DemandLoops

Soloprenuer

UserEvidence

UserEvidence automates social proof for GTM teams. Generate verified customer evidence, product stats, and ROI data in minutes. Game-changing B2B companies like Pendo, Workato, Gong, Jasper.ai, and Ramp rely on UserEvidence to boost buyer confidence, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates.

Advisor

Thoropass

Growth 

Chili Piper

Refine Labs

VP of Marketing

brightwheel

Interim Head of Demand Gen

Chili Piper is the most advanced routing and scheduling software for B2B revenue teams. 
We solve interesting problems, live and breathe our core value of “help,” and have a ton of fun doing it while fully distributed around the world — powered by espresso and hot sauce.

Senior Director, Demand Generation

Anvyl

Honeycomb.io

Solving demand gen headaches ➿

Hi, I’m Kaylee 👋 founder of DemandLoops.

I’m the marketing solopreneur making demand loops a reality for B2B SaaS companies. After spending years in-house building and leading demand gen functions one brand at a time, I’m now going solo to bring my learnings to you.

I spend my days doing 4 things:

1. Interim Marketing Leadership roles in B2B startups to help them build and scale.

2. Advising early and growth-stage founders and marketers on demand gen strategy.

3. Career coaching for eager demand marketers looking to grow their career.

4. Writing, creating, and talking about 1-3. 

I’ve operated and advised companies such as Kindful, Campaign Monitor, Chili Piper, brightwheel, Refine Labs, Vanta, Traackr, Mux, and many more. And am now trying to make my own newsletter happen fueled by my learnings – DemandLoops.substack.com 📧 I love helping others further their career in demand gen, while also continuing to push and define the boundaries of what this function will become. 💙

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✌️ Areas of expertise: Demand generation, brand marketing, community, podcasting, performance marketing, marketing analytics, marketing operations, influencer marketing, field/event marketing, customer marketing

🙅‍♀️ Areas you won't catch me in: SEO, display advertising, lead gen

Most demand gen responsibilities look something like the chart on the right these days. 

And to some degree I think we bring that on ourselves. So it's likely overdue within your org to establish a charter for your team to help set the record straight on your team's Why, the Stakeholders, and ultimately your roles and responsibilities. 

The Why:
To build an audience, establish authority, and generate interest in your brand, resulting in high-quality pipeline generation.

Your Stakeholders:
The way I see it, Demand Gen sits at the intersection of RevOps, Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales.

We’re the orchestrators taking quantitative and qualitative feedback from prospects, customers, and the market to derive and execute a GTM plan.

Wrapped around all of that is a desire to understand, evangelize, and engage our customers. The better we understand our customers, the more we grow.

And more clarity you can provide through internal comms, the better set up for success your team will be. 

I wrote about my thoughts in depth, and share a template you can steal for your own demand charter here 👇
https://lnkd.in/eCkMwARt

Kaylee Edmondson

What Most People Think B2B Demand Gen Is

I climbed the corporate ladder...and then jumped off. 🪂 
 
I went from: 
 
Marketing Coordinator (2015) 
Digital Marketing Specialist 
Demand Gen Manager 
Senior Manager, Demand Gen 
Director of Demand Gen 
Head of Demand Gen  
VP of Marketing  
Solopreneur (2023)   
 
Candidly, going solo is one of the best decisions I've made. ✨

"It's hard to validate spending time on organic social because there's no ROI" 

This was the opener to a convo I heard last week 👀

And there's never been a better case study on display than what's happened over the weekend with Chik-Fil-A and Shake Shack. 

CFA dropped the bag, and Shake Shack RAN with it 🐔

Here's the story: 
- A Chik-fil-A employee started a meal review TikTok page.
- Started getting thousands of views. And gained 50k+ followers.
- This employee was an ADVOCATE of CFA and spoke so highly of the brand.
- Then the company asked her to stop as per the employee handbook.
- The video "There will be no more Chik-fil-A videos" got 248K likes and 2.5M views in one week.

Now, here's when it gets interesting.

A couple of days later, Shake Shack offered her a brand collab to review their chicken sandwich. The video is now sitting at 711k views and 125k! https://lnkd.in/ep9nmnKt

And Shake Shack is now offering a free chicken sandwich on Sunday's for the month of April with your order. https://lnkd.in/eMSzgyQV

Chik-fil-A really missed a MASSIVE opportunity here.

So many lessons: 
- Your in-house influencers can give you exponential results. Be a little open minded.
- Instead of stopping them, encourage them to become brand ambassadors of your brand.
- Invest in social listening as a brand so you can opportunistically move fast on opportunities like this. 
- Spend time where your buyers hang out. Even if you don't have trackable UTMs, trust me, there's ROI here.

What are the benefits of having brand ambassadors?

An underrated skillset that should be on every marketing JD: 
 
𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐆𝐍𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐀𝐍 🕵️ 
 
It's an easy way you can separate the top 1% from the rest.  
 
Someone asks, "is 44% a good MQL to SQL conversion rate? Our sales team says the ACV on those SQLs is too low." 
 
Most people respond, "Industry benchmarks say you should be 70% or higher."  
 
Diagnosticians respond, "How are you defining MQL? What's your MQL to closed won ratio? SQL to closed won ratio? How about your AE capacity (% of self-sourced vs marketing sourced)?" 
 
Very few POVs are cut and dry. Most require an additional layer of detail to appropriately diagnose the issue, form a point of view, and provide a solution.

My social battery 🪫 is wrecked in the best way. 


But my heart and brain are so full. 

Yesterday was filled with magic from beginning to end with rooms filled with people we’ve known for years here on LinkedIn finally uniting in person. 

Events at their core are about connection. 

I’m walking away having had so many enriching conversations. I got critical feedback from my peers about my business, had face time with LinkedIn friends I’d never met before, and watched a net new event playbook unfold in front of my very eyes. 

A huge shoutout to Amanda Bagley, Anthony Kennada, JK Sparks, Todd Clouser, Elaine Cleary (Stalker), Ruben Rabago, and the rest of the AudiencePlus team 🫶

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The age old question: to booth, or not to booth? 

This example highlighted is pulled from Dreamforce 2023 booth costs vs 5 micro-events in the Bay area. 

So many things are top of mind about the way we do events today: 
- we prioritize badge scans over content creation
- the shelf life of a conference goes stale 24 hours after booth teardown 
- so much of the focus is AT the event so we overlook PRE and POST event activites

We've all been there, navigating events with booth scans, product announcements, and the infamous pursuit of "leads" (often translated as "I just want a t-shirt"). We find ourselves investing $20,000 to $150,000 (USD), sometimes even more, to secure a 10x10 booth in a sea of other vendors.

So I wrote about some ways in which we can all start to move the needle towards events that extend that shelf life 👇
https://lnkd.in/gJcJ6XMj

10 college classes I wish I'd had:  
 
1. Psychology of Consumer Behavior (201) 
2. Data Analytics: Attribution Edition (401) 
3. Ethics in Marketing (101) 
4. Marketing Operations (201) 
5. Storytelling in business (401) 
6. Data Privacy + Compliance (301) 
7. Why people buy (201) 
8. Content creation (201) 
9. Personal branding (301) 
10. AI in business (401)  
 
What would you add?

Heading to Goldenhour today with the rest of LinkedIn ☀️ 

So excited for AudiencePlus to reset the bar for what a conference can and should be. 

And even more excited that it’s a jam-packed, one-day event because the hardest part about showing up and being a career woman is that means I’m also missing bedtime for the littles. 

It’s a tough balance. 

So I’m channeling all of my extrovert energy today and I’m so excited to meet everyone and learn from the sessions. 

See y’all soon!

Your in-house influencers can give you exponential results. 
Be a little open minded.

According to a quick search there are more than 1300+ open Demand Gen roles on LinkedIn right now...

And most already have 100+ applicants–it’s a tough market. 

So whether you’re the hiring manager, or the candidate seeking your next DG gig, this post is for you.

