AMA: Oracle Group Vice President - Industry Marketing, Jon Rooney on Product Marketing KPI’s

As a product marketer, especially as you grow in role and become more senior, measurement of success moves beyond tasks and deliverables to align lock-step with the other GTM functions like sales, customer success and growth/demand generation. Especially once a company has established product-market fit and developed a repeatable GTM motion to scale the business (whether it's product-led-growth (PLG) or traditional direct sales), making sure there's a clear understanding of both the top-level GTM goals (revenue growth, net retention, addressing new use cases and buying centers) and the role each function plays to meet those goals is critical. That way, as the PMM leader, I can contribute to revenue by measuring and managing the parts of the process that the product marketing team owns - whether that's top-of-the-funnel work like messaging for digital campaigns and driving third-party validation like Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave placement or post-opportunity creation work like the development and enablement of a prospect demo/workshop to drive an oppty to close. The GTM leadership team should have a shared understanding of what everyone does to win deals - then the hard part is making sure you can track/measure them. Make the marketing operations (MOPs) and sales operations folks your best friends, put in the extra work so you understand how they're looking at the business and ensure PMM activities are part of the equasion.

Awesome question - I think there are two buckets that make up the "worst" KPIs for PMMs to commit to achieving: KPIs that simply track task completion and KPIs on which PMMs have no direct impact. KPIs that track task completion are so tempting because they're straight-forward and, thus, we've all taken them. A binary "complete/not complete" for stuff like messaging briefs, First Call Decks (FCDs), analyst presentations and RFP response docs is important to track, but they're not KPIs. If you can show if/when/how they're working and contributing to revenue, product adoption, etc. you're golden. If not, there'll be an incentive to create more and more of this kind of content that nobody knows abour or uses until, over time, other teams start to question how PMM is helping the business vs cracking out stuff that just gathers digital dust. Also be wary of important GTM KPIs (like ARR, MCP, net renewals) over which PMM has no clear, direct impact. MPC, for example, is dependant upon strong messaging and positioning (which is PMM bread and butter), but unless PMM has a say in audience targeting, channel investments and other demand/growth factors, try to isolate signals that show how the messaging is effective for pipeline generation. PMM can't simply be a "ridealong" on these types of metrics and still maintain a strategic charter of their own.

The short answer is socialize constantly - it's an "always on" function for internal alignment and awareness. Ideally, any PMM KPIs will clearly map to both top-level company goals (revenue, net retention, product usage) and a shared understanding of "who does what"/"how a bill becomes a law" for your company's GTM motion. If your business is a fast-twitch, bottoms-up, Product Led Growth motion - it needs to be really clear what the PMM team is doing to drive triggers for acquisition, activation and maturity. In this case, the feedback will come in quickly as to what's working and what's not and thus the PMM team can use those KPIs to strategize with product and the rest of GTM. For slow-twitch, traditional enterprise sales motions, PMM needs to have clear KPIs for the awareness and consideration phase (messaging informing campaigns that drive opportunity creation, first and third-party content that drive "see a demo," "talk to sales" and other hand-raising activity) as well as for the long haul of sales cycles that can take months or quarters. This is where you need to be plugged into the pipeline and how account teams can move opportunities to close with content, programs, campaigns and events. Designing ways to programmatically move opptys to close will not only socialize your KPIs but also make you a valuable partner to the rest of the GTM org who might have limited, out-dated views of what PMM does. 

For longer sales cycles, the product marketing team should be creating assets and programs that rally stakeholders, enable champions and fend off competitors during Request For Proposal (RFP) bakeoffs to help drive early opportunities to close. Long sales cycles frequently involve RFPs heavily influenced by third-party artifacts like Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves that map out critical capabilities, functional requirements and other vectors of consideration. The PMM team should create and own a "golden" response ready to go with core messaging, up-to-date product capabilities and pricing/packaging so account teams aren't scrambling to pull that info together at the last minute. Pulling a "golden" RFP response off the shelf and making a few tweaks based on the customer is a much better path to success for account teams. Long sales cycles often mean dealing with multiple stakeholders, so if you're selling to a line of business you'll also have to get through reviews from IT, security, legal, compliance, etc. Have spec sheets, whitepapers, demos and other artifacts ready to go for those personas. PMM needs to stay close to the account teams to understand what works and what doesn't then pivot accordingly. Internal champions at the customer/prospect are often critical in winning long sales cycles so the PMM team should figure out what those champions need to rally their peers and senior leaders to help win the deal. It might be a reference customer "brag book" that shows how other companies in their industry have been successful using your product or it might be architectural diagrams or demos to win over more technical audiences. Again, staying close to the account teams and building a relationship with the champion (if possible) will help ensure PMM creates the right content for the right audiences.

