a couple of those, like really some of those really like interesting kind of deep dive conversations with each of your team members, I think is really critical. And a lot of times you find out so much about how to motivate that team member. Once you have a good understanding of what it is that they want to do, you as a manager can then help open doors to that person's success. You know, I mean, if they're someone who wants to be on the on the managerial path, there's so many different resources likely that your organization offers. In addition to some of the other types of professional development, you know, training courses and events that they can do, but oftentimes you might have an individual contributor that just wants to continue to succeed in their role, right?

So it might be like, Hey, let me make sure that you're getting to work on some of these more strategic projects that are within your domain of expertise. You know, maybe there's an opportunity for me to introduce you to other folks in my network and maybe you're, you know, engaging in some sort of a mentor mentee relationship. Maybe you're getting an opportunity to support some external facing types of projects outside of your organization, anything that's going to help you to better hone that particular skill set for your domain. So those are just some examples of things you can do, but I just, I'm just a true believer that you can't, you can't really develop a successful team of demand marketers unless you're having those conversations and you personally are very invested in their success. You have to be able to have that level of trust and you have to be able to partner together with that person to really craft a development plan and timeline that's going to work for that person.

And if we extend this, right, if we extend it beyond the individual to the group of individuals, right, you've actually grown companies through multiple rounds of funding, right? You've seen growth and hyper-growth and a lot of people talk about it, but not everybody's seen it. You've done it, right? From that perspective, what has been your guidance, your vision on balancing skills and workload within the team, right? So that they're growing, but not exhausting themselves and working with trusted outside partners. How do you, how do you make that equation? How do you, how do you balance?

Yeah, that is an equation that is always being hyperbalanced, right? I think that's the big question for a lot of folks is, you know, as, as the economy continues to change and flux as different strategies and priorities for the organization begin to change and flux, how do you, as a demand marketer, make sure that you're managing the capacity of your team with an eye toward scalable growth? And obviously with an eye toward, you know, late lean budget management, that's always the crux of the situation. I think a lot of it has to depend on, you know, you as a manager have great line of sight into the capacity of your team, right?

I think we all know that the easiest positions to get approved headcount for are the ones that actually contribute to bottom line pipeline and, and revenue. And so, you know, when possible, if you can add those types of roles, such as a, you know, like a campaigns manager or an event manager, you might be an organization where you have a really heavy event strategy and offline events tend to just, you know, outperform all other tactics. That might be the way. You might also have, um, a really robust, um, ad spend budget that actually yields really optimized conversions that translate into pipeline as well. And so if that's the case, it's, it's essentially in a, in a long circling answer, it's essentially understanding what are your top performing channels, right? And then looking at your capacity against those top performing channels.

If you, if you see an area where, you know, Hey, if we spend X in headcount dollars, that's going to yield Y in pipeline and ultimately revenue, then there's a justification there. Um, I think the other factor that more often than not will impact your decision around that is also around where you are as a business. Um, startups in a lot of cases have to be, you know, very scrappy and they have to wear many hats and they have to just constantly do more with less. Right. So. Instead of in that type of environment, instead of looking at more of a specialized role, you might look at hiring more of a generalist on your demand team, um, to be able to support, you know, a multitude of different types of channels and programs that you're looking to execute. Obviously, as you're growing, you know, you can specialize more and more. Um, so hopefully that's, did that address your, your question?

Yes, absolutely. And I was actually just going to add another factor that, which is on the larger side, because some of our, some of our attendees are, you know, to them funding rounds is sort of a thing of the past. Like, oh yeah, before we went public, you know, I'm like, oh, that's cute. You know, but I mean, if I just take what you said, there's actually an application to this at the larger tech companies as well is if you're tying your headcount asks to RevOps, to marketing ops, to mops roles, right.

Where you may not be running the campaign because you've got a good sort of operational expertise with that, but you need to be analyzing the spend and especially the pipeline acceleration better, really good chance of getting those headcount approved, right now, given that there are there, you know, and this is really strategic. I would be very scared to be your CMO because I don't know how I'd say no to you, right? Like you've got these really good asks of headcount. Where do you go outside to compliment that talent or that, that generalist talent? And then we'll talk about some specialized roles. How have you found works working with, you know, one or more vendors as you scale?

