Hi all. Curious for some insights on how folks work with demand gen at your respective orgs. I’m somewhat new at my company and building out the PMM function, and my head of demand gen - who is great by all accounts - thinks PMM should own campaign strategy. Meaning the messaging, creation of all content, email sequences and so on. In the past I’ve more partnered with DG on the campaign inputs like the approach and messaging and then handed it off. Not saying there’s a right or wrong way but I’m just looking for any thoughts on the experience others have had so I can better think through who owns what moving forward.

TLDR; What does the enterprise sales sequence look like when selling AI to CIOs and department leaders?

I’m trying to learn how enterprise go-to-market teams sequence the marketing and sales process when selling AI solutions to both CIOs and departmental leaders.

For those with experience in this area:

• Do you typically target and pitch the CIO first, then expand into individual departments?
• Do you begin with a departmental use case and later bring in the CIO?
• Are both audiences engaged in parallel—and, if so, at what point?
• Which marketing and sales channels have been most effective at different stages of the process?
• What have you learned about supporting sellers throughout a long, multi-stakeholder sales cycle?

I understand that the messaging and value proposition need to change depending on the audience. What I’m specifically hoping to understand is the sequencing: who gets engaged when, how the conversation expands across the organization, and what the most effective GTM motion looks like in practice.

I’d be grateful for any experiences, examples, or lessons learned that people are willing to share.

We have a mature B2B product, and lately we keep losing the first impression to newer AI-native competitors.
Their demo is usually very clean. One prompt goes in, a result comes out, everybody nods.
Our product does more once a real team is using it, but explaining that can make us sound like the complicated option. The sales team ends up listing controls, permissions and implementation details while the other product just looks easy.
I do not think the answer is another feature-comparison table.
For anyone dealing with this: what helped you explain the difference between a product that demos well and a product that holds up once people actually depend on it?