AMA: Attentive Director of Product Marketing, Candice Sparks on Product Marketing KPI's

The best type of solo marketer is one that is willing, flexible and excited about wearing many different hats. You should be a curious problem-solver who enjoys setting the foundation of processes. You are probably very comfortable in ambiguity and appreciate variety in your role. It will also be very important to build cross-functional relationships as you will likely need to do a lot of education around your role and how you can be a partner to different organizations in the company.

There are a lot of KPIs that you can look at based on your stakeholders, product and GTM efforts. There's some always on metrics you should be looking at like win rates, sales content usage, feature adoption, and pre-established launch metrics. 1. Customer Engagement with Product Content * Track metrics like average time spent on product pages, completion rates for product demo videos, and engagement with educational content. This can indicate how well the messaging resonates and educates the audience. 2. Ongoing Product Adoption and Feature Utilization * Measure the % of customers using specific features and track how quickly users adopt new features after launch. 3. Content and Resource Usage Rates * Monitor downloads and views of key content, like product guides, white papers, or case studies, to see if resources are aiding the sales team and educating potential users. 4. Sales and Marketing Alignment * Assess the use and perceived value of marketing materials by sales teams through surveys and usage rates, tracking how effectively product marketing supports sales enablement. 5. Customer Feedback on Messaging and Positioning * Gather feedback from customer support interactions, NPS responses, or targeted surveys to determine if customers feel the product delivers on the promises made in marketing.

There's a few different teams that PMM needs to partner closely work to ensure alignment and visibility into your key metrics. * BI or Strategy & Ops team - they often hold the keys to a lot of important data that will help power your insights and strategies. * Revenue Operations - to understand sales metrics like conversions, deal velocity, upsell and cross-sells * Marketing - in particular your demand marketing team to understand marketing conversions, awareness, website metrics, etc. * Product - especially at your launch phase you should be working in tandem together to establish what metrics are important to track In terms of motivating teams to work with you, I believe if you're working in parallel and have established joint metrics to track against you shouldn't run into any partnership issues. Ultimately, if you are aligned on the important metrics to track against the business goals it will benefit all teams to put together the systems and processes in place to analyze performance.

A few different tools I love that most people could familiarize themselves with. * Gong - this is a great tool to get insights into how your messaging is resonating, what top objections the field is hearing, insights into your personas and their pain points and more. * Salesforce - having a few pre-set reports that you track some of your key metrics allow you to pull updated numbers independently * Pendo - this is a great tool to help understand product adoption and usage * Internal UI tools - have one of your PMs teach you how to review the backend of your platform!

Top KPIs I think every PMM should be tracking against: Product KPIs: * New product adoption * Customer churn * Onboarding data (how easy is it to get started on your platform and what features are/aren't being adopted) * NPS Sales KPIs: * Sales content usage * Win rates * Sales velocity * Average sales cycle * Product upsells/cross-sells Marketing KPIs: * Launch campaign performance * Product page views * Content downloads/completion * MQLs - are you attracting the right type of audience and is your messaging resonating?