AMA: Sentry Head of Demand Generation, Fanette Jobard on Demand Generation KPI's

Great question! To me, it would be what I call 'MCI' (Marketing Customer Interaction) or 'MAI' (Marketing Account Interactions). The goal here is to track marketing touches at the account level. By tracking all campaign touches—whether it’s for a prospect account or an account ready for expansion—you can assess some level of intent. For instance, let’s say one account had 5 people attend a webinar, 2 people meet us at an event, and 10 others open and click your newsletter. This would give a tota ...Read More

Similar to the question about worst KPIs, I believe vanity metrics and volume KPIs are often too easy to manipulate and can be used to tell a misleading story. Metrics like email open rates and click-through rates can be artificially inflated by bots. Lead counts and sign-ups can also be influenced by acquisition campaigns that don’t necessarily bring in high-quality prospects. Likewise, a low cost-per-lead (CPL) is often over-hyped; in the end, what matters is quality, bottom-of-funnel conversi ...Read More

Congrats! This is an exciting role, and it’s definitely an addictive one because you’ll have the chance to build everything from the ground up. I’d start by focusing on MQLs as your north star—quality leads that either support sales or, in a self-serve model, drive free trials. The definition isn’t set in stone; it’s a work in progress. You’ll need to find the right balance, possibly through lead scoring, to determine what qualifies as a perfect MQL. It’s also helpful to consider metrics like Le ...Read More

Start by aligning Demand Generation’s OKRs with the company’s main pillars so that every internal stakeholder can understand your goals. For each theme, define 2-3 highly measurable KRs (key results), then tie each KR to specific activities, campaigns, or initiatives to achieve those results. For example: Company Goal: Become the leader in the Enterprise segment. DG Matching Goal: Drive demand for the Enterprise segment. DG OKRs: Increase Enterprise ARR by X%; acquire X% more new Enterprise logo ...Read More

If Demand Generation and Content Marketing were to share a single KPI, Marketing Engaged Leads (MELs)—also known as leads generated or new emails in the system—would be ideal. MELs provide a clear view of top-of-funnel content performance, it answers which blog posts, landing pages, and ad creatives drive new signups and grow the lead base. This KPI is powerful for understanding if content is attracting the right leads and if Demand Generation can scale paid traffic to that specific content effe ...Read More

I love this question, though it’s a challenging one because there are plenty of KPIs that can be misleading or even counterproductive to commit to. Generally, I believe it's best to avoid KPIs that seem too easy, too vague, or overly flattering. The reason is simple: there are countless ways to tweak metrics to make them appear more favorable than they actually are. Common Quantitative Pitfalls (often volume-based without a quality component): -Leads collected during an event: For instance, it’s ...Read More

You could just rename MQL to PQL (product qualified lead) and, voilà! Just kidding. Many teams treat sales-led and self-serve as entirely separate models, but in my view, the KPIs don’t need to change much. In most companies, it’s actually helpful to keep KPI names consistent so that new hires familiar with a sales-led funnel can easily understand the different stages. You’ll still track Leads/MELs, PQLs/MQLs, paid users/SQLs, and ARR/revenue. Of course, in self-serve, you won’t have stages like ...Read More

This is the million-dollar question! It’s a real challenge for many companies, as it touches on all the complexities of attribution. I would start by defining a straightforward way to track each channel’s performance across the funnel stages—Leads, MQLs, and SQLs—for different channels (events, paid, product, organic, etc.). Next, analyze past results to identify where you have control over volume, and adjust planning for the upcoming quarter based on these insights. For ongoing tracking, the te ...Read More

Framing KPIs in terms of control and impact: if you control it or influence it, you can own it. In Demand Gen, we can control lead quality, MQLs routed to sales, and even the initial stages, such as Sales Accepted Leads, meetings, and early-stage opportunities. However, once we move past meetings and into opportunity creation, we enter a gray area. At that point, we’re less in control of what sales is doing during meetings or POCs, making it harder to be accountable for bottom-of-funnel outcomes ...Read More

Sharing in a central wiki or company repository (we use Notion at Sentry), at the same time as other teams to give them the same level of attention. I am a big fan of async communication. Connecting ahead of time with other business stakeholder to see how these KPIs fit in their pictures and serve their need. Connecting ahead of time with the Demand Gen DRIs for each KPIs to request their feedback and how they would prioritize these differently. On a regular basis, organizing weekly pipeline mee ...Read More