CAROLINE: startups is that they have usually no benchmark data, which makes building a KPI model that ensures that you get your revenue quite challenging. So my question for you today is, what's your advice for marketers that are trying to be on their KPI and make sure they hit the revenue goal when they are in early stage startups?
LAUREN: Yeah, sure. So I would say, you know, for me the first step and something that I think, unfortunately, a lot of marketers get wrong, is you should really be starting with a revenue mobile number data target and working backwards from there. If you're starting and thinking about, okay, how many leads do we need to generate this quarter? And that's the main KPI you're focusing on probably not starting at the right place.
So what I always focus on is first, okay, what's the revenue target we're trying to hit this year. How does that break down quarterly? And then typically you can do some easy math, even if you don't have a great benchmarks to go off of, to think about what you need to be bringing into the business from a pipeline perspective to enable the company to hit that revenue number. So for me, that typically means, you know, do you have data on what your close rates are or have a sense of what your sales cycle looks like?
If you know that you close about a quarter of the deals that you generate as a business, then you know that for a marketing team, you need to bring in four times that amount in pipeline so that your sales team has the ability to close the right amount to hit their revenue number. And so you then can work further back from there to say, okay, if this is how much pipeline, and this is roughly the average deal size that we bring in as a company, how many opportunities do we need to see that we're generating this quarter and then ultimately you'll need to work back to, okay, yes, there's a certain number of leads you need to be putting through the pipeline in order to be able to have things convert at a certain rate where you are going to hit that up pipeline and revenue number. But I think starting from that reverse demand gen waterfall perspective and with revenue as the focus is really the most important step when defining KPIs.