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 ...Read More

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 s ...Read More

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 Cont ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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: Adding more fuel to the x campaign to see if it continues to improve your Y output, which could be an indicator of correlation Or you could try spinning up an adjacent ...Read More

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 thro ...Read More

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 ...Read More