AMA: Skedulo Head of Marketing, James Huddleston on Product Marketing KPI's

The KPIs for PMM can definitely depend on the type of company or market you're selling into. Based on my SaaS background, I lean towards revenue-related metrics as PMMs need to show contribution to growth. To be specific there are two primary: * Win Rate * Pipeline Creation/Contribution Secondary: * Product Adoption The reason I place a premium on win rate and pipeline contribution is PMM has such an important role in developing positioning and messaging that not only attracts potential customers, but should also help sales in converting those prospects to closed sales. In my experience as a PMM and leading teams, PMM has been responsible for building the pitch deck, arming our sales teams with competitive intel, enabling the field, and even participating in larger, individual deal pursuits. Product adoption is a key metric to track for product launches. When a PMM is supporting a product or feature launch, you want to ensure existing customers are using the new product or feature.

What I would recommend is having very transparent conversations with key stakeholders and collaborators across the other departments with whom you might be sharing a KPI. I used pipeline contribution as an example earlier, so I'll use product adoption as a KPI you might share with the product team. In this case, instead of thinking about product adoption as a split metric, or metric that you need to attribute some of to PMM and some to PM. It really should be a shared metric for both. There's a significant amount of work that the product team will have done to ship the product, and there's a significant amount of work required of the PMM to build the right plan to take the product to market, so "credit" should be shared equally as you start to see product adoption increase.

The goals (and go-to-market strategy) definitely dictate what KPIs may be most important to you and your business. For example if you're in a business that sells larger deal sizes to more mid-market and enterprise companies the KPIs you might want to track more diligently for PMM impact are: * Win Rate - measure of how many new opportunities your sales team converts from the total opportunities in the pipeline * Pipeline Creation/Contribution - how many new opportunities you're able to generate through campaign(s) associated with a product launch or PMM initiative. If the primary focus of a PMM is on launching a new feature or product, you may also consider: * Product Adoption (how many existing and new customers start using/adopting the new product) However, if your go-to-market strategy is to try and get as many new users as you can using your product through a pilot, trial or even self-serve option, the KPIs that may be more important are things like: * Activation Rate - how many customers sign up for the new product or trial/pilot * Retention/Churn Rate - how many customers are you able to retain post trial/pilot Before setting any KPIs in stone, definitely have a collaborative conversation with key stakeholders in your business to determine what objectives are right for you and what you're looking to achieve.

Here are some of the KPIs I mostly closely track for PMM and how I obtain the data to measure: * Win Rate - this is the calculation of how many new customer wins you're able to convert from the total number of opportunities in your pipeline. To track this I'd use the CRM (in my case I use Salesforce). I've built reports that can track this number and I also use this report to identify most common loss reasons as this helps me prioritize where my sales team needs the most PMM support. * Pipeline Contribution - this is the amount of pipeline you've created from campaigns associated with product launches. To track this I use Salesforce. (You may need to work with Rev or Mktg Ops to ensure the campaigns are tracked effectively in your CRM). * Adoption Rate - This is a KPI my team and I often share with the product organization. This we track through product software that can identify usage rate of our customer base. Some tech that can provide this level of insight includes Amplitude, Pendo and Google Analytics.

I find the most important KPIs relative to the launch of a new product to be: * Product Adoption (how many existing and new customers start using/adopting the new product) * Pipeline Creation/Contribution (how much pipeline did the new product launch generate in both $s and # of opportunities) There may be some additional KPIs that are important depending on the type of product and your go-to-market strategy as well. For instance if you're launching a product that users can sign up for directly or a product with a pilot or 'try before you buy' motion, some of the KPIs that may be more important are things like: * Activation Rate - how many customers sign up for the new product or trial/pilot * Retention/Churn Rate - how many customers are you able to retain post trial/pilot For more established companies, KPIs like product adoption and pipeline creation may be the most important as it shows how both existing and new customers are using the product while also quantifying how many new sales opportunities are created as a result. For some companies the most important KPI may be activation rate as they just want users to start trialing their product before they try to upsell or cross-sell more premium features or offers.

It is definitely a challenge to set KPIs without having a good understanding of how your team has performed historically. In this case, I would look for industry benchmarks to get an understanding of where your team's should be. Consult other PMMs in your network or PMM communities (like Sharebird) for information.

I wouldn't necessarily avoid trying to identify contribution when sharing KPIs with other teams, but I'd caution not to get overly aggressive about seeking "credit" for those metrics either. PMM can be challenging because the work we do isn't always a 1:1 input to output of identifiable metrics that quantify our impact. What I would recommend is having very transparent conversations with key stakeholders and collaborators across the other departments with whom you might be sharing a KPI, let's say contribution to pipeline with demand gen/growth for example. First ensure that contribution to pipeline is the right shared KPI and use it as a way to build trust and collaboration with DG/growth. In this case, PMM is likely creating the messaging framework and product content that the DG/growth team(s) need in order to execute their campaigns. In this example, the contribution to pipeline would be shared, not split.

I think the most simple answer is to stop running the x campaign to see if y still increases without the x campaign running. But let's say you don't want to do that because it's a critical campaign and you don't want to impact Y (improvement) if you don't have to. Instead of isolating that variable you might try one of two things: 1. Adding more fuel to the x campaign to see if it continues to improve your Y output, which could be an indicator of correlation 2. Or you could try spinning up an adjacent campaign to x (let's call it z) and seeing if the z campaign is able to increase Y even further. Either way, I fully endorse and encourage experimentation when it comes to PMM and marketing at large. This is the fun part. Seeing what messages work, what doesn't, iterating and coming up with new creative campaigns.