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There are two categories of KPIs - business KPIs and launch performance KPIs. For both types, the KPIs you choose to track depend on the goals of your product launch. Let's say you're introducing a new revenue-generating product. The main business goals of the launch might be to create brand awareness for your company and create $XX pipeline for your new product, and close $XX ARR within two quarters (depends on your sales cycle). Increasing brand awareness * Business KPIs: Ask your comms team (if you have one) for any KPIs that they use. Set a benchmark there. * Launch KPIs: As part of the launch, you might decide to issue a press release, pitch industry trades journals, and create a product landing page. KPIs here might be # of views on the press release, # of successful placements with media, and # of visits to the product landing page. Create pipeline for the new product * Business KPIs: Pipeline goals should be discussed with sales and DG partners. Let's say you want to generate $500K in pipeline from 100 marketing qualified leads. * Launch KPIs: As part of the launch, you might decide to host a prospect-facing webinar and send out an email blast to prospects. Now you're looking at KPIs related to the performance of each of these tactics -- # of webinar registrants, % of webinar attendees, email CTRs, etc. The main takeaway is that your business and launch performance KPIs should go hand in hand; the most important thing to do as a PMM is to frame your goals in terms of business outcome. Think about the goals you want to hit as it relates to product adoption, pipeline, revenue, etc. Too often, PMMs can get stuck in measuring only the launch KPIs, because that's those are easier to measure. But, it's important to identify those business KPIs even if you can't immediately measure them -- it ensures that you're tying your launch to business objectives, highlights the need for better visibility & tooling that you can build in the future.
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Nate Franklin
Hex Head of Product Marketing • January 25
I'm glad you asked about KPIs. As Product Marketers, we don't have the luxury of a single metric or even a couple metrics. We own the health of the story & vision our company is selling. I say health intentionally. It's not just that we own the story (we do) but we also need to make sure it's landing amongst our key segments, that we have the right segments, our sellers can actually deliver the story (if you're B2B) and on and on. And it's something that we need to be monitoring regularly --- which is where KPIs come in. I see the cornerstone KPIs in four categories: Interest, Velocity, Win Rate, Cross-Sell. For the B2B context, these are some specific examples I would expect to see in these categories. For B2C - these can still apply, but win rate will be more around engagement or purchase conversion. Interest - Opportunity Growth - how many new opportunities is the business creating each month? Your goal is to grow this number! If it starts to stagnate - go figure out why. Is your content stale? Did your target segment change? Is a competitor stealing attention? Velocity - Deal Progression - how long (days/weeks) does it for deals to move through the sales cycle? Your goal is to see if you can shorten it - through sales plays, content, customer stories, ROI calculators, etc. Look for where deals are getting stuck and stay close to your sellers. Win Rate - Win Rate :) - what percentage of deals become closed-won revenue for the business? Your goal here is, no surprise, maintain or improve your win rate! Also included here is a win rate against top competitors, but as an input into the overall metric. If you see your win rate dipping that's where you need to quickly diagnose what's behind it. Cross-sell - Cross-sell :) - what percentage of accounts purchase additional products after becoming a customer? Your goal here is understand if your story continues to work post-sale. Is the vision your company sells compelling customers to expand their business with you? Are youe expansion plays working as well as your land plays? The challenge we face as a product marketer is we don't control a single part of the process - rather we influence all parts of the buyer journey from first touch all the way to cross-selling. Looking at one metric will never give us the full picture. Use metrics like those above to measure the impact of the work you are doing and look for opportunities to make improvements.
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Susan "Spark" Park
Monzo Director of Product Marketing • February 3
I built the 5A Framework of GTM for this question. :-) I know where you're coming from. You're proud of your incredibly, detailed GTM, but you need to present this plan to your GTM team, and you're in a sea of product documents and spreadhseets and you're unsure of what points to bring up. Create 5 sections with each of these A's, and you'll be surprised how holistic the GTM story is, and the quality feedback you will get back to pivot the GTM if need it. This is why 1. Audience: You must understand your target(s), and how it will be best to approach them. This can open eyes on who the product is built for and if you're going after an existing customer base or expading into a new customer base. This can start landing whether or not you're driving growth or retention in your accomplishments or goals 2. Angle: What is your message/angle. This will tell your audience(s) how you solve a problem. This can address whether or not your angles/messages go along with the existing mission and other product suite. Feedback here is critical to understand if the product is in line with where the company is going, and this is critical to get buy-in. This also leaves room for your copy and marketing team to get very creative. 3. Accomplishments: Your goals and milestones. These are also critical to get buy-in. If you're gunning for growth you will potentially have commercial objectives to hit. Either way, these will be necessary to ensure you are positiong your launch in line with the success executives want to see. This can also focus the GTM team for the right areas, and drive the right channels to hit these Accomplishments. 4. Activate: How will you execute your plan? This is where a screenshot of the GTM checklist with highlights of your top channels and partners come in. If you're not getting push back on any of the Audience, Angle, or Accomplishments, this Activation plan will not need to change much. But if any of the preceding A's are changed, be prepared to change how you will Activate, which is why it's more tactics than a big discussion. Also if your channel team understand all of the A's, they will have great ideas of their own to Activate. Empower your team with knowledge with the 5A Framework. 5. Assess: Evaluate and adjust. This will come in a post-launch and your plan of tracking. Everyone needs to be onboard on this for when you will regroup and what success/good looks like. This will enable the whole team to learn from each other and adapt better for the next launch. If your teams don't all understand this at a high level, it would be very hard for them to have agency in their contribution to the GTM. So ensure everyone has this undestanding so they can brainstorm how the best to hit these goals in your launch.
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Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, American Express, Sage • November 9
Brilliant question. If developed correctly, your messaging pillars should be evergreen (i.e. should not change on a dime) from campaign to campaign. Ultimately, your messaging pillars bring to life the core value your product/service delivers to customers and hence should be foundational. As you release new product features, think about how they ladder up to your core messaging pillars (aka the value you deliver to customers) and map them as such. Here are some best practices to ensure you get maximum traction from your messaging and that there is consistency across how channel marketers, PR teams, sales etc. use them. 1. Develop a 'How to guide' - In a how to guide, your role is to essentially breakdown and provide guidance to your key stakeholders on how they should be using your messaging - are there direct copy points they can leverage for the website, social, ad copy? Can your PR team directly leverage speaking points or use your messaging pillars? Can your sales team directly use your pitch with a talk track? Break it down for them with instructions, so it’s easy for your stakeholders to use and re-use your messaging. Good messaging is used on an ongoing and consistent basis across 360 channels - to promote customer recall. 2. Roadshow - Showshow your messaging across your sales, customer success, marketing organization - and explain how each team can effectively utilize your messaging. 3. Centralize where you store your messaging - so its easily findable and referencable by all stakeholders. Encourage folks to bookmark it
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Charlotte Norman
Canva Head Of Product Marketing • May 20
Positioning is about showcasing how you solve your customer's needs in a unique and beneficial way. I firmly believe that you can not create strong messaging if you have not completed an audit of your competitor's messaging. I typically use the following framework to audit competitors: Competitor framework: * Company name * Tagline * Positioning statement * Core benefit * Problem solved * Messaging pillars Once completed I’ll map on a 4 x 4 the key territories the competitor sits in and where our company currently stacks up in comparison to the competitors. Once I’ve identified where we currently sit, we discuss our positioning strategy: * Do we want to challenge our current position in the market? * Do we want to challenge a competitor in the market? * Do we want to carve out a unique space in the market? Once we have our strategy, we speak with customers to see: * How they describe the product and features? * What do they believe the core benefits to be? * What language do they use to describe certain aspects of the functionality? From there we have the competitive intelligence and strategy to start our positioning. The framework I use is: * Product Feature Name * Tagline * Short boilerplate * Long boilerplate * Pain points solved * Feature 1: Benefit/problem solved * Feature 2: Benefit/problem solved * Feature 3: Benefit/problem solved
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Jason Lyman
Customer.io Chief Marketing Officer • May 29
I have seen product marketers move into various roles as their careers evolve. The PMM skill set is very applicable in most marketing roles. For example, a successful PMM should be able to translate insights into strategy, build power narratives that engage customers, and drive cross-functional alignment/execution. Therefore, you can apply those skills in a more data-driven way on the demand gen side, or you could use those abilities to have more ownership over product decision-making as a PM, or you could help sell more of a given product in a GTM role. I loved being a PMM because it offers you a lot of flexibility for the future.
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John Hurley
Notion Head of Product Marketing • December 15
PMM is hard (and awesome) because we are a hub, not a spoke that often controls the final outputs. We’re not growth marketers, or demand gen manager, or brand marketers. However we do influence, inform, manifest, and/or articulate growth strategies and campaigns. Product marketing needs other growth teams to commit and execute. Same goes for traditional demand gen and campaigns – we have a bit more influence there and ability to define demand programs and contribute content, but still heavy reliance on others for execution (campaigns team, ops, etc.). We don’t own channels or many of the teams required for execution. Our role and responsibility are to develop (and coalesce) a GTM (and specifically marketing) plan to propose to cross-functional teams, surface the requirements/dependencies/roles, and coordinate and monitor the cross-functional workstreams. That GTM marketing strategy– along with positioning/messaging, enablement, launches, and research input into product strategy – are our core roles and responsibilities. Product Marketing can bring together all the growth/demand investments into a single view (ex. a Campaign Brief), come to the table with recommendations, and aide in the orchestration of various teams efforts (expose leverage points or conflicts). We can create messaging and content that supports the campaign. But we can not also be the sole execution side (not our expertise, not our area of ownership – literally don't own the distribution channels). This is part of what makes Product Marketing so hard. We’d love to work with Growth to help them refine their programs and tactics, and contribute to areas like messaging (ex. copy for an in-app test, or keywords and copy for SEO/SEM programs).
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Chad Kimner
Meta Product Marketing Director, AR/VR | Formerly Mozilla, LeapFrog • November 16
The answer will depend on the size of the organization and the resource network available to PMM teams. Today, my team enjoys dedicated Marketing Insights and UXR teams and so the critical work is writing an excellent brief that clearly defines: * What we're trying to learn? And why it's important to solving a business problem. The reality of large organizations is often that research teams are getting multiple requests for projects with significant overlap in purpose. Clarity around these topics might allow you jump on board another project that has already cleared organizational hurdles and save your budget for other research. * The target audience. If this is exploratory research, the audience may be less socialized and understood across teams so defining great personas for research teams to go find is critical. * Legal, ethical, competitive constraints. We're closest to understanding the challenges research teams may face in getting work into field given limits on what certain teams are comfortable sharing outside the company walls. * An expected plan for socialization. Who will care about the results of the work and how can we make sure we're tailoring the project to generate the kinds of data that will influence your key stakeholders?
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Vidya Drego
SmithRx VP of Marketing | Formerly HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce • January 19
It's an interesting time to be in product marketing because I think there will be significant shifts in the next few years in how we think about go-to-market. There's a fair amount being written today about how go-to-marketing motions have evolved from inside sales to inbound marketing to product-led growth and are heading towards more community-led growth. Each phase is additive to the one before it (i.e. companies are not going to stop doing one and move to the next but find more success in combining strategies) but I think a lot of the same skills will persist. First, PMMs will ALWAYS have to be exceptional communicators. Specifically, they have to be able to simplify the complex and not only write in their own voice, but typically in the voice of their company or sales team. They have to be able to understand a process or scenario that they're often not a part of and come up with ways of influencing it. And they have to be able to tell a story. Secondly, they have to be able to understand the dynamics of their market. This starts with who their customers are and how these people are changing or being challenged. The means by which a PMM influences or relates to their customers has changed and will continue to change but constantly listening to those customers and periodically picking your head up to evaluate whether the dynamics of the market have changed can often help you partner with experts to execute in the right way. As an example, my team has and will invest much more time with our customers telling their story, helping turn them into acvocates and build and develop their own communities. This is different from where we spent our time five years ago but involves many of the same skills.
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Jenna Crane
Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • November 17
Make sure you talk about the process! That includes: * What was the existing state when you started (i.e. messaging didn't exist, it did exist but it was falling flat / was outdated, etc.)? * How did you go about developing the messaging (i.e. what inputs did you use)? * How did you test and/or validate it with customers / prospects? * How did you socialize it and get buy-in internally? How did you roll it out? * How was it received in the market? (Can be anecdotal if needed, but of course ideal to have actual quantified impact) * What was the most difficult aspect of it, and how did you overcome it? (For example, the market was super crowded and differentiation was hard to come by, internal stakeholders had lots of strong and divergent opinions, etc.) The actual messaging output itself is important, but I also care deeply about how you got there, because that's what gives me confidence that you can do it again successfully.
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