AMA: Carta Vice President Product Marketing, Kelly Kipkalov on Product Marketing KPI's

Three important considerations in forming KPIs:1. Make sure that you can confidently attribute movement in the KPI to your product release or launch. So broad metrics like churn or retention are super hard to map back to PMM-led initiatives (unless you're doing a highly controlled experiment).2. If you don't own the data, make sure that you have identified the stakeholder who does and got buy in that the KPI is trackable.3. Balance lagging with leading indicators. Particularly around product ado ...Read More

I think you may have answered your question inside your question!It is very dependent on the goals you're trying to achieve. We align metrics to outcomes. So as example:Drive awareness of a new product: measure reach and engagement of social postsDrive demand for an existing product: improvement in win ratesDrive demand for new product: measure MQLs or Stage 0 leadsDrive adoption of a new product or feature: look for a leading indicator like video views, content downloads or event registrations ...Read More

Any KPI that is non-specific isn't helpful to measure PMM success...so high level metrics like retention/churn, cross sell, upsell, leads, win rates. I haven't cracked the win rate code yet, but we have been able to work with our demand gen teams to instrument our initiatives such that we can get a very specific read on marketing influenced outcomes. So leads that touched a PMM piece of content or downloaded a PMM asset. Marketing attribution has become such a hot topic and most teams want clear ...Read More

I answered in a prior question but the data we use depends on what we want to measure.If we're looking at awareness and engagement we frequently look at interaction with our social posts. Our organic social team would have that data.If we're looking at driving demand, we would get MQL data from our demand gen teams.Improving conversion on existing deals (win rates), we would pull that directly from Salesforce ourselves.Product or feature adoption, we would work with our data science team to look ...Read More

This is the million dollar question right now for most tech companies. Attribution is really a challenge. We look at marketing influenced leads because we are usually in a multi touch situation. So if a customer interacted with PMM content in any way, we claim the revenue associated with those leads as revenue that PMM influenced. We don't own attribution data, so we usually have to work with our demand gen team (ahead of time) to make sure that our content is properly instrumented so we can get ...Read More

Tough one, but I'm going to be extremist and say just one. You could have leading indicators of that KPI and lagging indicators, but ultimately you should be crystal clear on the singular needle you're trying to move. So as an example if you're trying to drive demand, your ultimate KPI might be leads or demos booked. But a leading indicator that KPI might be content engagement or webinar attendance. So start with your ONE end goal KPI and work upstream from that to figure out the leading indicat ...Read More