AMA: Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth, Sheena Sharma on Demand Generation KPI's

These are the core OKRs that I've tracked in various forms throughout my demand generation career: Objective: Drive pipeline Key Results: Raw volume merics: Leads: Net new names added to the database MQLs: Marketing qualified leads, or folks who have reached some kind of behavioral, predictive or demographic threshold SALs: Sales accepted leads, or folks that BDRs/AEs have accepted to work SQLs: Meetings booked. This can be either an SQL # or an SQL $ value, depending on your business. Funnel ef ...Read More

I ran a training for my team on this earlier this year! Here's an abridged version (feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want the full deck): What do we mean when we say “project-specific KPI”? As we develop quarterly plans, or kick off specific strategies, we look for folks to outline a few things: Context: What’s true today, or what got us here Objective: What we are trying to achieve. Usually no more than 1-3. Strategies: How we are going to hit our objective(s) DACI: Who is invol ...Read More

Not necessarily over-hyped, but I think it is important to find the balance between being too focused on top-of-funnel (Traffic, leads, MQLs) and having targets that are out of your control to drive (closed / won, revenue). If your marketing team is ONLY KPI'ed on MQLs and nothing else, you may be incentivized to drive a ton of volume at the detriment to quality. Then your sales team might come back and say that the 'leads' you are sending aren't good quality. If you don't have other metrics fur ...Read More

I'd think about how you can leverage agency and contractor resources to get more out of your small team. Then I'd also look at the maturity of the marketing program: Do you have a decent database of leads, and the goal is activating that database and driving MQLs and SQLs? If so, you should probably lean into marketing automation, engagement programs, email + lifecycle programs, and BDR enablement. Do you have no database to speak of? Then you want to spend time and dollars on ensuring you have ...Read More

Quarterly/annual OKRs: In an ideal world, you have a joint financial planning process between demand gen + Sales that outlines the sales bookings targets you need to hit for the year, and then broken down by quarter. From there, say your quarterly sales bookings plan is $5M. The finance and sales operations team (sometimes it is finance, sometimes it is sales strategy/operations, sometimes it is a revenue operations function), should then have a good sense of where that booking needs to come fro ...Read More

Yes! I actually had this experience for a few years. We had a pretty healthy ad budget as a business, but the focus wasn't specifically on the sales funnel. It was more focused on driving self-serve. My remit was driving pipeline for the sales organization, so we had to get smart about how we were bringing people in and engaging them. What we did in that scenario was focus on building a really strong inbound engine: Creating content based on the pain points of what our target audience was search ...Read More

See my answer on how I recommend setting targets - I think it's really really hard but really really important to get past the uncertainty, and set some kind of target.  In my 10+ years of building and launching demand generation programs, I honestly can't remember a time when I have wished I *didn't* at least try to set a target. I find most marketing leadership and startup leaders are flexible and understanding when you get a KPI wrong the first time. Don't make it a pattern though - because y ...Read More

This is another great question! I think there a few categories of KPIs where you should be wary: (1) KPIs or metrics that are out of your control. I fully believe that marketing and demand generation should be really focused on driving meaningful results for the business. I see a lot of folks talking about demand generation having a revenue target. I think that's a relevant lagging indicator, but a really hard leading indicator to drive. You want to be able to have controls on the inputs in orde ...Read More

In a self-serve world, you don't have the traditional sales funnel stages of MQL, SAL, SQL and closed/won to manage. You are probably focusing more on things like traffic, sign ups, activations, product engagement and invoices/customers. The levers you pull here are probably more around website optimization, paid ad programs, email + lifecycle programs and in-product optimizations. In a sales-driven world you'd be talking more about offline channels (events, direct mail, lead gen programs, etc.) ...Read More

I love this question! I think it is really important to make sure that you have alignment on a few key things before you start any project or initiative: Context Objective Strategies KPIs Primary Secondary Out of scope DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) Risks/dependencies Timeline I actually created a template for project plans / strategy docs. Sharable version here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11bFGp1KErN7ytcHxvJu9pEUQxWb2i_DRiQuLUUmuM9Q/edit Before work starts: What's reall ...Read More