AMA: Atlassian Sr. Director: Head of Global Lifecycle Marketing, Teamwork Foundations (Self-serve & High Touch), Ami Denman on Demand Generation KPI's

My experience is setting targets against Marketing Influenced Pipeline. Typically Marketing Influence is 60-70% of pipeline. Pipeline coverage ratio = how much total pipeline you need to hit your revenue goal (3-5:1 means $3-5M pipeline for every $1M revenue target). 

Otherwise, for other funnel KPIs, you can work backwards from revenue by using conversion rates: revenue/ average deal size/ close rate/ SQL-to-close rate /MQL-to-SQL rate = MQL

Pipeline Velocity - many focus on getting leads into the funnel but it’s also valuable to help get those deals to close faster!

MQLs - can be gamed and meaningless without context. In other words, you can have a ton of leads but if their conversion rate is low, it doesn’t matter how many you have. 

Yes, definitely - the key is focusing on really focusing on leveraging owned  and earned channels like influencer partnerships, strong content, community building and leveraging internal employees personal brands (see the other question about domains Demand Gen owns). The most effective Demand gen comes from building authentic relationships and valuable content. 

Leading: 

• Traffic to high-intent pages

• Email engagement

• Demo requests

Lagging: 

• SQLs generated

• Pipeline influenced

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Content-specific: 

• Time on page

• Content-to-SQL conversion rate

• Organic search rankings

Start with industry standards mixed with any data you have reflecting your unique circumstances. Forecast goals for the next 2 to 3 quarters with the expectation that you will apply learnings to adjust and update according to whatever pattern you see. 

Work backwards from revenue and then hold the team accountable for one to two steps from revenue and is still within their influence - likely SQLs or pipeline contribution. My recommendation is actually Marketing Influenced Pipeline (MIP) which shows the actual contribution to deals Sales can close rather than just measuring activity or early stage conversion. 

Demand gen is about driving leads to sales while growth marketing is about the entire customer journey from acquisition to purchase and often with a lot of experimentation