Field marketing: While marketers have really had to reimagine what this looks like in a COVID world, Sara believes everyone will come out of it as much stronger marketers. Marketers have been forced to think of new ways to engage buyers, especially those in the higher segments where executive dinners, networking events, and CxO councils are really critical. But Sara still believes there’s no better way to create pipeline than field marketing.
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Content: Sara specifically mentioned organic content, which she’s seen pay off in terms of search performance after long-term investments in content writing and creation. She believes it’s important to ensure you have coverage for a broad surface area of use cases to drive the right awareness for the long haul.
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SEM: While investing in organic content is a valuable long-term play, paid channels, like Google SEM, are low-hanging fruit and good for driving a predictable volume of traffic.

Executive alignment & sales enablement: In B2B, your sales channel is always your sales people. It takes a lot of human resources to invest in internal executive alignment and sales enablement. A significant element of this is creating a culture where the organization embraces marketing’s role across the entire funnel and views them as a partner for long-term strategic planning.
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Events: Events are an irreplaceable way from sellers to build intimacy with their customers. Attending events—either in person or virtual—shows a level of engagement that’s much more meaningful than downloading content or clicking on an ad, which is a great intent signal for sellers.
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Content: The content you produce has to start out. It can’t be borrowed from somewhere else and repurposed for your brand. It must be provocative and super detailed in regard to a problem your buyers are trying to solve. 

Marketing tech stack: Mike views this as a competitive advantage. Many of their competitors are larger and can outspend them. If they can’t outspend them, then they can outsmart them with an intelligent martech stack. This includes the data architecture behind the technology stack. Being able to bring the data together and derive insights that inform intelligent marketing campaigns is critical.
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Content: Content comes in many different shapes and sizes. You must ensure you have the right content at all stages of the marketing funnel, and it has to be valuable enough to cut through the clutter. is uncuttable because we have to have the expertise at every stage of the funnel.
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Virtual events: Virtual events—specifically those that would have traditionally been done in person—have been extremely important in today’s environment. In fact, Mike is seeing even higher attendance and engagement rates for virtual events than their previous in-person events. This is an area he will continue to invest in, even post-COVID. 

“Value Card”: This is a sales enablement tool 6sense invented that maps keywords (such as “predictive analytics”) to various personas. If a buyer with a certain role expresses interest in a keyword, sales reps can use the value card for that keyword to quickly understand the relevant pain points and value props to tailor communications with that prospect.
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6QA: Instead of MQLs, 6sense tracks “6QAs”. The 6QA model is composed of four scoring areas: 1) is the account a good fit?, 2) is the right decision maker engaged?, 3) are they showing the right signs of engagement? , and 4) where is the account in the buying journey? This criteria come together to generate a score that dictates whether the account is qualified.
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Personalized experiences: This involves taking a close look at how marketing channels are connected to ensure wherever visitors engage with 6sense, the experience is personalized to the account and the buyer persona.

Brand: Brand is an area that a lot of B2B companies don’t invest in, but it’s especially critical for a company like Slack in their mission to create a new category. Investing in brand marketing is binary; you either invest in it or you don’t. There are diminishing returns the more you reduce your spend in brand marketing, and there’s a threshold you have to invest in order to make it worth it. Slack invests in brand marketing in a targeted way by focusing on the regional areas they want to have the most expansion in.
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Content: In order to fuel great demand generation you need good content. Content helps buyers realize value and builds love for your product. Content also helps customers get value from your solutions and deepen their usage, ultimately driving them to evangelize your products.
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“Innovation pocket”: Julie describes this as the budget she dedicates to uncovering new ways to reach audiences using creative tactics. This includes things like ABM tools, content syndication in new channels, etc. 

Digital buyer experience: This is a critical area of investment for Tenable. It includes investing in search engine optimization to ensure Tenable is synonymous with the problems they solve for. They also invest heavily in conversion rate optimization, which involves looking closely at the customer journey across the website and ironing out potential areas of friction that would prevent buyers from converting.
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Free trial offer: Free trials allow the buyer to quickly earn value. In the SaaS world this is especially valuable. The point isn’t to get a buyer to create a login, but to demonstrate to the buyer that Tenable will solve their problems. Tenable invests in nurturing and coaching new customers along the way to ensure free trial users successfully adopt the product.
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Search engine marketing: This is the last budget Melton would cut. SEM is both offensive and defensive. It allows Tenable to position their brand in the context they want to be seen in. People turn to search engines more than any other source, so it’s critical that Tenable is part of that ecosystem.

