I went from marketing coordinator to VP of Demand Gen in 6 years and learned an insane amount about marketing and management during that time. Thought it might be helpful to document some of my top lessons.
First, a little background on me. I have been in the B2B SaaS space for the last decade. I was the first full-time marketing hire at a Nashville-based startup called Kindful, a nonprofit CRM. From there, I caught the rollercoaster and couldn’t get off. I stayed local and landed at Emma, which was quickly acquired by Campaign Monitor. In 18 months we had 6 mergers and acquisitions for other email service providers, and it was there that I took on my first management role leading a direct team of 3 and managing $14M in media spend.
Then I left Campaign Monitor to join a company called Chili Piper as one of their founding marketers for my first Director of Demand Gen role, reporting directly to the CEO. This was a 0-1 build in every aspect of the phrase–the team, the programs, infrastructure, and plays.
To round it out, I moved two more times to 1) prove that I could translate my success to an industry outside of MarTech (this was my stop at brightwheel) and 2) to an agency to learn the business model (Refine Labs).
And I’m now a solopreneur helping brands build programs, infrastructure, and teams based on these learnings and plays.
This move from coordinator to VP happened over the course of 6 years–which feels like an accelerated timeline. And I made a ton of mistakes along the way. It’s easier for me to admit they’re mistakes now because I have the wisdom of time.
One of the hardest lessons for me to learn is that being a good demand gen marketer and being a good leader are two very different things. And just because you’re a good individual contributor, doesn’t mean you’ll be a good manager.
(Thankfully most companies today recognize this and now have 2 pathing options for employees. Either the IC route, or the management route.)
I think management skills can be summarized into 3 components:
Managing up.
Building a great team.
And ruthless prioritization.
There’s so much that falls into these buckets though that might be worth a break out. So here’s 13 things I really wish someone would’ve told me before I started my first leadership role.
