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

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 marketing, so everyone's aligned on who's contributing what and the key assumptions to get there. For example, if marketing's responsible for 50% of a $1M target, that's $500K in ARR. Assume you need a pipeline coverage ratio of 4x, so you need to generate $2M in pipeline. Using your average deal size of $25, that means you need to generate 80 opportunities. Your Lead, MQL and SAL targets should tie to get to that 80 opportunity target. Sales quota is a slightly different story as most of the time finance plans have some kind of % quota attainment built in, which accounts for ramp, attrition and promotions - so I'd be careful about signing up for a marketing target that scales with the number of quota carriers, UNLESS your marketing budget or resourcing scales along with that.

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 spending more than 25% of your marketing opex budget on paid and you don't have a dedicated landing page strategy for paid * You don't regularly review your top 5 trafficked pages for conversion optimizations * You have low conversion on key product and solution pages * You get most of your conversions from your home page and not on key product or resource pages * You don't have a documented website CTA strategy

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 keywords * Content generation at the top and middle of funnel that is solution-agnostic and focused on solving the problems your key buyer personas face * Website messaging, positioning and key pages for your key verticals, personas or solutions * Brand efforts to drive awareness, including PR, events/field activations, brand advertising, and paid social * Lead generation via paid channels like paid social, content syndication, and targeted industry placements

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 access to any third party intent signals? - do you have access to intent signals from a third party like 6Sense or G2 and can you bring that into your scoring model? I don't always recommend this, but if you have a limited sales team, adding intent might help to focus your AEs/SDRs. * Buying group - who are your core personas, and who is a buyer vs. influencer on the sale? Can you score buyers more aggressively, and influencers a little less? * How big is your sales organization? Do you have 1 SDR or a team of 10? This is one of the most important indicators you should consider: Your organization might be strapped in SDR resources, meaning you should be filtering for quality. Or, you might have a bigger team, meaning you can send a higher volume of MQLs through to the team. * Do you have multiple SKUs or solutions that you are selling to different buyers? If so, you might want to consider a product-based scoring system that adds points if folks are interested in different elements of your product or service. * What's your typical sales cycle and deal size? For SMB business with smaller deal sizes, you should err on speed to lead and reaching out when folks are engaged, as these buyers will often go with whoever gets back to them first. For enterprise businesses with longer deal cycles, you might want to consider more stringent criteria for lead scoring. * What's your plan to allow folks to 're-MQL'? Make sure that you build a system that is flexible enough to allow people to come back through on the right cadence. If you are solely reliant on new leads or prospects you will quickly need to increase budgets and campaign activities to be able to hit your demand targets. * What high intent signals can you mine across all of the above questions to get at an "ideal" MQL? * Finally: INTERVIEW sales leaders, all the way up to the CRO to get alignment on the definition of a "warm" prospect. If you work day in and day out with BDRs, you may get a different perspective than what someone in leadership would say. Build a slide deck with a few examples: Ex. a product leader from this industry visited our site via an organic search result, clicked around on 3 pages, and then came back a week later to download this white paper. Do you think we should have a sales person reach out?

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 initially saw traction with the expansion accounts. Also, expansion + upsell campaigns can be successful if you have a product-led growth motion, leveraging in-product signals to surface relevant customers to BDRs and AEs.

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 generation retrospectives, breaking down functional performance across email, social, web, campaigns, webinars, content and paid. When I was at Envoy, we partnered closely with the BDR team to create aligned DG:BDR retros that dove into our time to first touch, sales outreach response rates, and top sequences. These performance reviews allowed us to find areas for optimization and improvement on both evergreen campaigns like paid search, paid social and email nurture. We also got ideas for new creative campaigns that we could try to improve mid-funnel conversion rates. One pro tip: As you build your strategy for your quarterly campaigns, make sure you plan to have at least a 30-day retro + report out for any major initiatives.