AMA: Iterable Sr. Director, Marketing Operations & Digital Marketing, Mike Braund on Demand Generation KPI's

This is going to vary by every company and where that demand gen team within the company is at in their maturity. O in OKR is "Objective" which align up to company strategy and vision, so that's the piece that's going to change the most and make this question tough to give a blanket or generalized answer for. A few generalized measures that I would guess most demand gen teams would want to measure are related to how they're creating awareness of their product in the market, how they're capturing ...Read More

This can be a tough question and definitely not something myself or our team has mastered. I do like stretching goals, so I'm ok falling short in some cases. Having historical data to reference and provide relativity to performance is helpful. Working backwards from the main outcomes where possible. There's lots of reverse conversion math in marketing to get to a target. If you need 100 opps how man marketing leads do you need? If your program is budget our resource dependent than taking an assu ...Read More

I appreciate this question a lot, and it made me laugh. I'll take the "over-hyped" side of the question. It can come from any raw production KPI - leads, demos, event registrants etc. An element of quality needs to exist in most cases for those to hold value. The easy example is 100 demos and 90 are spam. The more difficult ones come from things like events where you want to fill the room, but is it filled with the right types of companies and right types of roles from those companies. We're cur ...Read More

There are a few things that come to mind for me me when you're in early stages Defining your target audience (ICP and personas) and understanding the size of that audience (your TAM) will help you understand how much you want to lean into scaled tactics Where does your target audience live? you might need to test to figure this out if it's not clear from your Capacity of your sales team to pick up volume is also related to this. How much is quality vs quantity important? Early on I think startin ...Read More

Our foundational measures of success for our teams, channels, and campaigns are built out in a measurement plan. The duration of the OKR depends on how long it will take to get to the impact/goal of the work. The biggest strategic likely last more than one quarter. I think it can be beneficial have some of those foundational measures as OKRs that are consistent quarter over quarter, so you're not constantly changing the core focus of the team QoQ. During our quarterly planning process we tie the ...Read More

The quickest answer for demand generation would be impact to pipeline and bookings produced. How you represent that is a longer answer that would include the ability to show how different marketing channels and engagements impact each phase of the buying journey/funnel/flywheel. For example in the awareness stage showing how many targeted impressions you got is important, how many web visits, how many demos or contact sales submissions, how many quality leads did marketing produce. Those numbers ...Read More

Here are some ways to get started Align on goals and how success will be measured for you Input tour from your partners and stakeholders to inform your plan Create your vision/strategy for how to deliver on your goals/targets to align and socialize with your manager and stakeholders (your marketing team and sales as focus points) Be open to feedback and incorporate the feedback as you socialize your plan. Spend time is developing and setting up my measurement frameworks. This is how you're going ...Read More

I know that feeling for sure. I still think it's important to do. Establishing a baseline is important to give us feedback and future efforts to tell us if they're helping or not. I'm ok having stretching goals, and not hitting them. I wouldn't want all my goals to be stretching, but ok to have a few. If you're in a new marketing you can look to some industry bench marks or external peer input to help get an idea, and then go from there. If you're just getting started you might want to revisit/r ...Read More

We try to keep it simple. We align the channel to where it will impact the in the funnel and then create a KPI for the funnel stage and channel. That means that a channel might show up a couple times. For example for Paid search we can have a mid-funnel KPI for lead creation, and a bottom of funnel KPI for sourced pipeline or bookings. We track efficiency metrics next to production metrics to compare over time periods (MoM, QoQ, YoY) to get a sense of relative performance of the dollars spent in ...Read More

Ideally prioritized work and KPIs are getting organized across the department, so through you're quarter you're reporting on them there. For KPIs that might not be at the departmental level I think of it in the lens of project management. I like using the DACI model (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) to then determine who to communicate relevant updates to about your work and outcomes/impacts. To your call out you'd align with the A and C group pre-project, and communicate with all during ...Read More