AMA: Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth, Sheena Sharma on Demand Generation Strategy

I think that website optimization should be an ongoing priority if the marketing team has full ownership of the website. I've had web managers and developer agencies roll into my team in many of my past roles, and the reason for that was we really thought about the website as a key place to drive demand. Some other indicators that would tell me that website optimization should be a priority: You don't have a traffic > lead conversion goal You don't have a goal for net new leads You are spendi ...Read More

The first places I'd invest for short term wins: Capture intent via paid search (Google search, but also Bing) across branded and non branded keywords Optimize your website for lead conversion (CTA structure, strategy, form enrichment) Make sure you have multiple "high intent" offers including a contact sales request, live demo program, on demand demo program with short videos on your product, and free trial At the same time, you have to invest in medium-term strategies: SEO for key non brand ke ...Read More

Account-based marketing programs are a great place to start straddling the line of new biz + expansion as a marketing organization. Most marketing and demand teams have more mature motions against driving new logo. Account based marketing is a long game, but you can get some early wins and indicators of success by adding in some expansion/upsell accounts into your account-based motions. For example, we developed an account-based marketing list that was 50/50 new business vs. expansion and we ini ...Read More

I always think about demand generation's contribution to company revenue. For example, I think about marketing contributing to inbound, new logo pipeline + ARR by segment. Marketing should contribute more to an SMB segment (80%+), and less for an Enterprise or Strategic segment (~30%). All marketing demand generation goals from SQL up to MQL and lead should be derived directly from the revenue goal. Ideally, that revenue goal is built from a shared model across finance, RevOps, sales and marketi ...Read More

This is by no means exhaustive, but here are some of the angles I'd consider when building a lead scoring system: What does your web/content ecosystem look like? - what's your new content publishing cadence? What's the mix of content across one pagers, ebooks, webinars, IRL events? What high-value pages do you have on your site? What does a typical user's journey look like (are they binging a bunch of content in one session? Or visiting your home page and signing up for a trial?) Do you have acc ...Read More

I think this is a really great question, and a too often overlooked area for really drilling down into your team's success. You of course have to have product-market fit, the right positioning + messaging, and the right creative campaigns. But, you will not be able to create a predictable, scalable demand generation program if you do not have the muscle of reviewing, recapping and iterating on your top campaigns. When I was at Eventbrite, our team pioneered the concept of quarterly demand genera ...Read More