For PMMs running campaigns to drive pipeline, what KPIs do you recommend?

When pipeline is the main focus, I recommend these KPIs to capture both reach and conversion when running your campaign:

• Marketing-Sourced Pipeline: This metric shows us the dollar value of the pipeline generated by campaigns that we support as PMMs. And this gives us a concrete measure of our impact from marketing efforts. 

• Campaign Engagement: Tracking clicks, open rates, and sign-ups shows how well we’re capturing interest. For example, we recently uncovered that customer stories in emails drove higher engagement, so we’re focusing more on that approach moving forward. 

• Conversion Rate: Tracking MQL to SQL conversions reveals how well our nurture strategy is working and helps us spot where we might need to optimize. This ultimately leads to more high-quality leads for sales to close.

How PMM interfaces with marketing campaigns is highly variable depending on company size and marketing team structure. But in most cases, PMM is the industry, customer, and product expert and is best suited to design and orchestrate the campaign across channels. For a campaign focused on creating new sales opportunities, we try to focus on the 2-3 key conversion points along the buyer journey that lead to pipeline creation.

1. Unaware > Aware: Email open rates, ad CTR, brand impressions (social)

2. Aware > Interest: Email reply rates, landing page conversion rates

3. Interest > Opportunity: Meeting to opportunity conversion rate, avg number of pre-pipeline meetings

My favorite KPI related to pipeline-focused initiatives are sales opportunities that can be attributed to your campaign or initiative.

As a role with "marketing" in the title it can be easy to look to metrics like leads, page or asset conversions, site traffic, or other higher in the funnel marketing metrics. While these are directionally important, I do not think they are enough stake in the game. It's not just about exposure, it's about quality of that lead and your ability to find the right persona for whatever it is you have launched. This is why I love opportunities as a metric that is far enough down the funnel to guarantee quality and show you are really driving impact for sales.

Above all else, use measurements that impact company performance, especially for success measures that will be shared more broadly. These are our top-level pipeline measurements:

• Bookings
• Depending on your business, you might supplement Bookings with a measure of revenue retention. This is especially true if these cycles are relatively short (< 1 year). In many B2B settings, contracts are annual or multi-year, so there is too much lag to be helpful as a campaign measurement.
• Pipeline Velocity and its four components:
• Sales-qualified opportunities
• Win rate
• Average sale price
• Average sales cycle
• Cost
• Combine this with Bookings to understand your customer acquisition cost.

There are a lot of other measurements you can put in place upstream from these (and should), but those are for the Marketing team to optimize channel-mix and in-channel execution. The rest of the company shouldn't care about those.