AMA: Brex VP of Product Marketing, Joe Abbott on Product Marketing KPI's

How PMM interfaces with marketing campaigns is highly variable depending on company size and marketing team structure. But in most cases, PMM is the industry, customer, and product expert and is best suited to design and orchestrate the campaign across channels. For a campaign focused on creating new sales opportunities, we try to focus on the 2-3 key conversion points along the buyer journey that lead to pipeline creation. 1. Unaware > Aware: Email open rates, ad CTR, brand impressions (social) 2. Aware > Interest: Email reply rates, landing page conversion rates 3. Interest > Opportunity: Meeting to opportunity conversion rate, avg number of pre-pipeline meetings

It really depends on the initiative and the top-down business objectives driving said initiative. In general, most product marketing efforts aim to increase demand, sales efficacy, or product adoption. I'll pick two for each category of work. 1. For demand related work like major product launches or web projects, we like to look at top of funnel metrics like organic traffic and conversion rates. 2. For sales enablement efforts, it most often boils down to average deal size and win rates. 3. For adoption work streams, it's usually either product (SKU) attach or feature activation (as % of total customer base). This is of course acquisition motion dependent (PLG vs. sales-led and everything in between) and you can always drill down to more granular metrics. But we like to focus on the highest order north star metrics.

Without any context about the business, product, market, or customer, these 3 metrics are generally solid ways to measure your product marketing efforts. 1. Conversion rates - Is your message differentiated and resonating with website visitors within your ICP? 2. Win rates - Is your sales team effective at highlighting differentiation and connecting to business outcomes to beat the competition or status quo? 3. Product adoption - Are you reaching customers at the right time with a compelling message that drives them to consider and use more of your product suite?

Content management tools like Highspot and revenue intelligence tools like Gong are hugely beneficial to product marketing teams trying to demonstrate impact on revenue. With these solutions, you can track and measure content utilization, prospect engagement, and sales execution and answer questions like– * Is our new pitch deck being used? Is it resonating with prospects and helping accelerate deals? * Are sales reps putting the new skills and knowledge they were trained on into practice successfully? * Is our new competitive positioning landing and helping sales reps get past objections/hurdles? Moving further up funnel, if you have strong attribution in place, it's also pretty easy to point to organic traffic, leads, and pipeline from product marketing led campaigns as a direct impact on revenue.

It depends what is meant by "product", who is the intended target audience, and how product utilization drives meaningful business metrics like revenue growth, NRR, and LTV. For products already available to customers, it really is about activation (i.e. getting customers to turn a feature on) and utilization (i.e. sustained usage by a type of user over some window of time). Utilization is typically measured daily, weekly, or monthly across individual active users or at the account level. Last point I'll make here is all of these variables should be determined based on the synthesis of data across product usage and revenue. For example, we define adoption of Brex's accounts payable product based on a minimum viable number of invoices (say 5) paid over 3 consecutive statement periods to filter out customers simply trialing the product. That's because the underlying adoption initiative is focused on maximizing net retention (NRR) through product attach, which we've found is achieved when customers use this product for 3 consecutive statement periods.