AMA: AuditBoard Director of Product Marketing, Risk, Lizzie Yarbrough de Cantor on Product Marketing KPI's

My favorite KPI related to pipeline-focused initiatives are sales opportunities that can be attributed to your campaign or initiative. As a role with "marketing" in the title it can be easy to look to metrics like leads, page or asset conversions, site traffic, or other higher in the funnel marketing metrics. While these are directionally important, I do not think they are enough stake in the game. It's not just about exposure, it's about quality of that lead and your ability to find the right persona for whatever it is you have launched. This is why I love opportunities as a metric that is far enough down the funnel to guarantee quality and show you are really driving impact for sales.

I personally prefer measurements like OKRs, KPIs, and other goals to be shared by at least one other cross-functional partner. I don't want any PMM on my team to feel like a single point of failure or like they don't have others within the business prioritizing the same goals they are. So for me, performance is certainly gauged by are you moving the needle on the metrics we are committed to, but they are also a great way to prioritize what is most important to work on each quarter. For me they are guiding metrics to decide what tangible work and deliverables we should tackle first.

Cross-functional alignment and support of measures you will be focused on is probably the most important factor in actually achieving a KPI in my experience. This all starts with the relationships you have built as a product marketer and how well you are in-tune with business priority and what is motivating other teams. Here's my suggestions for staying in strong communication and alignment with other areas of the business to ensure your goals are aligned and supported cross-functionally. 1. Have a go-to-market leadership team that meets regularly to discuss progress, blockers, and action needed for the products or buyers you support. At minimum this team has participation from customer facing teams, product marketing, and product. My current GTM leadership team has representation from: Product Marketing, Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Onboarding and we meet weekly. 2. Utilize company planning cycles to force more structured alignment. For me, this means getting organized and aligned with my partners within the business during our annual planning cycles which gets airtime with our most senior executives. We then check back in on that plan at quarterly cadence to ensure we don't need to shift our goals or focus depending on business performance. This year we had a major shift in our primary KPI halfway through the year— we were over-performing against our original plan and were lagging at a different point in our customer lifecycle. Because we already had an established team for decision making and reporting in place, that shift was much easier to make mid year. 3. Make sure you are agreeing on KPIs that your full go-to-market team can support. It's really easy to quickly sign up for a sales target or a delivery-based goal without really stress-testing: does this measure require us to focus on the original goal/business priority? If you sign up for just a $$ amount for a product line, it can be easy for initiatives to slip or other paths to successful sales to take priority. Make sure your KPIs and the language around them encourage accountability from you and your partners. A good example here is instead of signing up for a certain $$ amount in new sales for a product line, why not sign up for a win-rate goal with a particular ICP you are trying to target or a sales goal for that particular audience? Those extra details means product has incentive to stay on track with roadmap that serves that audience, just like marketing and sales would stay focused on more than just new sales and top of funnel creation, but those activities for a particular ICP.

Honestly, I have no issue with shared KPIs as long as each team knows what they are contributing to influence the KPI. I think the most common example here are KPIs around a product or feature launch resulting in shared accountability with product and engineering, or product expansion/growth campaigns where accountability is largely shared with sales. This is where a strong plan comes into place—know what your KPI is as the over-arching metric and then be ok with delivery or outcome-based measures that can be attributed to different teams and detailed in a project plan. Each contributing team can list out milestones or delivery targets they need to meet in order to achieve their part of the KPI you are looking to achieve. The last point I want to make here is don't sign up for a KPI that sounds great, but can't actually be measured. Make sure you are meeting regularly with your partners in marketing, revenue, and product operations to have a strong hold on what you can measure. Fully understanding metrics you already have, or making a case for ones you need, is more important and influential in my experience than being able to attribute every single thing between contributing teams.

Just to share an opinion: if you need 5 separate measurements to ensure a campaign is successful, then you probably need to go back and reprioritize/reframe what you are looking to do. I think 5 KPIs is too many for a campaign to really be focused and effective. My suggestion would be to have a singular north start metric—ex. pipeline generation, new bookings, product or feature adoption rate—with one or two additional KPIs if needed. Here are KPIs I find myself defaulting to a lot lately: 1. Marketing (or campaign) attributed opportunities for sales 2. Win-rate increase with our target persona 3. Product success outcomes (like feature adoption or customer health scores) If you are in a 0-1 product or campaign launch, don't shy away from KPIs that may feel less "scientific". Here are some examples of questions I ask myself when the product is less mature.: 1. How many customer or marketing references might you target to consider that product GA or ready for prime-time sales? 2. What is your company's treatment for more established products and go-to-markets and what gaps are there in your product to get there? Examples: launching product pages, committing to content targets to make sure you've established clear share of voice, aiming for a certain number of customer reviews on third-party sites or analyst inclusion, etc. 3. How often is sales trying to include this product in deals? Does it make sense to target an inclusion rate to ensure sales is more confident in this sales motion?

I love this question because Sales Enablement is one of my most consistent partners on any initiative. How you measure success of sales enablement really depends on what tools you have in place. Lots of sales enablement tools now have ways to measure usage which can be very helpful. We use Highspot and Workramp at my current company and it allows me to track usage on things like training/resource pages, completion rate on specific enablement tracks, or how often sales is sending out specific sales assets to their prospects. It isn't perfect, there are lots of gaps in the process, but directionally it will show in general if your sellers are adopting what you deliver. Call listening tools are also amazing ways to track effectiveness of sales enablement. Tools like Gong now have amazing AI and call summary capabilities that can allow you to catch when calls mention specific keywords, assets, discovery questions, demos or anything else that might clue you into uptick in a particular enablement focus. Beyond capabilities of tools that may be in place, you can never replace good sales feedback. You should have key partners in sales who can help you to listen and learn: 1. What enablements need to happen and what assets to prioritize for your sellers 2. How things are or aren't being adopted and how to continue to adapt and improve upon what you've built This isn't a list I've personally vetted, but here is Gartner's take on current sale enablement tools if you are looking to adopt something to help with measurement.

Quarter over quarter, I typically look for KPIs and metrics each team member can have some ownership of individually. I will say, multiple team members may be focused on the same north star metric, i.e. a certain growth in customers or revenue for a product line, but will have different support KPIs that help contribute to the top metric. Here are some examples: 1. Ownership over a campaign with certain opportunity targets 2. Responsibility for marquee events and campaigns, activities, around it leading to pipeline achievement 3. 0-1 or foundational metrics like asset launches, new web pages, customer journey/experiences launches that allow you to establish a baseline for following quarters