AMA: Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Product Marketing KPI's

There's a lot of metrics you can track and help drive from Product Marketing, but the most important starting point is ensuring you have alignment with leadership and your cross-functional partners. Depending on your company stage and sales motion, adoption-focused metrics may make sense (for a PLG company) where as pipeline and win rate metrics may make more sense for a company with an enterprise sales motion. All that being said, right now my top 3 KPIs are: * Pipeline Contribution * Win Rate * Customer Retention & Expansion

First, I think any KPI that's connected to organizational goals no matter how small or large is important. There's so much value in aligning cross-functionally and pursuing goals that differentiate and move your company forward and aren't just department or function-specific. That said, I personally find some view-based metrics to not be helpful. They can help directionally but ultimately aren't reliable as sole KPIs for many initiatives.

I think it depends on the organization, and skillset of any existing PMMs (and the PMM leader) on the team today but generally speaking - for a PMM I prioritize strategic thinking, storytelling, and market understanding. For a Sr. PMM, I expect a higher-level of leadership and experience that translate into leading go-to-market initiatives, influencing cross-functional stakeholders, and ideally mentoring others on the team. For specific skills, the career table here is a good resource on attributes of a PMM vs. a Sr. PMM (and beyond).

There's plenty of ways Product Marketing can be at the heart of cross-sell/upsell campaigns. A lot of it ties into core product marketing skillsets and responsibilities -- persona development, positioning and messaging, enablement materials, market knowledge and measurement, and more. More specifically: * Customer Segmentation & Personas - Based on all the work you've done to develop personas, now you can put it to work and identify segments of customers that are most likely to upgrade or purchase another product. * Messaging - Consider the messaging your marketing team, and sales team, will need when running a cross-sell/upsell campaign. Think through all the variations of cross-sell/upsell, and personas on the buying committee it most applies to. * Sales Enablement Materials - Beyond just messaging, think about the materials (one pagers, pitch-decks, case studies, website content, etc) Sales will need to effectively tell the story to power this campaign. These are just a few examples but showcase how product marketing can be tied to cross-sell/upsell campaigns.

First, you have to ensure you have alignment on what KPIs you are driving towards, and how you're tracking them. This starts with alignment conversations across marketing, product, sales, customer success early and discussing not only what their goals are, but how they plan to measure them as well. From there, establishing shared dashboards, recurring meetings where you discuss progress towards goal (and any changes along the way), and a post-mortem analysis of how it went and what could have been done better.

Product marketing can collaborate with almost any teams to drive KPIs, so it's important to prioritize based on overall company goals and objectives first and foremost. That said, the teams you should definitely be aligned to are: Revenue (Sales/CS/AM), Marketing, and Product. Let's break each down a bit further: Revenue & Marketing KPI Alignment: * Depending on your organization and structure, you may work directly with Revenue leadership and/or RevOps to understand their KPIs. This can include things like revenue targets, retention, pipeline, skill building, and more. * How you can tie-in: Work with Revenue leadership to understand where they see gaps that need to be addressed (which should be a part of your ongoing work anyway). For example, are you telling the right story for a product? If not, it's an easy step to jointly collaborate on updating a product narrative and enable the team effectively and measure success of that. This all starts with identifying key areas of opportunity for your product or the overall org you're working with, and then working with leadership to set a strategy to address that area. Product KPI Alignment: * Product KPIs are likely more delivery, adoption, and customer happiness focused. As a product marketer, you should have direct line of sight to each of those areas so it becomes a question on what is priority for your organization. * Have a discussion with Product leadership about what they're planning to deliver in the next cycle of KPIs (quarter/year) and then work to prioritize and ensure that matches your plans, but also Revenue's as well. This is where a ton of value from product marketing comes from!

To calculate KPIs, I leverage a mix of quantitative and qualitative data sourced from multiple channels. For product launch success, metrics like adoption rates, feature usage, and retention data come from tools like product analytics platforms (e.g., Pendo). For go-to-market impact, I track lead volume, MQL-to-SQL conversion rates, and win/loss analysis from CRM systems (e.g., HubSpot). Qualitative data can be internal or customer sentiment, and more.