AMA: Morningstar Global Head of Demand Generation, Nicolette Konkol on Demand Generation KPI's

The best questions you can ask yourself as a marketer are always: * who is my target audience? * what do they care about? * where do they spend time? Make sure you have a dedicated sales development representative to follow up on leads. You can have some excellent marketing but if the leads don’t get followed up with, what’s the point? Build programs that provide a steady drumbeat that can act as an always-on “net” to attract and convert traffic to your site and also serve as offers you can promote in paid channels to accelerate activity until you have established an audience. 1. Develop 1 long form high value piece of content a quarter tied to your marketing themes and repurpose the heck out of the content making it into many “snackable” pieces. Release blogs regularly (SEO & ungated value to your audience, offer other CTAs on the page such as links to your larger pieces of content) 2. Have a newsletter (low friction way to collect email info and gain permission to continue communicating with your audience) 3. Once you have a “net” (always on programs that nurture your audience) go build/grow your audience with some strategic paid digital channels that you use to promote the content in your always-on strategy and accelerate audience growth 4. Invest in a couple of key events for the year where you have target audience alignment and get creative. Having a captive audience and a specific moment in time is a great reason to leverage the channel as part of an integrated marketing campaign that builds up to and off the back of that experience.

Demand Gen should have annual and quarterly targets for qualified pipeline and revenue. They are always at the top of the list and the main KPIs Other leading indicators to consider MQLs, newly engaged accounts, efficiency gains in MQL to Opp conversion

* Make sure reporting is set up to measure what’s important and is agreed upon across sales & marketing * You can’t wait till the martech stack is built or the website is perfect or your strategy is complete to start generating demand. You’re going to have to build the race car while you are racing. You need to capture/generate demand while you are standing up new process, getting new martech in place, etc. * Set up a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders- actively setting and managing expectations with your stakeholders is key to building trust.

The main OKR for demand gen will always be growing qualified pipeline and revenue so we know going into any given quarter what our targets are. To connect targets to campaigns or tactics we go through a lead forecasting process. We have historical benchmarks on how marketing channels or tactics perform and can estimate based on the marketing mix planned in a quarter if we are on track to hit our number or if we need to bulk up our campaigns. If any one of those tactics doesn’t perform as expected we are able to adjust.

* Work hand in hand with your sales or sales ops team to build the KPI reporting so everyone is looking at a single source of truth across sales & marketing. * Host a bi-annual marketing open house to share first-half/second-half plans with a wider audience. * Participate in quarterly business reviews across sales & marketing * Sales marketing interlocks every other week to review performance, get feedback, and brief them on what’s coming up

Build a simple waterfall model that starts with the revenue target for the year. Assign a percentage of that target to marketing. Use some conversion benchmarks (either historical for your company or industry avg) to work up a funnel for how many opportunities, demos, MQLs you need to hit that target. Plannuh has a free funnel-building tool to guide you through this exercise. https://funnel-builder.plannuh.com/