AMA: Snowflake Head of Enterprise Marketing, India, Kanchan Belavadi on Demand Generation KPI's

What is the objective that you want to drive? Is it customer acquisition? Is the top of your funnel healthy, but conversions aren’t? Are you looking at optimizing cost and campaign performance? The answers to the above questions should give you the primary metrics and KPIs that you need to monitor. Some metrics that will show up are: * MQLs, SQLs, etc., which help you monitor your customer acquisition strategy * Metrics like, Sign ups, Meetings completed, Pipeline, Win Rate, Conversion of MQLs to SQLs, etc. can help you focus on conversions and pipeline health * Tracking Cost per Lead, Cost per customer, etc. are metrics that’d help you manage campaign performance Content metrics can range from website related - bounce rate, user engagement, leads generated, page views, to time spent on page, etc. But the ultimate test lies in conversions. Apart from the above, a continuous analysis of campaigns, source of SQLs, wins, etc. channels that are effective, will help you determine areas that are working and areas that need work.

Demand generation: reaching out to prospects, engaging with them and building pipeline. More broad based and focused mostly on customer acquisition. Growth marketing: more focused on the entire journey from customer acquisition to retention. This would include cross-selling, upselling to customers, so the journey continues. This also is a lot more data driven, where you’d access information about the customer’s usage of your product and leverage in-app features to reach out to customers. For reference look up AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue) for Growth Marketing.

A first hire means a lot of ground to cover, as well as the need to show some quick wins. Hopefully, the start-up has attained product-market fit. Your primary responsibility is the funnel – generate leads, opportunities/pipeline, etc. Most often you’d have to over pivot on digital as a channel focusing on driving leads through website, content, paid, social, email, etc., to achieve scale. But apart from digital, you should look at leveraging other channels to help you build the funnel.

There are 2 sets of KPIs that you need to keep at hand. One is for internal marketing consumption and the other is what you share with the business. The business will be more interested bottom of the funnel, so pipeline, opportunities etc. While for internal tracking, you’d need to track everything from MQLs to revenue and conversions in between. As you socialize KPIs with these different set of folks, align with their objectives and goals. During the planning process as you outline the plan and commit to delivering certain objectives, be very clear – on the investment required and the outcomes you will own. Once you get that sign off, a tracker or dashboard highlighting these metrics should be shared on a weekly cadence either over a call or email (via Tableau or whatever tools you’d use), so that everyone is aware of where you are against the goals. This also helps flag and overcome any obstacles early on. A similar process for internal marketing tracking also helps. Sign off during planning for goal setting, from the entire team and then a weekly tracking to ensure everything is on track and course correct wherever required.

The 2 most important factors in determining targets are: Past performance and current/future business goals. * Past performance: Looks at historical performance (within the company or look at industry benchmarks), to understand what can be achieved by deploying a particular campaign, e.g. email CTR, website bounce rates, etc. Look at data from atleast 2 years to give you a better sense of trends and patterns, e.g. did a large deal skew Q2 last year? You can only know if you look at Q2 from a year before. * Business goals: This needs to be then coupled with the business goals. For example, if past performance indicated you can generated $100M pipeline with $1M investment, then at a 10% growth target, you can generate $110M in pipeline with an equivalent increase in budget. However, if the business is planning a 30% or 40% growth rate, then your targets will change accordingly. Just make sure to ask for resources and investments accordingly.

There are a couple of KPIs that can do with some love: * Customer Lifetime Value: We don’t see enough emphasis on CLV, which is an important metric in improving customer retention. Without tracking CLV, we are constantly in a state of monitoring tactical metrics even for large enterprise accounts. A focus on CLV will yield rich dividends in retaining the top strategic customers, converting them into advocates for your brand. * Account based marketing (ABM): Not 1 specific metric, but all metrics tracked through the ABM lens. Basically, everything account related from page views, to MQLs, SQLs, Opportunities. We don’t track it well enough and hence lose that edge when it comes to account based marketing. This also includes unknown visitors to the ABM pages, signups from personal email-ids, etc. For ABM, everything should go through the account lens, with a razor sharp focus.

A lot of the digital, social metrics tend to be overhyped, especially impressions, page views, followers, etc. What helps to sift through these is do a deeper analyses of these, e.g. who are the followers? Are they prospects/customers or mostly job seekers? What is driving the page views? Source of the inbound traffic? Profile of visitors? If you have to track the above metrics, it helps to double click and get a reality check to understand how much of it is relevant to your business. Otherwise, these can be just vanity metrics.