Hello!

Welcome to a longish, but very skimmable issue of The Shortlist.

I’m steeped in building and capturing demand. Setting sales up to win. Driving pipeline that actually converts. There’s a lot that goes into it—but before any of that works, you’ve got to lock in the foundation.

- The pre-reqs.
- The stuff that makes you answer tough questions.
- The core pieces that quietly make or break demand gen.

That’s what we’re diving into this week.

Before we get to that, I want to share a bit about what’s been going on behind the scenes with me.

1. After posting on LinkedIn recently about the brutal job market and my decision to go all in on consulting - so many of you reached out. It was a great week catching up with former colleagues, old friends, and new connections. I’m certainly not alone as many of you are also embracing what comes next.

2. This week, I kick off a website building project - for my own website. I am so excited! I have a wonderful team lined up to work with.

Be sure to check out the ICP building guide I created just for subscribers this week! Link is in the wrap up.

Let’s jump in!

🧩 Part 1: The Pre-Demand Enablers

You can’t build demand without a strong foundation. If that’s off, your campaigns won’t work, your SDRs will flail, and your demand team will take the blame for something that was broken upstream.

✅ Positioning & Messaging

This is the core. If it’s fuzzy or too generic, everything downstream suffers. You’ll waste money on ads that don’t convert, content that doesn’t resonate, and sales decks that confuse buyers. It doesn’t need to be perfect, early on it can take time to get it just right, but you need to be getting this in order, with clear ICP pain points, outcomes, and differentiators.

If you want to go deeper on this, check out April Dunford (obviously) I love the perspective in her book Obviously Awesome, it's the gold standard.

✅ Product Marketing

Product marketing is the glue. It connects what you sell to how you sell it, through messaging, narrative, battlecards, content, launches, and more. Without this, demand gen has to guess how to talk about the product. That’s how you end up with copy that sounds like ChatGPT on a bad day.

✅ Content Strategy

Education is the engine of demand. Great content gives your buyers language, context, and confidence before they talk to sales. A strong content foundation includes:

• A point of view.

• Multiple formats (written, video, social, decks).

• Speaking to pain and knowing what is important to your audience.

There are many amazing content experts. Heike Young for one, and Devin Reed for two. Both are easy to find on LinkedIn if you haven’t already.

✅ Brand

Your brand is what buyers remember, and what makes your demand programs easier (or harder). It’s how you earn trust before you earn a click.

I’m a big believer in brand having character. Being bold. Having a point of view. And it’s entirely critical to having success with demand.

The goal isn’t to be “fun” or “quirky”—it’s to be distinct and memorable. If you sound like every other B2B website, demand gen becomes a grind.

👉 Brand for demand is the focus of the next issue.

✅ Website

Yes, the obvious one. Your website is a hub for learning and engagement. It’s not just a landing page for your ads—it’s the place where buyers form opinions, self-educate, and decide whether to engage. Make it:

• Easy to learn and engage with chat and ungated resources

• Speak to pain, not just features

• Mobile-friendly and fast

✅ SDR Team

I love a great SDR team. When aligned with demand, that’s where the magic happens. They give you real-time buyer feedback, signal intent early, and help you qualify fast. But they also need support:

• Shared messaging and cadences

• Visibility into demand campaigns

• Real-time enablement and feedback loops

👉 Pro move: Strive to strike cold outbounds from the SDR to-do list. Working in sync around the ICP means demand should be warming up conversations and aligning with SDR’s on outreach.

✅ Sales Enablement

We don’t talk about this enough in demand. If your sales team isn’t trained on the messaging, content, or use cases you’re running in campaigns, you’ll lose deals before discovery even happens.

👉 Avoid the trap: Don’t fumble great leads by leaving sales out of the loop. No more “What webinar?” or “What pain point are they responding to?”

🔥 Want help? I’ve got one opening this month for a new demand client. If you’re building pipeline in a high-growth B2B SaaS and need a strategic partner, let’s talk.

🔧 Part 2: The Demand Team’s Groundwork

Before spending budget and launching campaigns, the demand team needs some prep to be successful.

✅ ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

You can’t build demand without a sharp, operational ICP. This isn’t just a persona slide—it’s a shared truth across marketing, sales, and product. Ask:

• Who are your best-fit buyers (based on closed-won + fit)?

• What pain do they have that you uniquely solve?

• What buying triggers matter (hiring signals, tools used, funding rounds)?

📌 You’ve heard me say it before: It’s not just about defining your ICP. It’s about operationalizing it—making sure your entire GTM org knows who you're targeting, how to prioritize them, and how to speak to them.

🎁 Subscriber Bonus: Exclusive access to my ICP Builder—a simple but powerful tool built in Notion to help you define, refine, and operationalize your ICP. Get it in the wrap up section.

✅ Resources

Know your team, your internal partners, and your capacity. Your “resources” aren’t just budget and headcount—they’re access to:

• Subject matter experts (for content and campaigns)

• Internal alignment (demand needs to partner with product, finance, sales, customer success)

• Execution power (designers, writers, devs)

👉 Pro tip: Map your current resources to each core GTM activity—content, campaign ops, paid, SEO, outbound. A lean team works but need to be shaped to meet the goals.

✅ Tech Stack

You don’t need 25 tools. You need a few that do their job well—and integrate cleanly. My go-to baseline:

• ZoomInfo – Great combo of data, AI co-pilot, and call recording.

• HubSpot – Clean CRM, campaign syncing, easy to scale.

Don’t overcomplicate it in the early days. Get what you need to execute well—then evolve as your strategy requires more support and complexity grows.

 📩 I’ve got one opening this month for a new demand client. Email shannon at shannonpham dot com with “Build my demand” if you want to grab that spot!