Yeah, absolutely. I've had a lot of success in the past with working with different digital marketing agencies on paid media ad spend. Definitely SEO and SEM. Especially when you're when you're starting out, I think that's really important to be able to leverage, you know, an agency and obviously, depending on the size of your organization and the size of your budget that determines the scope of your agency size. But those are typically resources that are best leveraged, I think, externally, as you get a little bit larger, and you have the ability to hire more digital marketers, then I think you can bring a lot of that ad spend management in house. And then it might be that you're maybe just leveraging a digital agency from a strategy perspective.

So again, thinking about, you know, what's going to make more sense for your organization, I think you have to look at what channels are top performers. And then what makes sense in order of, you know, whether you're hiring specialists, to kind of manage the or to manage the ad spend, or whether you're hiring maybe a strategist to then partner with an ad agency. So that's definitely one piece. I've also had some success with managing or with leveraging different like marketing technology agencies to support your tech stack roadmap, a lot of times, organizations going back to your initial point don't necessarily have immediate headcount to be able to hire kind of a rev ops or marketing ops function.

And so if that's the case, there's a lot of really great marketing technology agency partners out there that that are familiar with a variety of marketing automation platforms and the full tech stack gamut that they can support your needs there. So I think that's always a really good play. I am personally a really big advocate of establishing marketing ops from the get go. So I think if you if you can support the headcount of bringing in like a marketing operations manager or an automation specialist, I think it's really important to do that. But recognizing that that's obviously not the case it for a lot of organizations that are starting.

Yeah. And I mean, we have practiced that, right? Our revenue and sales and marketing ops person was like, I think our second or third marketing headcount of these pipeline. And it's been phenomenal. She's been like fundamental in how we've got we've brought things to market and evaluated different marketing opportunities. Now, one thing has changed dramatically in the last five years, it's a bigger change than even the pandemic, which is the growth of the the creator economy.

You know, in the past, you and I are old enough to remember when we had designers and writers and marketing that honestly nobody knew. Only we knew them sales never heard of these people, right? Some of the product team knew them because they interviewed them, but nobody knew. And they've been working at the company for over a decade. They're very good at what they did. And in fact, they didn't want to leave. It's really changed the creative talent that's available per gig per campaign on a long term contract basis is far more experienced and established than it used to be. How have you been balancing as you've grown your marketing team, how have you been balancing the methodical analytical skills and the general eye on the business versus creative skills that marketers are bound to have because it is it is still a creative function?

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think to your point there, that's that's the that's the piece I love about being a demand marketer is the fact that it is very right, left brained. I mean, it's this it's this piece that, you know, you require the ability to be data driven. You require the ability to digest data and derive insights and be able to use those to inform your strategies. But at the same time, the way that you get the highest level of engagement from your campaigns and tactics is by really getting creative around how you're reaching out to your target persona and, you know, via the messaging and the different tactics and the channels that are being leveraged.

So so to answer your question, you know, in an environment where, you know, we now more than ever have so many different types of tools and access to be able to create content and design. Right. And so I would say that has been helpful is is if you have a team that has experience leveraging a variety of different types of tools to be able to create content and they're not afraid to go out there and do it, then a lot of times that is making the entire kind of campaign development execution process that much quicker because they're able to just go and create content and not rely on a designer or not rely on, you know, maybe a copywriter or an external writer to be able to create things for them.

So I think it's again, it's if you're if you are prohibited by, hey, I only have a certain number of headcount. It's working with your team to understand what are all the pieces that you might need to leverage throughout a campaign and what are some of the things that you can leverage in order to help you, you know, quickly create content, for example, can can you jump on Canva and create some, you know, ad creative? I mean, do we necessarily need to outsource the ad creative if you can just jump on Canva and put something together? I think that's really important, too.

