AMA: Front Head of Digital Demand Gen & ABM, Moon Kang on Demand Generation KPI's

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.