Mike Braund

The quickest answer for demand generation would be impact to pipeline and bookings produced. How you represent that is a longer answer that would include the ability to show how different marketing channels and engagements impact each phase of the buying journey/funnel/flywheel. For example in the awareness stage showing how many targeted impressions you got is important, how many web visits, how many demos or contact sales submissions, how many quality leads did marketing produce. Those numbers hold meaning as they relate to the way they impact the bottom line of pipe and bookings A few ways to look at content performance - web engagement rates, if it's gated content then conversion, SEO metrics.

This is going to vary by every company and where that demand gen team within the company is at in their maturity. O in OKR is "Objective" which align up to company strategy and vision, so that's the piece that's going to change the most and make this question tough to give a blanket or generalized answer for. A few generalized measures that I would guess most demand gen teams would want to measure are related to how they're creating awareness of their product in the market, how they're capturing the demand generated, and how that's translating into pipeline and booking for the business. One specific example could be if a company is trying to move up market. That could be the objective. Some demand gen team KRs for that could be around enterprise leads, meeting, pipe, and bookings produced to represent successfully showing up in the Enterprise market.

Our foundational measures of success for our teams, channels, and campaigns are built out in a measurement plan. The duration of the OKR depends on how long it will take to get to the impact/goal of the work. The biggest strategic likely last more than one quarter. I think it can be beneficial have some of those foundational measures as OKRs that are consistent quarter over quarter, so you're not constantly changing the core focus of the team QoQ. During our quarterly planning process we tie the quarter specific projects to KRs. The KR is identified in the project plan so we know how that project's success will be measured. If you're developing an product feature adoption program for example you could have a KR around number of accounts using that feature. Half of my team is an operations team, so some of their OKRs are completion targets which is ok in my opinion as well.

Ideally prioritized work and KPIs are getting organized across the department, so through you're quarter you're reporting on them there. For KPIs that might not be at the departmental level I think of it in the lens of project management. I like using the DACI model (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) to then determine who to communicate relevant updates to about your work and outcomes/impacts. To your call out you'd align with the A and C group pre-project, and communicate with all during and post. Using KPIs to celebrate or learn from are equally helpful for people in those roles.

Here are some ways to get started 1. Align on goals and how success will be measured for you 2. Input tour from your partners and stakeholders to inform your plan 3. Create your vision/strategy for how to deliver on your goals/targets to align and socialize with your manager and stakeholders (your marketing team and sales as focus points) 4. Be open to feedback and incorporate the feedback as you socialize your plan. 5. Spend time is developing and setting up my measurement frameworks. This is how you're going to point to value and impact from #1

That would definitely make it more difficult, but there are ways I think you can make a path forward. For example if you're in an early growth stage demand gen may lean more on organic channels like SEO and social to drive demand. You can use engagements like webinars or virtual meetings, linkedin live, or free/low cost events to help.

We try to keep it simple. We align the channel to where it will impact the in the funnel and then create a KPI for the funnel stage and channel. That means that a channel might show up a couple times. For example for Paid search we can have a mid-funnel KPI for lead creation, and a bottom of funnel KPI for sourced pipeline or bookings. We track efficiency metrics next to production metrics to compare over time periods (MoM, QoQ, YoY) to get a sense of relative performance of the dollars spent in each channel. Upper funnel KPIs we often get from the platform, for example we use 6sense for display ads, so we'll get influenced pipe and view through KPIs from their platform. We organize tracking KPIs in a few ways - dashboards built in a BI tool of your choice, then spreadsheets to map out the channel measurement plan, and decks to summarize performance monthly and quarterly to the team.

I appreciate this question a lot, and it made me laugh. I'll take the "over-hyped" side of the question. It can come from any raw production KPI - leads, demos, event registrants etc. An element of quality needs to exist in most cases for those to hold value. The easy example is 100 demos and 90 are spam. The more difficult ones come from things like events where you want to fill the room, but is it filled with the right types of companies and right types of roles from those companies. We're currently working on getting ideas like 'quality leads' introduced to represents lead from accounts in our TAM.

The "worst" KPIs in my opinion would be ones supporting work that isn't aligned to what the department and company are trying to achieve. One of the questions above asked their question around OKRs. I think that method provides a good check point to make sure your commitments and roadmap align up to department and company strategy. A second way to answers this is to not to commit to a KPI that you can't measure. I've had this happen on program specific KPIs.

I think most teams have got themselves to the point where the answer is pipeline and bookings. If you think about bookings and pipe as level one KPIs, then creating level two KPIs for your team to be held accountable for would be for programs and tactics that lead to pipe for your business. Some examples might be source meetings (pre pipe), quality leads. I'll use this one as an excuse to also mention spending your budget! % of planned budget spent.