Content: Specifically, having super-relevant content on third-party sites, such as LinkedIn. You can draw engagement that’s trusted because you’re pulling people into an authentic conversation that they feel like they can control as they go through the experience.

LinkedIn page: Udi caveats this by acknowledging that LinkedIn is only a viable channel if it’s where your audience is. Not every company’s target market will have an active audience on LinkedIn. At Gong, their LinkedIn strategy is two pronged: the Gong brand is authoritative on LinkedIn, plus Gong employees are thought leaders on their own social profile. They use both levers to publish highly-engaging content that generates organic followers. This is Gong’s cheapest demand gen channel; they get thousands of content downloads from a single post.

Email list: Gong has built a large opt-in email list of people interested in receiving their content. They enrich these emails with additional information, such as company industry and size, to send tailored content to various reader personas to ensure they continue to engage them in a relevant way.

Virtual events and webinars: Virtual events are full-day, multi-session events, while webinars are 30-60 minutes. Gong generates value for both formats. In each scenario, attendees not only leave with a lot of takeaways, but their full attendance is a high buying intent signal. If you tap into those folks in the right way at the right time, you’ll be able to move opportunities forward.

AppExchange Marketing Programs: Since OwnBackup has such a strong focus on the Salesforce ecosystem, this is a major demand gen channel for them. They automatically know everyone they engage via this channel likely is a strong fit for OwnBackup’s product.
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Conversational marketing: Prospect engagement is moving away from forms and is now about getting prospects to the right person to have the right conversation with them at the right time. The idea that a buyer would fill out a form and sales would spend the next two weeks trying to get in touch is so off. 
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Video: Video delivers a clear, concise message in a format that’s really easy to share. YouTube is the second biggest search engine. Not only do you want to be present there, but it’s also an easily-consumable and easily-shareable content mechanism. 

Communities: You must learn quickly which “watering holes” your buyers gather at and participate in those forums. With increasingly-rigorous consumer protection laws, traditional “broadcast” marketing — cold calls, cold emails — are far less effective. Communities are a productive way of projecting your message and reaching your audience through genuine interactions.
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Open-source software: If you’re selling to or working with developers, it’s important to spend time in your open-source communities. Being a good community citizen means that you have people that are focused on contributing and participating in an open source community.
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Blog: Your blog serves as a consistent, repetitive point of contact with customers. A lot of content marketing is a single exchange, but blogs keep people engaged repeatedly. With social promotion of your blog posts, you can drive a subscriber base you can continuously engage. For VMware, a visitor that navigates to their website via their blog is 3x more likely to convert, proving this is also a high-intent audience.

Sales and marketing alignment: This is a non-negotiable; it must always be present and invested in. This is a “budget” item in a unique sense in that it requires time investment. Constant connection, accountability, and transparency with the sales org is critical.
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Transactional selling system: For Jen, this is usually Salesforce and a marketing automation platform. You can’t conduct a good business without these.
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Website: This is your “always on” front door. It needs to reflect your corporate positioning, but also engage visitors to create demand.

Digital: Sumo Logic uses digital channels—particularly digital advertising, digital events, and their website—in a variety of forms to reach their target audience. Digital not only drives net-new acquisition, but also brand loyalty. Digital is the top way they engage with their SMB audience because it’s easily scalable to the large market size. They also use small-scale digital events to engage with executives at target enterprise accounts. 
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Enterprise account-based marketing: Sumo Logic has a very sticky product, so they see great success with land-and-expand efforts. Account expansion and cross-sell motions are very important to them, so account-based marketing motions are particularly effective. 
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Content: Buyers are all at different stages of the buying process, and they demand just-in-time educational content tailored to their stage. Suku spends a lot of time thinking about the customer journey framework and how they help move buyers to the next step, and content is the linchpin in that process.