Sheena Sharma

* I ran a training for my team on this earlier this year! Here's an abridged version (feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want the full deck): * What do we mean when we say “project-specific KPI”? * As we develop quarterly plans, or kick off specific strategies, we look for folks to outline a few things: * Context: What’s true today, or what got us here * Objective: What we are trying to achieve. Usually no more than 1-3. * Strategies: How we are going to hit our objective(s) * DACI: Who is involved (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) * KPIs: What we are going to measure to understand if we achieved our objective * Why does it matter to set KPIs for our projects? * Ability to measure your progress * Gives you a goal to hit * Allows you to understand how your work ladders into larger objectives * Allows you to calculate or understand return on investment * Tells you if you are aligned to your strategy, and if your strategy is working * "Meaningful KPIs or performance measures have a specific definition: A performance measure is a quantification that provides objective evidence of the degree to which a performance result is occurring over time." - https://www.staceybarr.com/questions/howtosetkpis/ * Ways to model & forecast your KPIs * Tops-down: * Top-down forecasting is a method of estimating a company's future performance by starting with high-level market data and working “down” to revenue. Ex. we want to double revenue next year, so that’s coming from the tops-down. * Great example: if the business looking to grow ARR by 30% next quarter, and you have a top of funnel marketing goal that maybe isn't perfectly tied to ARR, you could still use that 30% growth rate as a starting point for the metric you are looking to drive * Bottoms-up (or trends-based) * At a high level, bottom-up forecasting is a projection of micro-level inputs to assess revenue for a given year or set of years. Ex. rollup of individual sales quotas. Or, looking at our historical performance to predict future performance * Using a comparable effort or external benchmarks * Sometimes you are doing something new, and have no historicals. In these cases, I often refer to other similar projects, or find external benchmarks to be my guide * Pro tip: If you are building teams and launching programs or at a start up, it will be TOTALLY normal not to have existing benchmarks or historical data to go from. This is not an excuse not to set a KPI. As long as you show your rationale and logic for why you set your target a particular way, you'll get a lot of understanding and appreciation if your first efforts to benchmark are off. * How I use historical data to set targets (in this example, for a quarterly target): * Quarterly data: Last 8 quarters is ideal to give you a sense of how this quarter performed not just last year but the year after. Look at quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and year-over-year (YoY). * Monthly data: Quarters might hide monthly seasonality, so it is also good to look at monthly data. * Weekly data: Can use this if you think there are more recent weekly trends that will give you insight (ex. did you recently invest in an awareness campaign that will continue? Or, did you recently turn off a paid ad campaign that was driving traffic but no meaningful lead or MQL volume)? * General tips: * You don’t want to forecast too high and miss by a ton * Nor do you want to forecast too low and way over achieve * Aiming for a +/- 10% is a good idea * You won’t always get it right, especially if it is a brand new initiative * Look at broader trends to inform your stretch: Ex. if we are growing all SQLs 25% QoQ, look at what you are trying to do in your own channel or with your own project - is this a mature channel so we should plan for more incremental growth? Or is this an area where we have a ton of opportunity and can grow meaningfully in a short period of time? * Think about improving percentage rates CAREFULLY! Going from a 15% open rate to a 20% open rate is not a minor 5% improvement, it is actually a 33% improvement (20%/15% - 1 = 33%). This is the difference between percentage points and percentage change * My biggest secret to forecasting KPIs: It is not JUST math. There's a lot of judgement, art and rationale involved. You know the strategy, you know the levers, you know what you are investing in or pulling back from. If you partner with a finance or operational team to set targets, make sure that there's always a point where you can have inputs or negotiate based on what you know about your strategy, market trends, and how current investments are performing.

* 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.

* Not necessarily over-hyped, but I think it is important to find the balance between being too focused on top-of-funnel (Traffic, leads, MQLs) and having targets that are out of your control to drive (closed / won, revenue). If your marketing team is ONLY KPI'ed on MQLs and nothing else, you may be incentivized to drive a ton of volume at the detriment to quality. Then your sales team might come back and say that the 'leads' you are sending aren't good quality. If you don't have other metrics further down funnel (I recommend tracking SALs - sales accepted leads, and SQLs - meetings booked or opportunities created), then it becomes hard to identify where you need to optimize and lean in. * I also see a lot of fuzziness around the word 'leads'. In my world today, lead means a net new name to the database. But, I will often hear BDRs talk about leads in terms of the people they are working (so an MQL or SQL), and AEs might talk about leads in terms of the deals they are working (an SQL or SQO). It's really important to make sure you have clear definitions for the KPIs that you are driving and that you are working over time to build a shared language in your organization.

* 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.

