A conversation with Mandeep Khera, Global Demand Generation and Channel Marketing Leader, Gigamon
I recently had the chance to sit down with Mandeep Khera, VP of Demand Gen and Channel Marketing at Gigamon, to talk about best practices around organizing and executing an effective global demand strategy and how he and his team drive success leveraging a combination of centralized and regional resources. We talked about the importance of communication and collaboration, the tradeoffs necessary to make global teams more effective, how to build agility across regions to accelerate marketing execution and how they work with partners like TechTarget on a global and local scale. You can find the full video of our conversation here or view it below.
Here are some of the key themes and takeaways from our conversation:
How to collaborate across regions to drive better decision-making
I asked Mandeep about how he involves the global marketing teams in the decision-making process. They take a thoughtful approach to validating decisions made by the centralized corporate marketing team with the regional teams. The key is to collaborate very closely in each step when making a major decision whether it’s about budgets or changes in strategy. For example, they recently re-launched their ABM strategy and closely involved each team in formulating new account lists to ensure buy in. When content is created in the US, each region gives its input and the final product is translated and produced locally. The important takeaway is to be sure to involve your entire global team in each step of the decision-making process.
Open, data-driven communication is essential for success
Keeping an open communications channel with global teams is fundamental to success. Mandeep’s strategy revolves around a regular and frequent communications cadence. They have weekly funnel meetings, demand gen meetings and metrics meetings. Gigamon is very data-centric, using metrics to look at trends that may affect campaigns and pipeline and head them off. They also have a content governance council, a multi-disciplinary group to look at content that’s needed and what’s in the pipeline and ensure that the topics are relevant to the regions. It is important to get input from all levels across the organization from BDRs in the trenches to senior management.
How to quickly respond to changing market conditions globally or within regions
The Covid-19 pandemic caused virtually every company in every industry to make some sort of pivot. Mandeep explained that Gigamon’s open communications channels provided the agility to quickly adjust its messaging to meet changing market demands. When the pandemic began, as a networking company, the global teams came together to create new messaging about the challenges to bandwidth and security associated with people suddenly working remotely. Now the company is shifting to stronger ROI messaging as companies once again are looking toward things like digital transformation where network optimization is a critical factor and can provide significant cost savings.
Building for better agility
Mandeep explained that the collaborative model does take time and involve lots of meetings, but in the end makes the organization more agile. For example, a lot of their content is created by a centralized content team, but the feedback channels in place in the regions ultimately speed the creation of the final product. In the meantime, the downsides to the model are few and mostly related to logistics like accommodating global time zones for meetings.
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