How do you measure the success of a launch or campaign when your sales cycles are 2 quarters or longer?

This is one of the more frustrating parts of enterprise PMM. Companies often handle it in one of two bad ways: they either measure almost nothing and operate on instinct, or they only measure lagging indicators and do not learn anything until it is too late to adjust. If your sales cycle is six, nine, or twelve months, you cannot wait for closed revenue to know whether a launch is working. You need to measure in layers. Market engagement. Are the right accounts engaging? Are the right personas s ...Read More

It can be hard to measure effectiveness of an asset, launch or campaign in longer sales cycles because attribution is tricky in a 6+ month sales cycle. Measuring the number of touchpoints that influences customer behavior spanning a quarter or two will show you the bigger picture of the pipeline you have influenced. Expect to see bookings more than a quarter out during the enterprise sales cycle, but you can still measure “created pipeline” and “influenced pipeline'' in quarter. Additionally, yo ...Read More

I’d keep an eye on all the indicators - leading and lagging. For leading, do your campaign metrics indicate that people are interested and engaged? How is this helping you fill your funnel? Can you use technology like Gong, which records and transcribes sales conversations, to track keywords associated with the launch? Was there a spike in keyword use post campaign? And were mentions in a positive context? For lagging, what did win/loss reveal? Was the product/feature instrumental in their decis ...Read More

I like to measure all marketing in terms of:Outputs: What you did marketing-wise such as sent X emails to whom, created Y social posts, made Z video, etc.Outcomes: How did people engage with your marketing such as clicks on the email CTAs, customers' tweets about your launch, Product Hunt results, etc.?Outtakes: What happened downstream for the business as a result of your launch/campaign? This is often the most difficult to measure quickly, yet the most important for execs. How much pipeline di ...Read More

Jeff's outputs/outcomes/outtakes model and Liz's point about influenced pipeline are the right frameworks. What I'd add is the "signals before signals" layer that enterprise PMMs often skip. At Salesforce, our longest deals ran 9-12 months. Waiting for closed-won data to evaluate a launch is a death march for PMMs trying to show impact. What we built was a set of leading indicators that pipeline teams weren't tracking: account penetration (are the right personas from target accounts engaging wit ...Read More

There are short term and long term metrics you can look at to gauge launch success. Here are a few! Short-Term Launch Success Metrics: PR & AR: Press/media mentions, media interviews, Analysts briefed, analyst report inclusion Social: Social engagement, click-throughs, shares Web: Traffic increases, CTR on key CTAs, demo views, content downloads Content: Engagement, downloads, shares Sales: AEs enabled, opportunities opened, customer engagements scheduled Product: Trials, downloads, engageme ...Read More