AMA: Klaviyo Senior Director of Product Marketing, Jenna Crane on B2B Product Marketing KPI’s

Depending on where the team focuses, Product Marketing can have a few different KPIs that are 'must-haves.' But the most common ones are: * Product adoption -- definitely for features that PMM launches/brings to market, but if certain PMMs 'own' an area of the product then they should also co-own the overall adoption on an ongoing basis. * Launch and/or campaign engagement -- you want to be able to speak to the success of your activities! The most common ones here are email opens/clicks, webpage and/or blog post visits, social mentions and sentiment, and (if possible) revenue metrics like leads, MQLs, pipeline/opportunities, or ARR. * Win rates -- if you are investing in sales enablement, you want to see win rates go up over time. If you have a competitive intelligence dimension to that, with battlecards and competitive training, you should also track competitive win rates to see progress there. 

Great question. A couple come to mind that I would advise against signing up for: * Sales-enabled revenue. There are so many variables and phases here -- from demand generation, to the sales team actually following up with leads, to the leads actually showing up for a demo, to the sales team effectively selling them -- that it's too big and far removed to commit to. Better to pick some metrics within this (like MQLs, or opportunity to closed won rate) that you have a better chance of influencing with specific tactics. * NPS, LTV, net retention or churn: Similar to the above, there is way too much that goes into these metrics that PMM has little control over. If you want to tackle this, design it intentionally (e.g. customers who do this maturity model pilot with their CSM should have a higher LTV after 6 months than those who don't go through it). 

I actually did a Wynter talk on that very topic! You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNyoCOToq-c It focuses on building a product marketing org in a hypergrowth startup, but a lot of the principles apply to any first PMM hire. The tl;dr: there is no one playbook. I outline a process you can go through to identify the most important areas for you to focus, how you can think about establishing a baseline, and how to get cross-functional partners and leadership onboard with your strategy. 

Very true; I've always said that Product Marketing influences everything but owns nothing. A few suggestions: * When Product Marketing runs a launch, an event, or a campaign that wouldn't have existed unless PMM drove it, the engagement (website traffic, social mentions, etc.) can be attributed to Product Marketing. If the campaign also drove revenue or leads/MQLs/pipeline directly from the activities, make some noise about that too! * If you want to measure the feature adoption impact of a launch, and you have an analytics team that can help, you can look at the adoption or product engagement of those who interacted with the launch (clicked on the email, visited the landing page, etc.) vs. those who didn't — that's Product Marketing's impact! * This is trickier but if you do a big sales enablement effort — a new pitch deck, a sales play, a package of enablement assets, or a specific competitive battlecard & training — and most other factors remain relatively constant, you can attribute an increase in win rates (especially competitive win rates, in the case of compete enablement) to Product Marketing. In a fast-moving and dynamic company it's pretty rare to have everything else mostly the same, so you can always survey the sales team on how confident they feel and measure that over time as you do more enablement. But my most important suggestion is this: invest in educating cross-functional partners and leadership teams on the fact that Product Marketing influences everything but is notoriously difficult to measure. A team that makes everything more successful but whose impact can't be measured in a cut-and-dry way is still a worthwhile investment to me :)

Cross-functional work is Product Marketing's middle name! PMM <> Sales * Key deliverables: Pitch decks, enablement assets (internal resources like battlecards and personas, external resources like one-pagers and case studies), and trainings * Key goals: Improve win rates, improve competitive win rates, increase ASP, shorten sales cycles, improve demo request to demo held rates, generate pipeline, improve sales team confidence PMM <> CS * Key deliverables: Same as sales, but with an existing customer upgrade / health / cross-sell / retention angle. Add in enablement on new features and important changes (like pricing), and resources like maturity models or crawl/walk/run decks. * Key goals: Average customer health score, net retention or churn rates, NPS, CS-driven expansion, lifetime value [though be careful about signing up for these, as seen in one of my other answers!] PMM <> Marketing * Key deliverables: Messaging and positioning, launch moments and/or campaigns, website pages, case studies, personas and customer insights, demo and/or explainer videos, competitive intelligence, and more * Key goals: Website traffic, share of voice, engagement metrics for external moments like launches or campaigns, website conversion rate / bounce rate, and (whenever possible) revenue-focused metrics like leads/demo requests, MQLs, opportunities/pipeline, and self-serve ARR PMM <> Product * Key deliverables: Product positioning, roadmap feedback, market/customer research, competitive intelligence, launches, GTM strategy for new products, support with onboarding experiences and product-led growth/virality * Key goals: Feature adoption, adoption and/or revenue generated from new product lines, self-serve revenue, NPS, net retention rate, specific virality metrics

I explain it across 4 core responsibilities: Experts on our customers, products, and markets We find the right insights and turn them into strategy, and make the insights easily consumable for the rest of the org Marketing owners for product We partner with product teams to make our products successful — driving awareness, acquisition, adoption and expansion for our product lines Integrators We sit at the intersection of most teams, working with each of them to break down silos and get to better results Customer advocates We work with internal teams to design and deliver great customer experiences that make them feel understood, empowered, and valued