* Make sure reporting is set up to measure what’s important and is agreed upon
across sales & marketing
* You can’t wait till the martech stack is built or the website is perfect or
your strategy is complete to start generating demand. You’re going to have to
build the race car while you are racing. You need to capture/generate demand
while you are standing up new process, getting new martech in place, etc.
* Set up a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders- actively
setting and managing expectations with your stakeholders is key to building
trust.
Demand Generation Team
2 answers
Global Head of Demand Generation, Morningstar | Formerly Ariba, Taleo, Showpad • October 5
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
Focus on small, incremental improvements with frequent check-ins and meaningful
status updates for the whole org.
Focus on the teams you will be presenting your results to and fully understand
the audience and their OKRs. Make sure what you share aligns to their OKR
otherwise you will lose them and their partnership.
For sales, their objectives are to close deals -- you should share with them
1. The work you're doing to educate potential buyers of what we do
2. The work you're doing to get visitors on your website or your targeted ICPs
to convert into a lead
3. The work you're doing to help move prospects down the funnel while sales is
working them in parallel
This will get you some strong, enthusiastic partners and alignment with the
other leaders.
3 answers
Senior Director, Customer Acquisition & Operations, Envoy • August 23
* These are the core OKRs that I've tracked in various forms throughout my
demand generation career:
* Objective: Drive pipeline
* Key Results:
* Raw volume merics:
* Leads: Net new names added to the database
* MQLs: Marketing qualified leads, or folks who have reached some kind
of behavioral, predictive or demographic threshold
* SALs: Sales accepted leads, or folks that BDRs/AEs have accepted to
work
* SQLs: Meetings booked. This can be either an SQL # or an SQL $
value, depending on your business.
* Funnel efficiency metrics:
* Lead:MQL CVR: What percent of leads generated this quarter turn into
MQLs? This is an indicator of how well you are taking the new folks
entering your database and engaging them with marketing materials to
reach a score threshold, and/or how strong your targeting is in
terms of bringing in folks with the right firmographic and
demographic criteria.
* MQL:SAL CVR: What is the quality of MQLs that you are sending to
BDRs? Are BDRs disqualifying too many MQLs before they even reach
out? You want to keep a really close eye on this metric if it is
less than 75%.
* SAL:SQL CVR: How well are BDRs converting the folks they are working
into meetings. This is a little out of marketing's control, but
marketing can support BDRs with enablement, email sequences, best
practices and more to drive this number up.
* In addition to the above, if you have a broader focus on awareness as well
as pipeline, you should look at metrics that relate to website traffic,
SEO (top keywords, traffic from SEO), etc.
* As you get more sophisticated, you probably want to have a sense of how
the pipeline you are generating turns into revenue for the business.
Depending on the segments you serve, marketing should plan to provide
anywhere from 25% of pipeline/revenue (Enterprise business) to 75%+ of
pipeline/revenue (self-serve/SMB businesses).
* When I take a look at the current quarterly OKR list for our entire
marketing team, we have about 60 KRs we're looking to track - my team is
responsible for about 30 of them. SO, as my team has scaled we've gone
beyond the core metrics above.
Global Head of Demand Generation, Morningstar | Formerly Ariba, Taleo, Showpad • October 5
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
Increase high-quality web traffic.
Increase traffic conversion rate.
Increase lead to opportunity rate.
Demand generation is all about creating demand and capturing it.
Increasing your website's traffic with high-quality traffic (target ICP) is the
best way to build actual awareness as users self-educate on your website. Then
you need to really focus on good, clear CTAs and incentives for users to convert
on the page(s) you direct them to. Once they are in your funnel, help the sales
team by putting them into nurturing emails and teasers for what the product can
help them achieve to increase the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate.
2 answers
Senior Director, Customer Acquisition & Operations, Envoy • August 23
* 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.
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
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.
1 answer
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
Own all of the lead generation because no one else can do it besides DG.
Have a stake in opportunity creation (% of your pay with accelerators), pipeline
generation, and inbound revenue.
I would not own organic social media and only ask to own SEO if you have a
dedicated head or agency for it as that's a slow burner and needs a decent
amount of attention.
1 answer
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
Demand gen is responsible for every stage of the funnel but accountable for
stages where they have ~50%+ of the influence on that stage compared to sales.
For example,
Demand generation at the awareness stage is 100% responsible for delivering that
message to the masses by driving the DG machine to those target accounts.
Demand gen can support leads that come in by educating them through email and
display even while sales reps work that lead.
Demand gen also supports leads down to stage 2-3 SFDC by displaying social proof
campaigns, and email campaigns about social proof, and even host events to
invite prospects and clients to close big deals.
Every stage after that is beyond demand gen in my opinion. There are ad hoc
cases where custom landing pages, custom sales decks, and custom ROI packages
are created and delivered but that's a tight partnership with sales so both
marketing & sales are accountable for that.
3 answers
Senior Director, Customer Acquisition & Operations, Envoy • August 23
* 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.
Global Head of Demand Generation, Morningstar | Formerly Ariba, Taleo, Showpad • October 5
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.
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
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.
2 answers
Senior Director, Customer Acquisition & Operations, Envoy • August 23
* See my answer on how I recommend setting targets - I think it's really really
hard but really really important to get past the uncertainty, and set some
kind of target.
* In my 10+ years of building and launching demand generation programs, I
honestly can't remember a time when I have wished I *didn't* at least try to
set a target. I find most marketing leadership and startup leaders are
flexible and understanding when you get a KPI wrong the first time. Don't
make it a pattern though - because you want to build a reputation as someone
who learns from past experiences and gets more accurate over time in
forecasting.
