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Sheena Sharma

Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth, Heap

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How do you recommend setting targets for KPIs?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 ......Read More

1474 Views

What are good OKRs for Demand Generation?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 ......Read More

1316 Views

Do you believe a demand gen manager can be successful without budget for ads to pair with their strategy?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 abou......Read More

951 Views

I'm sure there will be questions about the best KPIs to track, what are some of the *worst* KPIs to commit to achieving?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 busi......Read More

936 Views

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

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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......Read More

914 Views

For a lean startup with limited resources (1-2 marketers), but healthy budgets. How would you approach demand gen strategy and effectively develop campaigns that move the needle? What are the big questions to ask yourself?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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......Read More

882 Views

What are some KPIs that you find over-hyped and/or unimportant?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 els......Read More

815 Views

Setting KPIs can often feel arbitrary, especially when entering new markets. How do you get past this uncertainty to set realistic goals?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 ha......Read More

804 Views

How do demand generation KPIs change with a self-serve product?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 a......Read More

748 Views

How do you recommend socializing KPIs (before the work starts and when it's done)?

Sheena Sharma

Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth • August 24

* 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 (Drive......Read More