Let’s just start here…hiring for any role in this climate is tough, and I might be slightly biased, but your next Demand Gen Manager could make or break your team hitting growth and efficiency goals this year.

Stakes will inevitably be high when you get ready to start interviewing.
Hundreds of candidates will be able to “talk the talk” during the interview process and sure, they’ll flash up all their best metrics and share their best stories. But…can they actually back it up?

I’ve just gone through the process to help a client hire their next Demand Gen Manager role and thought I’d share what I asked, what I learned, and what I might do differently the next time around.

Open article: Hiring your next Demand Gen Manager by open.substack.com • 7 min read

Ever felt like insanely uncomfortable going out on a limb and trying something entirely new? 

Me too. 

So, Nick Bennett invited me to chat about my route to solopreneurship on his 1,000 Routes podcast. And he jumped right to the truth of why I believe I got off to a slow start before finally making the switch from W-2 to Solo. 

Turns out–it was a 'me' problem. While I do still inherently believe that market acceptance for Solo's vs W-2's is low, I also believe that if you build the confidence and ask for what you're dreaming of building, you'll land on your feet just fine. 

Check out my route on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eQqpZMZv

SaaS companies have two choices: 
 
 
To be transparent...or not 😅 
 
Most companies still choose to keep their pricing and packaging options behind a lead wall. This seems crazy for so many reasons 👇 
 
- It sends your prospects on a hunt on your website (when we all know most fall off after 1-2 page jumps anyway)  
- Your sales teams’ calendars will fill up with less than ideal “prospects” just seeking more info — not ready to buy  
- Good luck forecasting revenue with a model like this. You’ll be working with varying degrees of interest on this form that’s supposed to represent your high intent buyers.  
 
However, there’s such another path here.  
 
✨TRANSPARENT PRICING ✨  
 
Most execs will be hesitant to make this move for fear that it reveals “all their cards” to the competition (speaking from past experience here 😅).  
 
In reality it simplifies and streamlines the experience for your prospects and your team. You’ll see:  
- More *qualified* conversions on your high intent forms  
- Tighter progression through opportunity stages, setting you up to more successfully forecast late stage pipeline 
- A stronger alliance between marketing and sales because you’re not passing them low intent leads to work  
 
For those who’ve made the switch, I’d love to hear how it’s going!  
 
Or for those without a pricing page, convince me why this is the path for your brand! (You can’t say because “every plan is custom” 🙈)

It was a sunny morning in San Francisco a few years back. 

Padraig O'Connor and I were in town for a marketing offsite and had met early to have a team breakfast before we all headed back home.  Padraig and I lucked up and were sat across from one another at a small café table. 

We started off with the casualties, and recapped our learnings from the offsite. All the suspected talking points of a breakfast with a new colleague. Then Padraig started talking about his previous impact on growth at Wealthsimple and I’ll never forget the moment my eyes lit up and I found myself physically leaning into the conversation nodding along. 

We're talking behind the scenes of building a content marketing powerhouse, and how SEO became Wealthsimple's most efficient channel. 

He's sharing it all on this week's Looped In newsletter–link here! 
📨 https://lnkd.in/eKJH2UmF

Before worrying about creating and capturing demand, make sure you're converting existing demand effectively.  
 
Start at the Marketing <> Sales handoff. There's likely opportunity there to close gaps, operationalize the infrastructure, and increase handoff conversions. 
 
It typically comes down to: People, Process, Technology  
 
In a company I’ve partnered with recently we found that 30% of demo and pricing requests that raise their hand during working hours preferred to connect live on the phone, but of course we didn’t want to just stick a 1-800 number on the website and flood the sales team with junk calls and busy work.  
 
Instead we invested in technology that enabled us to auto-qualify upon form submission, allow the end user to select their choice of live phone call or booking a meeting, and only allowed those that were qualified to run through a live call router to connect with their Account Exec.  
 
This small change increased meeting held rates by 25% and sped up cycle times by 20%.  
 
💡 Look for instances like this in your data! Odds are you’ll need to run some capacity models but could pick up tons of wasted pipeline that’s slipping through the cracks of your infrastructure.

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