* I'd think about how you can leverage agency and contractor resources to get more out of your small team. * Then I'd also look at the maturity of the marketing program: * Do you have a decent database of leads, and the goal is activating that database and driving MQLs and SQLs? If so, you should probably lean into marketing automation, engagement programs, email + lifecycle programs, and BDR enablement. * Do you have no database to speak of? Then you want to spend time and dollars on ensuring you have a website built for conversion and effective paid programs to drive relevant people to your website. * What you want to make sure you are clear on with leadership: * What are the force-ranked priorities for your small team? It's fine to say there are three key things you are looking to achieve, but you will not be able to focus effectively if you don't literally force rank them in terms of the first, second, and third things you need to do well. * How I'd approach the strategy from there: * Given those priorities, you should then develop a strategy that covers at least the next 6 months, which outlines what you can start to tackle immediately (next 30 days), medium term (next quarter or next 90 days), and then beyond that (6 months) * You also probably want to build a 12-18 month roadmap that outlines what additional investments (people, campaigns, technology) you'd recommend. And, I'd provide options: A 'small + scrappy' version, a 'medium'-sized version, and a more aggressive/ambitious version. Along with each of these versions, it shouldn't be just an ask for more resources. You should do your best to forecast or estimate the return the business would get for those investments. At an early-stage company with low maturity and not many programs, putting in baseline programs should be able to get you 3-5x ROI in a decent timeframe. * Effective campaign development: * I'll share a few tips I've learned that have worked for me: * (1) Don't give up too early - you can't run a webinar or launch a program and expect to get a result after just a few efforts. Commit to a program for at least a quarter if you can, if not two. * (2) Start with a machete and not a scalpel. At early stages and with small teams, it is less important to know WHY a test or campaign worked and more important to know that it DID work - you want to be able to throw a bunch of things together and see a number actually move. Then, you can get into testing what works best: A question-focused email subject line, a red button, or a dedicated campaign on Facebook. In the early stages, you are just looking for any kind of lever that you can pull. * (3) You need both 'fuel' and an 'engine' - fuel is the right content for your audience that provides real and meaningful value. The engine is how you capture those leads, how you deliver that content, how you engage with the folks to drive them further down the funnel, and how your BDR hand-off works. If you don't have great fuel, it doesn't matter how good the engine is. If you have a great engine but no one is interested in what you are offering, you are also stuck. * Big questions to ask yourself: * Does the resourcing we have (heads + dollars) align with the strategies and objectives we're looking to hit? * If I invest a dollar here vs there, what return can I expect? You need to get really good about framing tradeoffs in a way that doesn't feel defensive or a resource-grab. * If I had 40 or 80 units of time (1 person = 40 hours/week = 40 units of time), how should I be prioritizing and spending that time for the most return? * Is the plan that I'm proposing flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the business? You don't want to sign a 1-year agreement with an agency to do SEO or produce shiny videos if you don't know if that's really what's going to drive a result in the next 1-3 months. * Do you know what returns the business is looking to get from the dollars you have at your disposal? Having a healthy budget is great, but with 1-2 resources, you do need to make sure that there is enough capacity to effectively use that budget. You can't rely on the same old ebook or webinar replay for too long before you will get diminishing returns on your ad spend. * What does it take to prove to the business that you need more full-time folks on the marketing team? You should understand if the business is thinking about marketing HC as a % of overall headcount or if they are looking to see an increasing marketing contribution to business results in order to unlock more resourcing.

* Yes! I actually had this experience for a few years. We had a pretty healthy ad budget as a business, but the focus wasn't specifically on the sales funnel. It was more focused on driving self-serve. My remit was driving pipeline for the sales organization, so we had to get smart about how we were bringing people in and engaging them. * What we did in that scenario was focus on building a really strong inbound engine: Creating content based on the pain points of what our target audience was searching for, and then pulling folks to us via SEO, website optimization and lead capture mechanisms. Ad budgets can add fuel to a strong inbound program and add volume, but you can drive quality lead, MQL, SAL and SQL volume without a paid budget. In that scenario, you need to invest in SEO, content development, website operations + optimizations and have a really strong email nurture program. * We were also in a position where we had an existing database of leads / email addresses to draw from. If you don't have that database, then you HAVE to find a way to start there: Whether it is an ads budget, lead generation programs, or events, you need a database of folks to reach out to in order to drive any kind of demand. * And, don't give up on getting a paid budget. Just figure out what pitch / proposal / test / results you need to show in order to unlock some level of investment.

