How to run the first 90 days, from someone who just did.

If the creative audit went well and you have enough data to tell you that you're directionally producing results, the natural next layer is connecting your campaigns into shared audience structures that feed into each other. This is where compound interest can build. Multiple creative formats and multiple different campaigns and channels. At Vector, that eventually became what we called the B2B surround sound play: one core ICP audience, brand awareness on connected TV, retargeting back into LinkedIn engagement ads and thought leadership, plus a Google search layer to capture the demand the awareness campaigns were creating. We wrote up that exact play in a separate blog if you want the actual mechanics.

You don't have to copy that structure. But the principle to steal is layered campaigns built on a shared audience, not five disconnected campaigns competing for the same budget.

If you're going to activate signals or run an ABM motion later in the year, the foundation for that work starts now. You don't have to have a target account list or have a signal architecture finalized yet. You do need to start asking which closed-won deals had which signals present before they closed, because that's the analysis that builds the list. We'll go deeper on this in section 9.

The retro version that helps you is the one where you're willing to kill things that didn't work. The retro version that hurts you is the one designed to make the first 60 days look good.

The questions worth asking:

By the end of month three, you should have enough signal to say what the next quarter looks like. For most teams at this stage, that means doubling down on the channels that worked, starting the signal or ABM motion, and building out a more mature reporting layer.

By 90 days, you should have enough to show direction, not enough to defend every dollar. The attribution work takes longer than that, and setting that expectation with leadership early is the same play as telling them in month one to give the platforms time to learn.

Two pieces of the foundation above are where Vector fits naturally: an audience builder that doesn't require you to have a target account list before you can run anything, and engagement visibility that goes beyond "someone clicked, someone didn't." Our ICP Builder lets you define your audience by who they actually are. Vector also tells you, by name, who clicked your ads and visited your site. Both are things I needed on day one.

The reason I'm putting this in a kit for new demand gen hires (instead of in a list of "later" tools) is that the longer you wait to build the audience layer right, the more budget you spend reaching people you don't actually want. That's why this category is foundational for me.

Everything else, including the things that probably feel essential right now. Multi-touch attribution. Customer journey mapping. Impression-level account influence. A purpose-built attribution platform. All of these are valuable, but none of them block your first campaign.

I used in-platform reporting and CRM last-touch for the first 60 days, paired with Google Looker Studio and Supermetrics for the manual reporting work. Around month two I bought a reporting tool to handle offline conversion tracking and customer journey mapping, because the manual work had grown beyond what I should be doing by hand.

I worked closely with our product marketing manager and our RevOps Leader Sara to do a full ICP analysis, including signal detection in recent closed won deals. We also looked at closed-lost, sales qualified and sales disqualified. Here's an exercise that actually produces something usable:

Going from 40 to five or six feels brutal. It is. But the discipline of narrowing is what makes the signal-based campaigns work later, because you're targeting the patterns that actually predict your wins instead of whatever's easiest to query. Complex signal architecture is earned over time. Get your wins in with the most important signals.

I'd planned to do this kind of work toward the end of the year, but it ended up being one of the bigger pieces of my first 90 days. Once you start asking which closed-won deals had which signals present, that question pulls on a lot of threads: the audience definition for your campaigns, the target account list, how the team talks about who's worth pursuing. You don't have to activate a full signal-based motion in month two, but you do need to start the conversation.

The other reason is that signals shape who your broader campaigns actually reach. Even if you're running brand awareness, knowing your signal layer informs how you narrow the audience down from broad reach to the people most likely to be in market. Starting on the architecture early pays for itself even if you don't activate the full motion for another quarter.

The most useful version of AI for a demand gen leader is small and specific: build a workflow for the thing I do every week or every day, where I know what good looks like, and get the output to 90% of how I'd do it myself. Then you use it daily or weekly, and from there you can start moving into more advanced workflows. Automating the entire stack can wait.

If you start in chat, in your domain expertise, you have taste. You can tell when the output is wrong. AI is fast and confident, and if you don't have the expertise to push back, the confident output starts to look like the right output. That's how you end up with polished, structured, very confident AI slop in your campaigns.

Starting here gives you a chance to refine your frameworks, strategy, and context about how you think and your company. The context layer is extremely important to get right because it's the foundation for everything that comes after.

Vector MCP is one example of an AI workflow worth setting up early in your tenure, because most of what it answers are the questions you're going to be asking yourself every single morning anyway. The questions I use it for most: