AMA: Samsara Head of Product Marketing, Suyog Deshpande on Product Marketing KPIs

First 100 days in a job quite important. The First 100 days are your opportunity to ask questions, make some bold moves, build trusted relationships, and set the tone. I would focus on the following things: Build a solid understanding of your industry and target market: As a PMM, you need to bring unique perspectives to the table. PMMs are fortunate that they get to interact with customers, sales, analysts, product managers and gain insights about competitors. In the first 30-60 days, I will focus on understanding things like market opportunity, competitive differentiation, why people buy us? or why they don't buy us?, TAM, Your core market, your adjacent markets. Trust me, invest your time in understanding these things better and you will get payoff in the next 12-18 months. So, although this will never be part of your initial projects, make sure you save time to build your own point of view o the market. Think of your lack of knowledge for processes/tools more as a "fresh perspective" you can bring to the team: As a PMM leader, it is important that you invest in building scalable processes and you invest in building some foundational templates. So, while it's important to understand current processes/tools/SLAs, don't be afraid to propose new things that could save hours and hours of your team. People who are already following set processes tend to miss out on improvement opportunities. You can add tremendous value here. One of the best pieces of advice I got was from a PMM leader at Salesforce. When I was moving to a new company, she cautioned me to stay away from saying that the things are really broken (in her words - that the kitchen sink is dirty). Be mindful that the team has been using/working/following their own processes that may not be the best, but they got work done. Focus on building relationships: You have a blank slate. Use it wisely. Build solid relationships with sales, product leaders, CS leaders, your team, your managers, extended marketing org. Try to listen before jumping to conclusions. It's difficult to do it during COVID time but casual coffees and happy hours can forge good relationships with your colleagues.

That's would be a tough problem if you are trying to understand the impact on one deal over a period of 18 months. I would flip this on its head and instead try to focus on measuring pipeline progression and map it to product marketing work. For example: Let's say your sales funnel is a 6 stage funnel. Start by understanding the current health of your funnel. Analyze data from the last 3-4 years to see where the which stage do the opportunities are stuck for the longest. For example, let's say that the deals are stuck in stage 4. Now, this could just be the nature of your industry but most likely there would be some things thatmight help you accelerate this stage by 2-3 weeks on average. Multiply that with the number of deals in that stage, and you will see a huge impact on the "Deal Cycle" metric. To make it more real, let's say currently stage 4 is 100 days average. You realize that by creating an ROI report and a set of relevant customer case studies, your buyers would make the decision in 75 days. If you have 1000 deals in stage 4, you have basically reduced the sales cycle by 25 days on average and 25000 days in total for your existing funnel. That's a lot! :) Some metrics that would help you assess the health of your pipeline are = Average Sales Cycle Last Activity Date on opportunities Push Count Average Deal Size Slice & dice by Customer Industry & Win Rate - move the needle in a few of these Regional Distribution - again pick regions where you can make a significant impact Funnel Shape: Better when you have a funnel that looks like a funnel. Many times, one of the stages would have a ton of pipeline stuck. The funnel then is distorted.

Why split? Make feature adoption a shared metric between PMM and PM teams. This is an important metric for both teams. I would use this metric pre-launch to really understand the target market segment, to set the baseline, and to define post-launch target. Post-launch, evaluate how the needle moves on this metric. If you are doing this in your company for the first time, this could start interesting conversations. Depending on the root cause analysis, PM and PMM will own different metrics to move the adoption up. Example: * Customers don't use this feature as anticipated because it adds several extra steps to their workflow: This is a great PM, UX conversation * We see low adoption because our target users don't find value in the feature: As a PMM, you should think about whether you crafted a good target market segment for the launch. Pivot your GTM strategy and communicate to the new segment if your initial assumption was wrong. * We see low adoption because customers were did not get any communication and the discoverability of the feature was hard: PMM, PM, Design, Demand Gen, Customer Marketing - they all need to discuss this. * ... so on.. you get my point.

Adoption. Adoption. Adoption. PMMs think of launches as the big day. In reality, it's just a milestone if your product's lifecycle. Don't settle on traffic/clicks etc as your launch metrics. Think about launch success 3-6 months from the launch date. This is where measuring product adoption helps. It's really easy to miss adoption (mostly because it's hard to track or there aren't any standard processes to track it). So, take the ownership, find a model to define adoption metric and start tracking it. I wrote "5 Truths of Building a Product Launch Strategy" article on this topic. Link: https://sharebird.com/profile/suyog-deshpande

A simple answer to this is that as a PMM, you are responsible for product launches and the GTM strategy around those launches. So, you will ultimately own all launch metrics. However, things like Pipegen, ACV/Revenue, Traffic, SOV etc are shared with your demand gen and content stakeholders. In addition, some metrics you could focus on as a PMM are - New product/feature mentions in sales calls: Tools like Gong help you search keywords and add filters. It's not hard to see how many times your sales team talked about your product launch. This is a good indicator of how well the sales team was enabled. This works really well especially for product launches that are either Tier 1 (new market creation launches) or features/products that are competition neutralizers (Track how often your competitor and this new launch was mentioned in the same call). I have also used this when a new corporate pitch is launched. It's a great forcing function for GTM teams to use latest messaging. Adoption: I think this should be a mandatory metric for every product launch. Start to think about a good adoption metric for your launch. It could be - frequency of use from certain types of users? depth of engagement? usage by certain personas in the target company? Purchases made? CLTV? If you are not sure, start with something and keep evolving that metric. Sales success: The straightforward way to measure this is ACV. However, was your launch catered towards a specific industry? If so, how many net new customers did you land with? The ACV might be small but if the goal was new logos, then you should focus on that. Was your win rate with a particular competitor trending down? then, post-launch did the trend change? Also, renewals - was your launch focused on reducing churn? if so, that should be a good way to measure success. So, before you use ACV as the only indicator of sales success, think back about the goal of your product launch. --- I have written a blog on Product Launches titled "5 Truths of Building a Product Launch Strategy". You can find it here: https://sharebird.com/profile/suyog-deshpande

Please add the "why" behind why you chose to take on new initiatives. I often see marketer proposing solutions that are searching for a problem. So, always start with Why and how your work aligned with the company/marketing/PMM north start. Then mention the results. Example: It's great that you wrote an e-book, but why did you do an e-book instead of a webinar? What was the outcome? How it helped the company drive certain goal. Some guidelines on what to include: 1. Include different formats - media, writing, interactive 2. Balance long and short form - 1 pagers or inforgraphics and longer whitepapers 3. If the role asks for a specific thing, make sure that you give more than one sample. Example - for a technical marketing role, the hiring manager is trying to asses how well can you simplify technical jargon to drive sales in low maturity buyer but the hiring manage is also curious about the depth of technical knowledge - so, if you did release notes, add that, 4. Don't be afraid to add samples from your previous roles: No one was born as a PMM. so, you might have some work experience before moving to PMM. If you did something that's relevant, please add that. Hiring managers are looking for fresh ideas and the fresh ideas come from the intersection of different fields. 5. Public speaking examples: Public speaking is a core skill for PMMs. The sample doesn't have to be from a large event. Even if it was a webinar or an internal training, add that. 

Product Marketing is about product and sales success so your OKRs should align with company, CMO and product OKRs. However, I think these 3 serve as a good "PMM OKR template" 1. Build a POV and become the hub of market intelligence: Think of this as all PMM programs: Competitive intel, Voice of Customer, Analyst Relations, 2. Bridge the gap between product and sales: Product launches, sales enablement, technical and release marketing, Roadmaps, CABs 3. Win in your core market: Your ranking, Customer advocacy, SOV, Content hubs, Thought leadership, Pipegen, ACV, Website 

Learn from the best in the industry. I love the customer marketing from the following companies: 1. Salesforce - unbelievable focus on customers! Look at the trailhead, attend Dreamforce if you can 2. Gong - I like how they call out specific outcomes and challenges 3. Adobe Experience Maker Awards: https://www.adobeexperienceawards.com/