* The first step is building the forecasting muscle, and then you want to get
good at forecasting accuracy. This is true of startups overall, going from a
private company with a few investors to a public company with a ton of eyes
and scrutiny on your performance.
Some tips:
* Even if you are entering a new market, you are still likely selling a product
or service to a person or group of people. There is a way to find some kind
of comparable data or benchmark as a starting point. If you have TAM (total
addressable market), you should be able to do some guessing as to your SAM
(serviceable addressable market), and then take a look at what resourcing you
have internally. If you are in a totally new space, but you only have 1 sales
person so far, you aren't going to be able to capture 10% of the total market
share in a quarter or two.
* You should use tops-down (high-level business growth targets) and bottoms-up
modeling to try to triangulate to a target.
* Another thing that I try to do in a situation where I don't have a ton of
historical data or benchmarks to guide me is to build a few models: An
aggressive model, a moderate model, and a conservative model. The best
practice is to only change ONE assumption between those models. I like
building simple calculators in excel or Google Sheets so that as you are
reviewing with your stakeholders, you can make copies of the model and make
changes in real-time and see what might change in your calculations.
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
KPIs and OKRs should not be arbitrary. Developing strong OKRs/KPIs requires a
lot of research both internally and externally. How did you company do in the
past and what were those KPIs in the past? Based on where the company is today
(employee count, sales coverage, target ICPs, etc) how much more effective is
your team supposed to be? Then add 10% to that to ensure your goals are not too
easy, but realistic, and aspirational.
The realistic goals should also follow the SMART format (specific, measurable,
attainable, relevant, and time-bound) which can be loosely based off of some
industry benchmarks you can find online.
1 answer
Head of Digital Demand Generation & ABM, Front | Formerly a child • January 10
1. Cost per $1 of pipeline
I see a lot of teams simply focus on cost per lead, then cost per opp, then cost
per closed won -- but when you look at cost per $1 of pipeline, or even better,
cost per $1 of annual recurring revenue, you will start to understand how
efficient your demand gen machine is and where you need to turn the dials for
maximum efficiency. ie. targeting more up market to pay a higher cost per lead,
and higher cost per opp, but a lower cost per $1 of pipeline because the deal is
larger.
2. Customer lifetime value
It's important for businesses to understand and track CLV so you know how to
allocate resources and optimize their efforts to maximize the return of a
customer. If it costs you $500 to acquire a customer that pays $250/yr but you
know they churn within the first year, you are actually in the negative. Way
more than just the dollar amounts listed above -- there's overhead that doesn't
always get calculated -- the cost per rep managing the account, the hourly costs
of reps trying to work the deals etc. It's important for teams to not focus on
short-term goals but think longer term about the growth and trajectory of the
customer for the true overall health and success of the business.
2 answers
Senior Group Manager, Demand Generation, Databricks • August 2
There will likely be a crossover in a few KPIs between DG and PMM. This however
is not a bad thing, it ensures your PMM counterparts are invested in making sure
GTM activities are successful. For example both groups might take an opportunity
target. For DG this is our bread butter. For PMM it helps drive behavior around
not just putting assets and programs into market but marking sure they are
helping to drive quality leads all the way through the funnel.
PMM will likely focus on, to name a few:
* Delivering customer references and case studies
* driving product adoption and enablement
* site visitors or web traffic to specific pages or within a target audience
* execute product launches
* various thought leadership items like favorable AR endorsements
DG will likely focus on:
* Funnel performance
* Responses/form fills
* MQLs (quality/quantity)
* Opportunities (count/ $ value)
* Upsell/cross sell
Head of Growth Marketing, Observable | Formerly Issuu, OpenText, Webroot • January 3
The KPIs and responsibilities between demand generation and product marketing
tend to get a bit blurred depending on your business model. I’ve noticed this
most often with product-led growth (PLG) and growth marketing. I believe the
reason for this is because a customer’s journey is not linear; we tend to have
responsibilities that are for the purpose of having defined swim lanes which is
also helpful.
I’ll respond to this question from a PLG perspective.
Product marketing KPI examples:
* Feature engagement and time to value or “aha”
* Conversion rate of sign up to paid
* Upsells
* Downgrades
* Churn
Demand generation KPI examples (these metrics start to fall into growth
marketing):
* Conversion rate of sign ups through to retention
* Performance of growth loops
* Revenue
* Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
* Customer lifetime value (LTV) by source
This definitely is not an exhaustive list. While some KPIs do fall further on
one end of the spectrum, you’ll also see that there is some overlap and
partnership that is required to have a repeatable and scalable PLG model. Be
sure to clearly define the overlap and the swimlanes for each.
1 answer
Head of Growth Marketing, Observable | Formerly Issuu, OpenText, Webroot • January 2
Some of the key processes I’d set up when expanding my demand gen team from 1 to
multiple people include evaluating and addressing the following questions:
* Documentation. Take inventory of the documentation that currently exists.
What gaps are there that need to be filled?
* Tracking and reporting. What reporting and dashboards are currently in place?
What tracking can be enhanced? How can you establish smarter reporting?
* Clear swimlanes. The importance of clarity around roles and responsibilities
is often understated. With clarity comes accountability and ownership.
Empower others to be responsible for their programs and enable them to move
faster with accountability.
* Communication. Establish an environment that promotes communication, healthy
debates, and transparency.