Product marketing performance should absolutely be measured, and both the outcomes and measurement parameters should be well-understood from the start to avoid a whole lot of folks running around doing stuff without a clear sense of "why?" and "how do we know if it's going well?". Every industry and business is going to be slightly different, but any PMM metrics and measurement should ladder up logically to the top 3-4 company objectives or goals - like grow revenue by X%, boost net customer retention by Y% or enter Z market with a compelling, credible offering. Once you have the top 3-4 company objectives or goals (and if senior leadership can't agree on those, you might be in trouble), the next step is to determine exactly what the product marketing team is doing (and, subsequently, not doing) to drive to those goals. For example, if a top company goal is to grow revenue by X%, the PMM team isn't responsible for owning accounts or closing new opportunities per se (that would be sales) or ensuring customers have the support they need to drive expansion and prevent churn (that would be customer success), but there is a lot that PMM does along the way. Don't let that work get lost - measure it so you can manage it. Messaging is a fundamental responsibility of PMMs, but don't just measure task completion (i.e. messaging docs drafted, reviewed and delivered), measure whether or not that messaging is working. In a modern PLG SaaS environment, messaging is critical to getting prospects not only signed up but using the product. If the messaging isn't landing (too vague, wrong audience, chock full of jargon), sign-ups will struggle and adoption will be even worse. But if people actually understand how your company's product will help, both at the top of the funnel and while they're finding their way around post-signup, that's a strong signal that messaging is working so take those KPIs for the PMM team. It's the same thing with sales enablement work like First Call Decks (FCDs), competitive battle cards, sales plays, demo scripts - the kind of work we tend to spend a ton of time on as PMMs. Don't just measure the completion and delivery of those assets (most GTM orgs are swimming in undiscovered or out-dated artifacts cranked out by PMMs), measure their impact on opportunities both being created (which in a SaaS/PLG team is measured by self-service customers "crossing over" and in traditional enterprise sales is measured by BDRs/SDRs creating an opportunity guided by assets likely created by PMMs) as well as opportunities progressing to close. Product marketing teams should be creating assets and programs that rally stakeholders, enable champions and fend off competitors during RFP bakeoffs to help drive early opportunities to close. Track when and where sales teams use those assets and programs and do cohort analysis to show the impact of when they're used vs. when they're not to help scale GTM and evolve past an account team "hero ball" culture that will likely have PMMs scrambling around like short-order cooks.

For new senior PMM hires (like Sr. Director/Director team leads), I think of 30-60-90 plans to follow a basic flow: assess (30 days), design (60 days), run (90 days). During the "assess" phase, a senior PMM has to listen, observe and learn as much as possible: meet the team and figure out the current state of how basic stuff (sales decks, product launches, campaign content/strategy, analyst relations) gets done. Learn the product cold, not just the demos but how to actually use it. Watch how teams (whether PMMs or PMs or Sales Engineers) demo the product - how consistent are those? How do customers react? How does our demo pitch compare to competitors? Same thing with sales pitches - how many homegrown/Frankenstein pitch decks are floating around? What seems to land and what doesn't? How are reps - particularly in a fast growing environments when new reps are joining all the time - getting enabled on the product? How are they grabbing assets when they need them? Go through the same onboarding as a new sales rep. And, once you have a little bit of grounding, do ridealongs with reps - even if it's just Zoom calls. Attend a QBR or two if you can. Watch demos/keynotes/etc from competitors to help you understand the landscape - how differentiated is everyone? Could you infer your company's positioning from the space left over from how competitors position or is the landscape pretty murky. Finally, understand the current marketing machine and how it works. How does content end up on the website and how/why does it change? What's the demand gen hand-off with sales and how is marketing being measured? Why do we invest indo certain events, how do they get executed and what do we hope to get out of them? Who defines campain themes? Who reviews and has to approve copy/content/press releases/analyst presentations? How are launches planned and executed? For the "design" phase, map out how PMM works with sales, product and the rest of marketing and lay out what should stay the same and what needs to change. Engage with all relevant stakeholders on what you think needs to change and why (particularly, how these changes will make their lives easier and help them meet their goals). This is the hardest part, no doubt, but if everything was operating perfectly they probably wouldn't have needed to bring you on in the first place. Ladder up these changes to the top level GTM goals (revenue growth, product usage/activation, net customer retention) and explain how these changes will help meet those goals. Then map it all out with everyone, making sure it's all as simple and straightforward as possible so that everyone will be ready ready to implement these changes. Finally, during the "run" phase, put it all in practice with a growth mindset of measure and iterate. Go in with the assumption that you didn't get everything right so be ready to tweak things - whether it's as simple as adding another reviewer for web copy updates or as major as who should be an analyst spokesperson for a major launch. Cover your own responsibilites but also stay close to team doing new things in new ways so you can both support them and get firsthand feedback on what's working and what's not. Synthesize that feedback, adjust and run again. Of course, in the midst of all of this in your first 90 days you'll have tasks and firedrills flying at you from all over the place - it's critical that you juggle both and don't lose sight of methodical assess-design-run work or else you'll end up as a reactive "short-order cook" rather than as a strategic partner to the other functions. This is an awful place for PMM to land and it doesn't really help the business or your team. Don't let that happen.