How do demand generation KPIs change with a self-serve product?

• In a self-serve world, you don't have the traditional sales funnel stages of MQL, SAL, SQL and closed/won to manage. You are probably focusing more on things like traffic, sign ups, activations, product engagement and invoices/customers.
• The levers you pull here are probably more around website optimization, paid ad programs, email + lifecycle programs and in-product optimizations. In a sales-driven world you'd be talking more about offline channels (events, direct mail, lead gen programs, etc.), and you'd be more focused on BDR and AE enablement.
• You might also think about the concept of product-qualified leads (PQLs) in a self-serve funnel, but with no sales team to work these leads, these PQLs might just be folks in your free trial or freemium flow who you should try to get to upgrade via onboarding + in-product signals and triggers.
• In the organizations that I've been in most recently, we've had both sales & self-serve funnels. In some places those funnels are completely separate, and in others, they overlap a bit. You'll want to be really intentional and careful about how you define your funnel stages in a world where there's a blend between folks who come in or who convert via self-serve, vs those who convert via sales.

Self serve is slower so you really need to keep a close eye on time to activation, lifetime value, and usage data to revenue ratio. 

Self serve requires a lot of attention through automation and email marketing to ensure these self serve users are aware of how to use the product and understands the values of paying for the premium. 

It's similar as a traditional b2b tech demand gen function that you need to build awareness to each feature, and ultimately get them to convert for a demo or trial and then keep nudging them to buy. The caveat is this is all done with little to no human execution. 

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 "Sales Accepted Leads", "meetings", "Proof of concept", or "Sales Qualified", but you’ll have equivalents that allow you to effectively track ARR.

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.

Demand generation KPIs change with a self-serve product because the goals are different with this framework. The buyers’ patterns are different based on the mechanism you have in place to convince them to purchase your product. Some of the KPIs you’ll focus on include the following:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). How much did it cost you to acquire the customer versus how much revenue did you generate?
• Engagement. How does the customer engage with your product? What are the sticky features?
• Activation. How long does it take your customer to use the product? What is the time-to-value?

There are several additional KPIs to consider, but looking at the sample above, you’ll quickly see how this differs with a self-serve product. This does not put an emphasis on MQLs as an example. The focus is on product qualified accounts (PQAs) and product qualified leads (PQLs). The “handshake” for demand generation is not just generating leads and that’s it. The quality and velocity matters. You are trying to surface repeatable patterns from customers who have quickly experienced the value of your product.