What's your guilty pleasure, snack? Anything sweet. I am a sweet person, so give me some chocolate, give me some, like, anything sugary. And then I'll flipside also spicy.
So, like, my second best snack in my house right now is I have to spice up, like, a huge jar of spicy pickles. So we're going to the sides here, very sweet or very spicy. Got to have them both. Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks.
I'm Steph Krenyola, and I'm here with Ashley Lewin, Senior Director of Demand Generation for Refine Labs. And today we're talking about Demand Generation Dashboards and KPIs. So where we left off, we talked about mindset. We talked about the tactical, what that dashboard looks like.
And today we're going to talk about measurement. So, what are some leading indicators to measure before declared intent conversions and pipeline? The way I look at this is these are leading indicators that will give you a cool check on it, especially if you have a long-sale cycle. These are really helpful ones to have.
So, when you are initially doing the transition from lead gen to demand gen, the first piece is that I look at our website traffic. Some people say these are quote-unquote vanity metrics. I beg to differ. These are just indicators of down-fonal performance.
So, you guys are on your website. So, we are looking for a lift in organic, direct, and branded paid search traffic. These are all indicators that you are increasing your brand awareness and your brand recall in the market, especially when you are shifting from that lead gen to demand gen strategy. And that's whole strategy is more about a brand breach to the right audience than it is purely about conversion, which is what lead gen is all about.
So, when you are looking for are you increasing your brand recall in the market, you're going to see a lift as a correlating factor. We're not going to see this as direct attribution, but there is a very strong correlation. So, first and foremost, you want to look at website traffic. Then you're also going to be looking at other metrics as well that are going to go a little bit further.
In that website traffic, you could also be looking at are they going to certain high-end to quote-unquote high-end pages on your site or using a lift there. Those could be product pages or pricing page or demo page and so on. So, those are going to be really great website traffic for your brand recall. Additionally, I like to really look a little bit more on a manual level on things like your paid ads.
A huge live-up moment I've noticed of clients when we do this is take screenshots of the people who are liking or engaging on your ads and put that in like a Google slide deck or something or you have an internal marketing channel that's shared with the company. This is a great place to put it for internal marketing purposes. Showcase who is interacting, a lot of times is a huge live home moment for other stakeholders who aren't in marketing because they may say like, especially like a VP of sales or your CEO, etc. Like, oh wow, that's definitely a company we want to be engaging with us.
We had no idea. This is where I'm a qualitative insight versus quantitative, but I think it's a really important one to monitor over time as well. You're also going to be monitoring that engagement within your post as well. So, what's the sentiment?
Has it increased? Add engagement, website traffic. Those are typically the first metrics that you're going to see a correlation in. And when you talk about brand recall, it sounds like it's a little bit more manual work.
Like you said, but if you're taking those screenshots and you're tracking that engagement, you're going to start to see some of those same names pop up, right? And so having that finding those patterns and seeing those people and how that how they're coming back, how they're engaging and how they're finding and following through is a really great important way to I think brand recall is really important and not necessarily something that I hear about a lot. I like to think about it in terms of marketing fundamentals as well. Like, let's let's take ourselves back 50 years.
Marking was all about repetition. You needed to be repeating yourself, putting your brand logo, message, et cetera, in front of your audience multiple times. I can't remember what the exact set is, but it's something like you need to see a logo seven times or something of the sort until you remember them, come back, et cetera. So in B to be marketing, we kind of swung the other way on the pendulum of being so performance marketing driven that we forgot all this fundamental.
And so the brand recall, I think, is just getting us back to that fundamental piece. The website traffic you can automate. So that's something I would just have like on a dashboard or someone on the team, maybe figure out an integration into your slack, et cetera. So you can see that over time.
I just keep watching that and so on. Another thing that you can also be watching, aside from the ad engagement and website traffic, is the quality of your submissions. So volume may not go up. Let's say the number of demo submissions isn't skyrocketing as much as we would love for it to be.
But the quality is increasing. So the way that we are measuring this is, are we seeing a decrease in sales cycle? Are we seeing an increase in win rates? Are we seeing an increase in demo submissions to meeting books or meeting attended?
Are we seeing higher ECVs? We're looking for all these other inputs that go into the sales funnel as well from the high-end tech version. Those are also a really great pulse check that you are bringing in a higher quality bar. And if you're bringing in a higher quality, you could technically bring in less submissions because the end of the day, doesn't matter how many submissions you bring in, it's all about the pipeline number, right?
And the revenue number. So if you can get to a point where you bring in just such a higher quality bar that you need half of them and you're exceeding your pipeline target, fantastic. So that's another metric. So metrics that I would watch when you're switching as well.
And this goes all the way back to our first segment here. When you're switching your mindset, it might feel and look like less. It might be less. But if they're higher quality, then the outcome is going to be more productive anyway in the long run.
Absolutely. So we've talked about why to change, how to change, what that looks like. Next time we're actually going to go through the process of getting by in to make this shift. So we'll see you then.