How do you develop quarterly/annual demand gen OKRs and tie those to individual projects?

• Quarterly/annual OKRs:
• In an ideal world, you have a joint financial planning process between demand gen + Sales that outlines the sales bookings targets you need to hit for the year, and then broken down by quarter.
• From there, say your quarterly sales bookings plan is $5M.
• The finance and sales operations team (sometimes it is finance, sometimes it is sales strategy/operations, sometimes it is a revenue operations function), should then have a good sense of where that booking needs to come from
• Is it all new business? Is there some expansion?
• Do you have different AE teams (either segmented by region, product line, company size/deal size)? Generally, the answer here is yes, and so you have a sense of the quota roll-up for each of these sub-teams.
• From there, then you can break down the sources of revenue: marketing-driven inbound, marketing-driven outbound/ABM, BDR-driven outbound, AE-driven outbound, channel sales, etc.
• Ideally, you want a good sense of your typical win rates + average transaction sizes, so you can get to the number of opportunities (deals, or SQLs, or even SQOs in some organizations) that you need to generate
• Don't forget about latency! In some enterprise organizations, you need to plan for 6-9 months between when an opportunity is generated and when it will close. Make sure you have a sense of your typical latency. If it is more than 30-60 days, make sure you are baking this into your plans.
• The ultimate output of this exercise is a quarterly target of what your demand gen team is responsible for at the SQL level.
• Once you know your SQL targets for each quarter that the business is asking of you from a top-down point of view, ALWAYS make sure you do a 'bottoms-up' pass based on your historical performance, how much investment you are getting in headcount, and operating expenditures, what strategies you'll be leading, and any information or intelligence you have on market trends.
• If there's a big gap between the tops-down business number and the bottoms-up trends number, this is where you need to (1) think about re-allocating resources or re-prioritizing your strategies, or (2) see if there's room to negotiate your targets. In the case where you think the targets are low/achievable, then that's where you might go in and offer to raise your targets to take pressure off another area of the business.
• Tying targets back to projects/initiatives: Then you definitely want to tie the SQL target to (1) your marketing funnel of leads, MQLs and SALs, and (2) make sure that you have key strategies and initiatives that ladder up into hitting those targets. Not every initiative will drive results for each stage, but you want to ensure that you have strategies to drive results at each stage of the funnel. You also should think about building a roadmap for the year and sequencing initiatives over time: Maybe you have more ability to pull a lever fast to drive more leads in the short term, but it will take you a long time to build really great full-funnel nurture campaigns to drive MQLs --> closed/won. Ensure you are not trying to take on too much in a given quarter.

The main OKR for demand gen will always be growing qualified pipeline and revenue so we know going into any given quarter what our targets are. To connect targets to campaigns or tactics we go through a lead forecasting process. We have historical benchmarks on how marketing channels or tactics perform and can estimate based on the marketing mix planned in a quarter if we are on track to hit our number or if we need to bulk up our campaigns. If any one of those tactics doesn’t perform as expected we are able to adjust.

The goals are always tied to revenue goals. What is the company's revenue goal for the Q and year? What % of that needs to come from marketing? From that %, what % comes from inbound vs upsell? From there, you work up the funnel based on each stage's conversion rate to get to a lead goal. That massive lead goal is then sliced and diced into smaller chunks (ie. if we need 100,000 leads, we will run 10 major campaigns this year, and generate 1,000 leads per campaign). Then you factor in seasonal ups and downs from past years and determine which campaign (based on time) will generate 10-20% more or less and compensate for that appropriately. 

OKRs or Objectives and Key Results are important business tools. They help forge alignment cross-functionally and give purpose to day-to-day work. For goal setting, my preference is to work backward from the goal. What are your overarching company goals or desired outcomes? Armed with this information, you can then develop quarterly and annual demand gen OKRs.

• Based on the company goals, what does this look like for demand gen for the year? For example, this could look like an attributed pipeline or quality sign-ups depending on your go-to-market motion.
• Based on the annual goal you have defined, how can you segment this into quarterly milestones? The sum of the quarterly goals will equal or surpass your annual demand gen OKR.
• Based on your quarterly goals, how can you segment this based on individual projects? Each project should have a forecasted outcome.

The bottoms-up math should then equal your quarterly goals across the projects. I have found this step is often missed. This step will help you identify any gaps earlier so that you can deploy additional projects or make adjustments as needed.

OKRs or Objectives and Key Results are important business tools. They help forge alignment cross-functionally and give purpose to day-to-day work. For goal setting, my preference is to work backward from the goal. What are your overarching company goals or desired outcomes? Armed with this information, you can then develop quarterly and annual demand gen OKRs.

• Based on the company goals, what does this look like for demand gen for the year? For example, this could look like an attributed pipeline or quality sign-ups depending on your go-to-market motion.
• Based on the annual goal you have defined, how can you segment this into quarterly milestones? The sum of the quarterly goals will equal or surpass your annual demand gen OKR.
• Based on your quarterly goals, how can you segment this based on individual projects? Each project should have a forecasted outcome.

The bottoms-up math should then equal your quarterly goals across the projects. I have found this step is often missed. This step will help you identify any gaps earlier so that you can deploy additional projects or make adjustments as needed.

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 logos.

• DG Activities: Invest in Enterprise trade shows and field events, launch an ABM campaign, consider some Enterprise content syndication...