Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Demand Generation Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Demand Generation Manager is a hands-on growth marketer accountable for designing, executing, and optimizing multi-channel campaigns that drive qualified leads, accelerate pipeline, and scale revenue. This role blends strategic planning with tactical execution across paid media, email and nurture programs, ABM, content syndication, events/webinars, marketing automation, and analytics — working closely with sales, product marketing, marketing operations, and revenue leadership to turn target accounts into customers.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Demand Generation Specialist / Associate Demand Generation
Marketing Coordinator focused on digital/lead generation
Marketing Operations or Email Marketing Specialist

Advancement To:

Senior Demand Generation Manager
Director of Demand Generation / Head of Growth
VP of Marketing or VP of Revenue Marketing

Lateral Moves:

Product Marketing Manager
Growth Marketing Manager
Marketing Operations / RevOps Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and own an annual and quarterly demand generation plan tied to revenue goals, including channel mix, KPIs (MQLs, SQLs, pipeline influenced, CAC, LTV:CAC), budget allocation, and ROI targets across paid, owned, and earned channels.
Build, execute, and optimize integrated campaigns (email nurturing, paid search, paid social, display, content syndication, webinars, and events) to generate high-quality leads and accelerate pipeline velocity.
Design and run an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy — identify ICP accounts, create intent-based targeting, orchestrate personalized multi-touch sequences, and measure account coverage and conversion uplift.
Manage marketing automation and lead lifecycle: create nurture and re-engagement tracks, define MQL/SQL criteria, implement lead scoring, and ensure timely handoffs to sales with defined SLAs.
Partner with Sales leadership to align campaign objectives, refine lead qualification, provide campaign briefs, and coordinate follow-up cadences to maximize conversion rates from lead to opportunity.
Own paid acquisition channels: strategy, creative briefs, audience targeting, bidding, budget pacing, and performance optimization across Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, programmatic and retargeting platforms.
Lead landing page and conversion rate optimization efforts — write briefs, A/B test CTAs, forms and page layouts, and improve conversion funnels using analytics and UX best practices.
Create measurement frameworks and build dashboards (Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or GA4) to report campaign performance, pipeline attribution, LTV/CAC, and insights to senior leadership weekly and monthly.
Implement and refine multi-touch attribution models to accurately credit marketing influence on pipeline and revenue; use data to reallocate spend to highest-performing channels.
Coordinate with Content Marketing and Product Marketing to produce demand-focused assets (case studies, white papers, webinars, solution briefs) and syndicate them through paid and organic channels to drive top-of-funnel interest.
Manage marketing automation systems and integrations (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot) and collaborate with Marketing Ops to maintain clean CRM data flows and accurate lead lifecycle reporting.
Conduct rigorous experimentation and testing (A/B/n tests, creative variation, audience segmentation) to increase MQL quality and improve conversion rates across funnel stages.
Own campaign creative briefs and performance copywriting for emails, landing pages, ads, and nurture sequences that align messaging to buyer-stage and persona.
Forecast campaign outcomes and pipeline impact, manage monthly/quarterly campaign budgets, and optimize spend to maximize pipeline contribution and marketing-originated revenue.
Lead and manage external vendors and agencies (PPC, programmatic, demand gen partners) to augment internal capabilities and ensure SLAs, deliverables, and performance targets are met.
Drive lifecycle marketing programs to increase product adoption, upsell opportunities and customer advocacy that augment demand generation through referrals and expansion revenue.
Establish and maintain cross-functional processes for campaign planning, GTM launches, lead routing, and post-campaign retrospectives to capture learnings and scale repeatable playbooks.
Monitor market and competitive activity, emerging channels, and intent signals to identify grow opportunities and innovate demand gen tactics and channel experiments.
Maintain compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and email deliverability best practices to protect brand reputation and maintain high inbox placement and engagement rates.
Provide regular training and enablement materials for Sales on campaign audiences, value propositions, collateral, and expected conversion behaviors to improve close rates.
Analyze funnel leakage and implement targeted initiatives to reduce drop-off between awareness, engagement, MQL to SQL and opportunity stages.
Drive segmentation and personalization strategies to maximize relevance and engagement across personas, verticals, and buying-stage cohorts.
Prepare executive-level presentations and ROI analyses that clearly show marketing’s influence on pipeline, wins, and revenue to secure budget and stakeholder buy-in.
Mentor junior demand generation specialists and collaborate with marketing ops to scale processes, templates, and automated workflows for repeatable growth.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and deep-dive analyses to uncover campaign performance drivers and optimization opportunities.
Contribute to cross-functional GTM and product launch planning to ensure demand creation alignment.
Coordinate and support sales events, trade shows, and partner co-marketing opportunities to extend reach and accelerate deal flow.
Participate in vendor selection, RFPs and contract negotiations for paid media, ABM and marketing technology solutions.
Provide post-mortem analyses for major campaigns and share best practices and playbooks with the broader marketing organization.
Collaborate with RevOps to improve lead routing rules, account matching, and attribution fidelity.
Act as a subject matter expert for demand gen tools and processes, and provide training to marketing peers and new hires.
Assist with budget forecasting, spend reconciliation and vendor invoice validation as needed.
Support customer marketing initiatives that complement acquisition efforts (case studies, reference programs, advocacy campaigns).
Help create standardized reporting templates and data dictionaries to improve cross-team data consistency and interpretation.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Marketing automation (Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot) — campaign setup, nurture flows, and lead scoring configuration.
CRM proficiency (Salesforce) including lead/contact object management, campaign integrations, and report building.
Paid media management across Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta, and programmatic platforms with hands-on bid and creative optimization experience.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platform experience (Demandbase, 6sense, Terminus) and intent-data activation.
Analytics and dashboards (Google Analytics / GA4, Looker, Tableau, Power BI) — building executive and ops-level reports.
Multi-touch attribution modeling and measurement frameworks for pipeline and revenue impact analysis.
A/B testing and CRO tools (Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce) and experience designing statistically valid experiments.
SQL and data querying skills for ad-hoc performance analysis and segmentation (preferred).
Email deliverability and list hygiene best practices, plus expertise in designing high-performing nurture cadences.
Excel / Google Sheets advanced skills for modeling, forecasting and budget management.
Experience with webinar platforms, event lead capture tools, and integrations to marketing automation/CRM.
Familiarity with SEO/SEM fundamentals and conversion-oriented landing page design.

Soft Skills

Strategic and analytical mindset with the ability to translate data into actionable growth opportunities.
Strong cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management — able to align Sales, Product, Content and RevOps.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including persuasive copy for ads and emails.
Project management and organization — capable of running multiple concurrent campaigns and meeting deadlines.
Results-driven and KPI-focused with a bias for experimentation and continuous improvement.
Creative problem-solving and adaptability in a fast-paced, scaling environment.
Leadership and mentorship — experience guiding junior marketers and external agencies.
Attention to detail, especially when managing budgets, data flows, and compliance requirements.
Time management and prioritization in high-volume campaign cycles.
Customer and revenue-centric orientation with a focus on pipeline contribution and marketing ROI.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

MBA or Master's in Marketing, Analytics, or Business (preferred for senior roles).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Marketing
Business Administration
Communications
Data Analytics / Statistics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 4–8 years in B2B demand generation, digital marketing, or growth marketing roles.

Preferred:

5+ years managing demand generation programs for B2B SaaS or enterprise technology companies.
Demonstrated track record of building scalable programs that directly influence pipeline and revenue.
Experience managing paid media budgets, ABM programs, and marketing automation at scale.
Proven experience partnering with Sales and RevOps to implement SLAs, lead scoring, and robust attribution models.