Kady Srinivasan

• Vanity Metrics: Metrics like social media followers or email opens that don’t correlate with pipeline or revenue are dangerous to focus on. They look good but rarely drive business outcomes.

• MQL Quantity Over Quality: Pushing for a specific MQL count without ensuring alignment with sales can lead to wasted resources on low-quality leads.

• Unrealistic Targets: Setting goals like 10x growth in a single quarter without proper market conditions or resources can damage team morale.

A: My favorite: “Walk me through a campaign you owned end-to-end—what was the insight, execution, and outcome?” Best answer was someone who A/B tested messaging for cold leads, saw 3x lift, adjusted mid-funnel nurture accordingly, and could quantify the revenue result.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): While it’s a decent pulse check for customer sentiment, it doesn’t always correlate with growth or revenue.

• Bounce Rate: Taken in isolation, it’s rarely actionable and often misunderstood.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) Alone: CTR without downstream metrics like conversion rate or cost-per-lead is incomplete.

• Time on Page: Without context, this doesn’t tell you if the time spent was valuable.

A: Start by owning the sales-marketing glue roles: outbound sequence creation, lead scoring, and feedback loops. Your sales empathy is gold—use it to build campaigns that convert. Over time, grow into owning parts of the funnel and reporting on what moves pipeline.

• Quarterly OKRs:

  • Objective: Increase mid-market pipeline by 25%.

    • KR1: Launch 2 ABM campaigns targeting top 100 accounts.

    • KR2: Generate $1M in SQLs.

    • KR3: Improve MQL to SQL conversion from 20% to 25%.

• Annual OKRs:

  • Objective: Achieve $10M in sourced pipeline.

    • KR1: Launch a lead nurture series to improve lead-to-MQL conversion by 15%.

    • KR2: Drive a 30% increase in demo requests.

• Start With Company Goals: Align OKRs with overarching business objectives (e.g., pipeline targets, new market penetration).

• Set Cascading OKRs: Break down the company’s goals into actionable demand gen objectives. For instance:

  • Objective: Generate $2M in pipeline this quarter.

  • Key Results: Launch 3 campaigns, achieve $500k pipeline per campaign, drive 100 SQLs.

• Project Mapping: Each OKR ties to specific initiatives. For example, a webinar might target pipeline generation for a specific segment.

A: Curiosity, speed, and comfort with ambiguity. Growth marketers must be experimenters, data translators, and friction hunters. You need to move fast, break things, learn from results, and connect the dots across channels, behaviors, and revenue.