Exactly. And also, you know, as we've moved from the traditional sort of Mad Men out of home advertising, right, where everything was print and everything had to last six months because the next time you're going to change it was six months later. That sounds crazy. But it wasn't that long ago that that was our world, right? Or print. You have to have things of weeks in advance to where now you're deciding within hours how you're iterating your campaign. I think it's a really key point that you should have folks internally that understand the business really get the buyer and are willing to experiment and not have to go back to the well all the time for that original copy, original design.

Right. And I think that willingness to experiment is like such a key. It's such a key component that you should also look for when you're hiring candidates. But also, it's something that you have to foster on your team as a team culture, right? Like it's this idea of like, it's okay to take risks. Like I, you know, like, I come from a couple of organizations where we used to say, like, let's just fail fast, right, if we're gonna fail, let's figure it out. Let's figure out why it didn't work.

And then let's iterate and optimize for the next time around. You know, you have to you have to make your team members feel like that's okay to take risks. It's okay for me to test things as long as I'm then continuously learning and optimizing. Exactly. And as long as I'm open to this as a test, I can get to emotionally attached to it. If it bombs, it's okay.

Let's move on to the next one, right? Right. You need that culture where everyone doesn't, you know, come at you. I failed so many times in my marketing career. I've never had someone stick it to me, which is probably why I still do this, right? So as, and we can't talk about it publicly yet, but as you embark on your next big adventure, I'm very excited for you, by the way, right? I have a little inside information. But as you embark, is your first hire going to be GPT-4? Are you just gonna throw up your hands and say, let's just use AI?

I'm so excited about GPT-4 because it is like, I mean, it's, it's like, it's like any, any new tool, right? I'm always, I'm, I'm a, I'm an early tech adopter. And so I'm always looking for how do I work smarter, not harder. How do I, you know, work more efficiently. And so for me as a marketer, there are so many different cases or use cases that I can leverage that tool. And I'm really eager to see the team take hold of it and leverage it in their day to day too. But yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm excited about it. I think, I think in general, you know, people should be excited about the tech. It's like any, any new technology. It's like you know, several years ago before we had like, you know, video marketing platforms, we couldn't make, you know, personalized videos and send those off to prospects. Now we can do that. And that's super cool. Right. And so it's just looking at you know, different, different ways that you can leverage that technology to make your day to day even easier.

Well, so this is going to be our last question and I'm summarizing two or three different questions because we're going to run out of time and we always do. It's just the way it goes, Shayla. Sorry. Okay. One of the things that's really challenging when you are creative, when you are growing quickly, when you're sort of one of the top three in your, you know, sub sub industry or sub-segment is that the traditional or benchmark metrics aren't there. In fact, the ones that are there are really misleading. So how do you measure and reward success on your team when you don't have a larger benchmark to be like, well, this is not about open rates, you know, this is not about MQL to SAL conversion. This is different and there's really not a number for it yet. How do you measure success when you're actually experimenting?

I think you benchmark yourselves, right? I think you're establishing like, hey, this is something new. We're trying, we're drawing a line in the sand. Here's where we are. Here's where we'd like to be. Let's measure against that. You know, I think any organization, as long as you're, as long as you're demonstrating consistent improvement around, hey, we did this, it didn't work, but then we did this, we saw that it was amazing. So we scaled it up and here's where we are now. Demonstrated progress and improvement is always really critical. And businesses love optimization and efficiency, right? So the more that you can show that bench, just benchmark yourself, right? Especially if you're, if you're in a new space where you're using new methodologies that we haven't really figured out, how do we quantify that yet? How does that support the bottom line? Just demonstrate quarter over quarter progress. And, and I think that's a good thing. You know, benchmark yourself.

I have to say this before we end Shayla, if anyone in the audience is looking for a role, go work for her because like, she is really good at getting budget, optimizing budget and supporting your career. She really is. She, everybody who's ever worked for Shayla loves her. Thank you so much for this experience and really sort of explaining it for the audience because we don't really talk this candidly, you know, in, in the marketing community as much, and we will have to bring you back Shayla. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Sarab. I really appreciate it. Take care. Thanks everybody. Bye.