How Do You Prove PMM’s Value When You Don’t Own the Number?

The short answer is 'it depends'.....let me explain...  A product marketer, in my opinion, is like the CEO of a product. And just like a CEO, has to do whatever it takes to make the company (in this case product) successful. Hence, she/he should be measured on what is relevant for that specific year.  PMM OKRs depend on your answer to questions such as - what is the stage of the product lifecycle? Do you own all of product marketing or a specific PMM function? What are the business goals and obj ...Read More

Tricky question! To be honest, OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) are HIGHLY context- and business-specific, so there isn't such thing as "good OKRs for Product Marketing" in the abstract. You should be aligning PMM OKRs to the OKRs at the company level. And keep in mind that they are all about business transformation, not keeping the lights on. So they will involve stretch goals and should intersect and overlap with the OKRs of other teams across the org, not be strictly unique. On the other h ...Read More

Good Product Marketing OKRs really depend on the business and what the company is trying to achieve. For example, if there's no unified launch process, you may set an objective to develop a launch program. Or another example: you're starting to lose deals to a specific competitor. You may kick off a competitive program to mitigate losses on competitive deals. It really depends on the business. For product launches: Did I reach my intended audience for this launch? How many people engaged with ou ...Read More

Product marketers are professional cat herders who drive impact by motivating cross-functional teams toward shared goals, even without direct reporting relationships. As a PMM, you're constantly the leader of the group project when no one else volunteers. You're a professional cat herder. When thinking about accountability and ownership, PMMs can feel good about their impact by motivating people who don't report to them to work on strategic projects. There's nothing harder than managing people w ...Read More

Create accountability by breaking down larger North Star metrics into specific activities that product marketers own and can be measured against. When we share bigger North Star metrics with other teams, activities become the way we measure performance and provide accountability. For example, if we need to deliver $100 million in pipeline, we might plan to generate $20 million through webinars. This breaks down to a specific number of webinars with target conversion rates and success metrics. I ...Read More

Most of our PMMs are in Pods - where a PM and PMM focus on a certain area of the business. Each pod shares a North Star Metric - most of which are revenue based and come down from our overall business goals. While of course we aren't 100% responsible for that goal - that is, sales has to sell it! - it helps us stay focused and measure our impact. For folks that don't have a specific revenue goal, primarily because it might be hard to measure or change quarter to quarter, we still have North Star ...Read More

This partly depends on the role that PMM is expected to play, and we know that this can differ pretty dramatically from company to company, even within the same space. At Meta, we have a clear mandate - probably the clearest I've ever seen - to truly lead as GTM "captains". Leadership relies on us to lead the business, defining goals and strategies, driving cross-functional execution and shouldering accountability for all GTM execution. In an environment like this, the business goals are our goa ...Read More

Great question! Measurement for PMM has been a long debated topic and vary greatly company to company, but here's a framework for thinking through it. Key Considerations: PMM should align itself to company objectives. If a company is focused on driving renewals, PMM should be focused on driving renewals. PMM shares ownership of metrics with other teams. For example: Product and PMM share adoption and launch metrics Sales and PMM share revenue and sales efficiency metrics Marketing and PMM share ...Read More

In well run marketing teams, the metrics for the business are assessed holistically instead of piecemeal among each marketing function.  The contribution of Product Marketing to a growth result is setting up the strategic positioning, messaging, and core assets that can be used by your demand generation teams. The contribution of demand generation teams is taking that understanding of the audience, problem, and markets and selecting channels that best reach and resonate with those audiences and ...Read More

Product Marketing plays a critical role in launching products, but it is harder to measure. This question can come up frequently in performance reviews and setting OKRs for the coming year. Product Marketing owns several key areas of product launch - from defining customer needs and key features to launch strategy and target channels. Multiple goals may be binary - Did you do customer research? Did you create a launch plan? The challenge comes when you want to tie these activities to specific re ...Read More

Product Marketing and Growth perform different roles in a marketing team and need to be measured in different ways. Whereas Growth is often easier to quantify, concrete measurements that can be attributed to Product Marketing only become clearer as you get further down the funnel, once deals have been created and the effectiveness of positioning is easier to see on a case-by-case basis. However, Product Marketing does meaningfully contribute to every stage of the GTM journey.   At a high level, ...Read More

