AMA: Salesforce Senior Director, Global Campaigns, Justin Carapinha on Demand Generation KPI's

While KPIs such as MQLs, SQLs, Marketing generated pipeline are typical, I think KPIs that allow marketing and sales to get more granular into what is actually happen with lead disposition is critical. Often times marketers will have a laser focus on those standard KPIs (which is not a bad thing) that they often times don't have the right insights to determine why leads may or may not be converting. For this I believe it's also important to look at KPIs and data points associated to different lead attributed. Meaning, speed to lead (how long on average is it taking a marketing generated lead to be followed up with), the average number of touch points made into a lead before it's converted or disqualified, as well as disposition statuses (i.e. qualified, no-answer/no-connect - disqualified, not interested - disqualified, etc.). In addition to lead disposition measurement, it's also important to understand WHO your marketing team is engaging with and passing over to sales. For this it's important to align on "decision maker" or "C-suite" level leads vs. influencers and how many your organization is generating each week/month/year and the investment aligned to each lead persona. All of these additional demand generation KPIs help provide powerful insights and tell a story off the value marketing is adding for Sales.

It's not too different from your traditional demand funnel/waterfall and KPIs, but instead of leads > MQLs > SQLs > Opportunities > $ pipeline, your funnel should start with web traffic, both from an aggregate perspective, as well as the core pages you want to drive users to sign-up for your self-service offering. Quality web visitors are essentially your "leads," and from there you measure conversions to your sign-up pages, web trial downloads and starts, paid users, and eventually upgrades, expansion, etc. Then depending on your martech sophistication you can get extremely granular with your UTM parameters to measure where traffic is coming from, whether by channel (i.e. organic search, SEM, paid media, organic social, etc.), tactic, campaigns, etc. and continually optimize based on where you're seeing the greatest conversion throughout the self-serve funnel.

Ultimately you want to work across the company's leadership team and determine what is most important to them and what success for marketing and demand generation looks like. If leadership is not bought into what marketing is measuring or finds important, then it will create a disconnect that is difficult to overcome. Now, seeing that all companies and leadership teams are different, I strongly recommend trying to tie your demand generation efforts as close to company revenue and tangible ROI as possible. So while impressions, clicks, click-thru-rates, website visits are all important marketing inputs to measure, it's always best to align on KPIs and metrics that show the impact on the business. This typically looks like number of MQLs, SQL, marketing generated and influenced opportunities and associated pipeline generated. Once you can align on the definitions of these KPIs for your business, signing up for a specific percentage of pipeline sourced via marketing is the ultimate way to show marketing accountability and impact on the business. Fewer actionable and impactful KPIs is better. The same is true for a self-service SaaS model. Tying your efforts and holding your team accountable to the metrics that matter is most important (i.e. product downloads, trials started, trails converted, paying customers, etc.).

Depending on your business model and offering, I recommend first and foremost partnering with your cross-functional stakeholders and building trust. For example, in a traditional B2B sales led go-to-market motion, you should make it a point to become best friends with your sales leadership team and understanding what is most important to them. If you're not aligned with what is important to sales, it'll be very difficult to see success. If you're part of a self-service SaaS go-to-market motion, partnering with Product leadership will be critical so you can work together to understand product dependencies that lead to successful customer acquisition while decreasing product barriers for customers.

This is a great question as marketers can often times fall into the trap of wanting to measure everything or too much, which is not a luxury they can have at a startup. I'd start with what leadership and sales cares the most about. If it's a self-service SaaS offering, measure quality visitors to the website and core product pages, as well as conversions on the offering/trail downloads. If a B2B sales led motion, I recommend measure not just the number of leads you're generating and passing to sales, but also which of those are truly qualified and willing to have a conversation with sales. Defining what your company's "MQL" looks like will be very important in gaining buy-in with sales leadership. From there you'll want to measure the conversion from MQL to SQL and pipeline attributed from your marketing programs/campaigns.

I don't necessary think there are any KPIs that are "unimportant" as everything can be measured and provide value and insights to the business. However, there is a difference between marketing "inputs" and "outcomes." And "outcomes" should ultimately be those KPIs that truly impact that business (e.g. MQLs, SQLs, marketing generated pipeline, product demos or trials downloaded/viewed, etc.). While "inputs" are still important, they are those KPIs that help lead to or drive the business outcomes (e.g. web visits, cold leads, event attendees, etc.). I think marketers fall into the trap of putting too much of an emphasis on the inputs, instead of using them as a directional data point to better understand how you can impact the business outcomes. For instance, I've seen marketers care too much about measuring "leads" generated and spending too much time justifying why they're important, when they should be spending time on understand how MQLs and SQLs are driving results for the business.

Typically a content marketing function is measured on the engagement with the associated content put into market via paid, owned, earned tactics (i.e. content/asset downloads, social media engagements, webinar views, etc.), however when associating that content to demand generation programs and campaigns, It's important to understand how that content is impacting and driving the business. Essentially, how many MQLs did that content produce and ultimately what is pipeline associated to the content. I think it's also important to understand how marketing content is driving business outcomes via a direct attribution, as well as influenced attribution as customers will engage with multiple pieces of content throughout the customer journey. However, if your company is not at the state of having a sophisticated multi-touch attribution model that provides a weighted measure of the content's impact, you'll have to align on a first-touch or last-touch model to determine which content gets "credit" for driving downstream impact. It's also important to understand the type of content your organization is creating and the purpose of that content. For example, thought leadership content is not typically intended to drive short term pipeline, but it can impact a weighted multi-touch attribution model. Content on a company's website also has a very different purpose which is to engage and convert customers/prospects to the next action in the customer journey. Therefore it's very important to align on clear expectations of the purpose of the content being produced before it goes into market.