AMA: Snowflake Head of Demand Generation, Jennifer King on Demand Generation KPI's

I usually think about KPI targets as something you build, not pick. You start with the business goal—like how much pipeline or revenue you need—and work backwards to what marketing has to deliver to get there. Then you sanity check it with history. What have you actually been able to produce before? What’s seasonal? What’s trending up or down? After that, you layer in reality: how much can the team actually execute given budget, headcount, and sales capacity. A target that ignores capacity usual ...Read More

The biggest one I see missing is pipeline quality—not just pipeline volume. A lot of demand gen teams are still optimizing for MQLs or even pipeline created, but not tracking what actually happens downstream. So you end up with “great” top-of-funnel numbers that don’t convert. The KPI that usually exposes this gap is something like: • MQL → opportunity conversion rate • opportunity → closed-won rate • or even better, pipeline-to-revenue conversion and velocity If those aren’t healthy, it doesn’t ...Read More

A few KPIs are often over-hyped in demand gen: MQL volume—easy to inflate if you know what levers to pull, but doesn’t guarantee pipeline or revenue. Cost per lead (CPL)—can reward cheap, low-quality leads. Email open rates—increasingly unreliable due to tracking limits. Website traffic—good for awareness, but not a strong success signal on its own. Overall, these are activity or proxy metrics. They’re useful for context, but not great measures of true performance. Stronger KPIs focus on pipelin ...Read More

The worst KPIs to commit to are the ones that are easy to game, disconnected from revenue, or only measure activity instead of outcomes. A few big offenders: Lead volume or CPL goals. They push teams toward cheap, low-intent leads that don’t convert well downstream. Email opens or click-through rates as primary goals. They’re noisy, increasingly unreliable, and don’t consistently correlate with revenue or at least it’s hard to tie it back. Website traffic goals. Traffic can be bought or optimize ...Read More

I start with the business goal—usually revenue or pipeline—and work backwards from there putting a bottoms up plan. Then I map the funnel and separate what marketing can truly influence from what sales owns, so there’s no overlap or confusion. From that, I pick a small set of KPIs across three areas: • Output (pipeline created or sourced) • Efficiency (conversion rates across funnel stages) • Velocity/quality (how fast deals move and how much closes) I pressure test each metric by asking: if thi ...Read More

A modern B2B demand gen team is responsible for creating awareness, capturing intent, accelerating pipeline, and influencing revenue across the full buyer journey. The exact mix varies by company size, sales model, and market maturity, but most teams focus on areas like paid digital, webinars/events, ABM, lifecycle marketing, content campaigns, field marketing, website conversion, and sales alignment. More enterprise companies are starting to look at buying groups within accounts and account acc ...Read More