When designing a demand generation strategy, at what stage do you audit internal departments to determine if there is sufficient stakeholder buy-in and infrastructure needed to support success?

This one is slightly tricky but a good rule of thumb is getting primary stakeholders’ inputs as early as possible, especially for things that need resourcing from other teams and anything that involves technical implementation. Throughout the planning process, this is where you can pinpoint the members for the working team. It’s also important to identify one primary PoC from each functional area to avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen. From there, establish a clear RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) as you kick off the workstream to better set expectations. For example, the person who is ‘responsible’ will be the main decision maker while keeping everyone else informed on progress. This can be sent in the form of a weekly email update.

Generally speaking your demand generation strategy isn't a single wouldn't have a distinct beginning and end so I believe you need to build into your strategy a set of regular check points to audit for resources and buy in. I would audit my strategy for infrastructure quarterly. For buy-in I believe half-yearly or annually is more appropriate. As far as who would be a part of that I would include at least the following teams:

• Marketing/revenue operations

• Design and creative teams

• Product marketing

• Pre-sales (SDR/BDR, etc.)

• Sales

• Customer Success

Here are a group of internal stakeholders that I believe is important to get buy-in and approval.

I would ensure every group listed below have seen your plan prior to getting it launched as each group can actually help provide assets/ideas to complement your plan.

Sales leadership (Informer): Please note I specifically didn't put Sales leadership as an approver. This doesn't mean you shouldn't work with your Sales leaders often and early to get their feedback on your strategy but make sure every decision you make nested underneath that strategy is back by data and historical trends to predict the desired outcomes.

Field (sellers/AEs, inbound/outbound sales rep (Input): You should always find a handful of seller to understand what painpoints your customers/prospsects are facing in market and whether or not your messaging resonates with those pinpoints.

Product Marketing (Influencer): Messaging and positioning is a critical part to your success! Ensure you bring PMMs on early and often to ensure you are on point with pitch and value propositions.

Your boss/VP/CMO (Approval): This one is obvious but I would absolutely make sure you get sign off on this by your chain of command to ensure your plan is complementary to the rest of the overall global marketing strategy.

Customer Marketing (Influencer): It's critical to have customer success stories to validate your product/services! Your prospect/customers are going to ask sellers how other customers are using your product/services similar to them or in their industries.

ABM (for up market, Influencer): Make sure your plan doesn't overlap with ABM's plan!

Product (if you own PLG, Informer): same logic as ones listed in the "sales leadership" section above.

Sales Enablement/Sales Programs (Informer): doing things in silo will never work. Amplify your impact by ensuring everything you do aligns with sales programs and the enablement programs for the quarter. That way, whatever you are creating demand for, your sellers will have the proper education/training to sell the solution and they will have tools from sales program and target accounts to go after.

Once everyone signs off on your plan I would recommend you check in mid campaign and post campaign.

Step zero. Those things are really critical in order for demand to really work. I like to build a pitch deck and go around socializing my strategy and my forecast internally. I talked to sales, finance, product marketing, and even product. Just find the supporters in your company that are excited about what you're doing

I’ve seen the most success when auditing along the way. This should not wait until the end. If you are transparent and have ongoing communication, the need to have a stage to then audit becomes nonexistent.

Why take this approach? In the words of Brené Brown, “Clear is kind.” Be sure to include checkpoints throughout your demand generation plan. Identify who needs to be included as part of the ongoing discussions upfront. When you are clear and focused on what the strategy is, stakeholders are not faced with surprises.

If there are any adjustments to budget requirements, they should be raised immediately. It would be incredibly inefficient to spend time on a demand gen program that ultimately hits a blocker at the end.