Best case, I partner with the product team to define the core KPI(s) for a product launch. Often product adoption is the goal of the launch, but sometimes a product is launched with other intentions like decreasing churn or increasing revenue through other product/feature adoption. Depending on the nature of the product, KPIs may include new signups for free trials, paid upgrades, add-on purchases/total value, NPS, or active users of the new product that was launched. I also like to measure KPIs ...Read More

One of the things we can do as product marketers to elevate the role we contribute to the organization is to orchestrate goaling across all dimensions of a product or program launch. For example - instead of thinking only about the unique KPIs that you may be driving as a PMM, what is the total set of outcomes and KPIs that must be monitored to determine the success of a launch (for example)? Are these outcomes and KPIs connected? Are the right directly responsible individuals defined and coordi ...Read More

It's pretty difficult to get a straightforward read on the effectiveness of your messaging and positioning but there are a few things you can do to ensure your messaging is more likely to succeed. 1) During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both quantitative test of words or descriptors you use as well as qualitative tests where you actually test aspects of a pitch with customer. 2 ...Read More

Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets and channels perform relative to benchmarks?  Sales asset usage and engagement - Which assets, talking points, and messaging were used, and how did prospects and customers engage? Highspot will show you which sales assets are being used the most and which are driv ...Read More

This is probably one of the toughest problems we face as marketers. A lot of times, teams will look at a combination of leading quantitative indicators (clicks, conversions, time spent, etc.) and qualitative signals (from buyer interviews, listening to sales calls, etc.), to take a best guess at what’s working and what’s not. There are lots of problems with this. It’s tough to isolate messaging as the primary driver of these results, and assign quantifiable measures that will clearly indicate im ...Read More

Measuring the success of messaging overall generally ties back to product launch goals — whether that’s a sales or revenue number, or more user/signup focused. That being said, if you’re working on positioning and messaging outside of a launch then I’d look at metrics like length of sales cycle, demo to close rate, % of deals closed-won vs, closed lost (and against specific competitors if that’s important to your product line/business), and raw volume of sales and MRR/ARR. You can switch some of ...Read More

One of the challenges of being a product marketer is that oftentimes we don't own a number, but are responsible for the success. When I think about sales enablement, ensuring you have tracking in place to look back and measure what is and is not working is crucial. For quantitative metrics, I track content usage like download rates and view counts, deal attachment where I can see which materials were used in specific opportunities, and conversion rates to understand if deals with enablement mate ...Read More

We track both leading and lagging indicators, from sales enablement asset usage to pipeline and win rates. One of the challenging things about product marketing is that we're string pullers behind the scenes - defining positioning and messaging that gets activated through demand gen campaigns that drive lead generation, but it's the sales team that's actually moving prospects through a buying cycle. So attribution becomes fuzzier. We tend to look at a combination of both leading and lagging indi ...Read More

We focus on sales readiness and perception metrics, though we're working to better track product marketing asset attribution for win rates. Emmy covered most of the key metrics. I'm particularly impressed about being able to assess product marketing asset-related attribution for win rate. It's something we've been trying to tackle but has been difficult to fully get buy-in for, simply because our processes tend to be more manual. If you have tips on how to unlock that particular metric, that wou ...Read More

Best case, your company has some strategic KPIs that your KPIs can feed into. If there isn't a formalized process for documenting and sharing these, I recommend taking the initiative to do so. Either in a deck or doc, detail your KPIs, how they ladder up into the business KPIs and the cadence (usually quarterly, but sometimes monthly) in which you'll be reporting back on progress. It's also best practice to share with your key stakeholders for feedback prior to finalizing, and then offer some op ...Read More

A cornerstone of my PMM strategy, and how I set/socialize PMM KPIs is something I call the “state of the customer report.” This is done quarterly, and is a look at the market based off of win/loss interviews, revenue and churn data, competitors, and other insights relevant to company performance. The report establishes where we are seeing the biggest breaks in the sales funnel, biggest gaps in terms of product adoption/NPS, and any other threats/opportunities perceived (for example, a new compet ...Read More

Great question! I agree, when it comes to KPIs, we need to keep everyone on the same page from start to finish. Here’s how I like to approach it: Pre-Kickoff: During campaign planning, I work closely with my partners in marketing to determine what our target account list and KPIs are for the launch. This is when we get aligned, and make sure that everyone understands the purpose behind each metric. During Execution: Then as we work through the campaign, our team is great about sharing regular up ...Read More