AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Product Marketing KPI's

Our PMM KPIs are always related getting something out the door, or unsticking something in the funnel. So while I generally have a rule of thumb of "one big content rock per quarter" that can be sliced up in different ways for DG efforts, exactly which DG-related KPIs we choose will vary based on business priorities during annual planning and quarterly thereafter. So for example, in Q4 we're really focused on taking good care of opportunities that might be leaking out of the funnel. We kicked off an initiative to "make nurture the new outbound" by using PMM time to help sales focus PG days on reinvigorating past leads that just needed more education or touches. The KPI there is to increase the percentage of cold accounts moved to our sales cycle phase—'establish criteria and why now.' We're also ensuring we have good mid-bottom funnel content streams to supply more nurture and education to folks not quite ready for a POV. The KPI there is to decrease closed lost and increase those moving into the POV planning phase, and the levers we'll use are more case studies, product tours, and more love for our sandbox environment. We also have a KPI to amplify our brand with more thought leadership and support for topics and content in field events, videos, and our podcast. KPIs include: An increase in organic web traffic, increase in SQOs, increase in competitive win rate, and achieving a ⅘ website clarity score with Wynter message testing.

The biggest challenge for us lately is that it's hard to track certain KPIs on a quarterly basis, because the nature of enterprise deals is that they can take longer than 3 months from very first touch to contract signing. We like to do it to ensure directional improvement and alignment, but things like "reduction in closed losses" or "increased conversion to POV" are really hard to measure from quarter beginning to end, in comparison to the last quarter beginning to end—specifically because by November 1, you're comparing a pool of probably closed deals from July to still open deals that won't close til February. So we're always looking for other related indicators of success. Like velocity of moving between certain stages rather than total conversion rate. Velocity can be measured in a vacuum, and while it's no guarantee you'll closed win, moving fast into and out of a POV is a pretty good indicator that PMM has done all we can do to make value obvious—regardless of whether we ultimately in or lose.

All of our PMM KPIs are really reflective of our impact on other parts of the business, but yes primarily they come down to pipeline influence (not just filling the funnel but impact on velocity and conversion rates from sales enablement efforts). My team also owns content (not true of all PMM teams), so those KPIs typically relate to search, ad performance, brand awareness, etc. And while it's not a focus for my team this coming quarter, it wouldn't be unusual for us to choose some KPIs related to launch success, product adoption, upsells, and retention!

Love this question. Anything related to content/brand performance, filling the top of the funnel, or even SQOs are a fantastic reflection on PMM's ability to provide DG and Digital with compelling messaging for a clearly defined IC, but those metrics do have a longer line to draw to closed revenue for the business. So if you're looking for something a little closer to the metal, I would look at later stage conversion rates—but still within the realm of things PMM can influence. Mine would be conversion from demo into POV planning, and from POV planning into POV. Beyond that is a lot of product and sales engineering effort. I have an eye on those activities, but our place to shine is really more in how we're convincing the right audience that now is the right time to solve their problem, and our product will definitely help.

I love this question, but also don't love an environment that needs to conclusively prove one team is responsible for adoption! Ideally you're just using metrics to guide whether you should do more or less of a thing, rather than as an award system But even so, the best way to figure out whether you should send more launch emails in future, is just use a control. Start with a pre-launch pool of say 50 users that you think having the highest likely of adoption. Send the email on Day 1 to the first 25 and on Day ~8 to the remaining 25. Track when adoption happened for each group—was it just after the email? Or did they organically find the new solution in product and purchase/begin using anyways? But if it were me I might just do the email as a formality tbh, and err on the side of in-product messaging. If you have the right tech, you'll be able to see who was served the notification, whether they clicked it, and exactly what they did after.

Even if you have other teams that "own" activities that are owned by PMM in smaller companies, your KPIs can probably still remain the same—they just become reflections of cross-functional efforts, and you'll need to ensure how you're calculating them matches how your DG, or content, or lifecycle teams are calculating. I've never run into a situation where a growth team, for example, takes issue with the fact that one of my KPIs matches or is directly supporting their KPI. I sometimes even call them out as "support KPIs" where it's clear I've grabbed a couple from their teams to ensure I'm helping support all parts of the business. Your content team might have a KPI for content-influenced wins, for example. If you call that out as one of your "support KPIs" you could also note that your contributing activities will include giving the content team new research for a new persona, or updated messaging for a new launch, or support for building and analyzing an industry survey.

I'm not sure the topline KPIs will change, but how we're tracking them should get a hell of a lot easier, which means we should be able to reasonably add more that are sort of "always on" rather than focusing on just a few of the most urgent issues that need correcting that quarter. A few years ago, I probably wouldn't have signed up for a KPI that said something like, "90% of all intro calls are using the new messaging," because I don't have time to listen to 90% of calls. But with Gong's AI capabilities, it's actually a lot easier to assess messaging penetration without my needing to manually track anything.

We run a quarterly sales confidence survey to assess how AEs and SEs feel about their knowledge of our ICP, use cases, playbooks, etc. This is separates from their sales performance, conversion rates, activity, etc. It’s just a means of assessing in a psychologically safe way where they wish they had more help. We also take qualitative feedback on direction during our quarterly marketing business reviews!