AMA: CaptivateIQ Senior Director, Product & Corporate Marketing, Lindsey Bly on Product Marketing KPI's

I’d first start with defining your KPIs as a product marketer. Know that product marketing KPIs typically aren’t as straightforward as say our sales or demand gen counterparts. They often vary by business strategy, company maturity, product suite, PMM size and more. In more scaled organizations for example, you might own high level KPIs like pipeline or revenue for a product line. In a start-up world where you’re wearing a bunch of hats, KPIs might be more project-based as priorities shift.  My ...Read More

Generally, PMM teams should share KPIs with demand gen. Where you have the luxury of getting more granular to tease out PMM’s specific impact, do it! We’re currently in the process of moving from single to multi-product. In a multi-product world, I expect my team to share pipeline KPIs for their product line with the demand gen team. With multiple products, it’s easy for things like product-specific pipeline to get overshadowed by overall pipeline so I’m looking to each PMM to be a true owner of ...Read More

Who knew something so simple as a few metrics could be so difficult?! The reality is KPIs put into practice can get messy if you don’t set things up properly across teams, have difficulty actually accessing the data, don’t monitor frequently enough and aren’t clear and concise in your communications. Challenges typically boil down to these buckets: Sloppy metric definitions. This is shockingly common. You define your KPI as X% win rate for a certain product line only to find another team has a s ...Read More

This is why it’s so important to have a really solid understanding of your KPIs. Generally you want these things to align but that’s often not the case, especially for new products where you’re still figuring things out or newer metrics you’re just starting to track.  If you’re getting conflicting information between the data and qualitative insights, it’s time to dig in!  A few things I’d look at:  Reporting accuracy / outliers - this is obvious but errors in reporting happen all the time. If n ...Read More

There’s no such thing as a common KPI in PMM! Okay maybe that’s an exaggeration but KPIs in product marketing really vary heavily by organization, current priorities, your role and PMM’s broader role within the company.  Generally PMM’s are tracking the customer journey from pipeline generation to win rate and through adoption, retention and upsell. If you own an entire product line, you’re likely focusing on those higher level, business metrics. And the reality of PMM is that it is so cross-fun ...Read More