* This is another great question! * I think there a few categories of KPIs where you should be wary: * (1) KPIs or metrics that are out of your control. * I fully believe that marketing and demand generation should be really focused on driving meaningful results for the business. I see a lot of folks talking about demand generation having a revenue target. I think that's a relevant lagging indicator, but a really hard leading indicator to drive. You want to be able to have controls on the inputs in order to be fully responsible for a metric. * In the example of wanting demand generation to own a revenue-related number, I'd recommend breaking this down into something that you and your team can drive from a leading indicator point of view. Ex. revenue could be equivalent to a closed/won sales deal. Closed/won sales deals come from opportunities, and those opportunities are sourced across various teams: CS teams, AE teams, BDR teams, and demand generation teams. Demand generation teams should be responsible for working with sales folks on generating those opportunities. Unless marketing can direct the activities of AEs or CSMs to actually close the deals, they shouldn't be fully responsible for the ARR outcome. * In this example, marketing should be responsible for an SQL or opportunity generated target as the leading KPI, and then you'd want to make sure you are tracking the performance and seeing how it turns into revenue as a lagging KPI. If you are hitting the leading KPI and missing the lagging KPI, then you can dig in to see where the miss is once the opportunity is generated. If all of the down-funnel results are * (2) KPIs that are not meaningful to the business. * On the flip side, you also want to be wary of KPIs that are too far away from core company objectives. You don't want to crush it and knock it out of the park on metrics that ultimately don't support the business and what's important. * (3) KPIs that don't take into account the addressable audience * Ex. Signing up for 50 people to attend an event, when the total addressable audience is less than 500 people. You have to take a look at the various conversion rates you would expect to see. Ex. if you can send an email invite to 500 people, you are likely to get (at best) a 30% open rate. That's 150 people opening your email. Then MAYBE you'll get 20% of folks to fill out the form to register to attend, so that's 30 registrants. Then, depending on if it is a virtual or IRL event, you may get 25-30% of folks showing up: That's 8-10 people. * (4) KPIs that you don't have the means to achieve * Ex. I always believe in stretch targets and the value of setting goals that align to the overall growth you are looking to drive for the business, BUT, you also want to make sure that you have the means: resourcing, budget, time, support to make progress against that KPI.

* 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. 

* 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.

* I love this question! * I think it is really important to make sure that you have alignment on a few key things before you start any project or initiative: * Context * Objective * Strategies * KPIs * Primary * Secondary * Out of scope * DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) * Risks/dependencies * Timeline * I actually created a template for project plans / strategy docs. Sharable version here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11bFGp1KErN7ytcHxvJu9pEUQxWb2i_DRiQuLUUmuM9Q/edit * Before work starts: What's really important in the strategy doc template above in terms of socializing are the following: * (1) Making sure you have alignment on the context (why are we here?), objectives (what are we trying to achieve), and KPIs (what does success look like?) * (2) Getting your approver or approvers to sign off on those context, objectives and KPIs before you start work. If you have agreement on what you are trying to achieve and the numbers that would make the program a success, then you have some room to iterate on your strategies and tactics to get to the goal * (3) When should you do this? You should ALWAYS try to get a sign off on your plan before you get too deep into execution. You don't want to be in a situation where you've signed a contract for an event, committed to an ad campaign, or made a decision that's hard to back out of before you have alignment on the scope of the effort * (4) I know we live in a Slack world and a move-fast world - but, I think there is IMMENSE value in building the muscle around cascading comms. 9 times out of 10, if you are leading an initiative that has a specific budget, scope or meaningful targets tied to it, you should have (1) a Google doc outlining your strategy and (2) you should send an email to everyone on your DACI list after the approver has signed off and before you start work to say 'here we go! this is what we're trying to do and the metrics we are going to achieve' * When it is done (+ along the way): * The question is specifically around when you should share results when the work is done, but I also think it is really important to share progress along the way. This will help to get in front of times when you are not hitting the KPIs as set. And, on the flip side, if something is going really well, you should be proactive about sharing wins. * Along the way: If a project is going on for a quarter or more, I'd recommend adding 'results readouts' to your key milestones at the 30-day mark, 60-day mark, and 90-day mark. That way you are building the cadence of reporting and sharing into the core of the work you are doing. You'll be able to course-correct more easily if you commit to looking at results early on. In work that we do that's mission-critical, it is not uncommon for us to look at results weekly. * When a project is complete: It is SO easy to mark something as done and move on to the next thing. However, doing an end-of-project recap or retrospective has a ton of value to the business as well as to you and your future self. At a minimum, I recommend sending a recap of results in the format of an executive summary email: What was the work, what was the goal, what did we achieve in terms of the metrics we wanted to hit, and WHY do we think our results where what they were (either hitting or missing the target). If you want to do more than the minimum, you could put together a retrospective deck that recaps the project plan, results, learnings, and a summary of what you'd do differently / what you'd incorporate into the next iteration of the effort.