If you had to pick 3 measures to help track the impact of product marketing over time, what would they be and why?

It is classically difficult to directly measure PMM work, given our work is so cross-functional and many goals will be co-owned with other teams. It also depends on the focus of your team and each PMM - for example, we measure the effectiveness of our Enablement group differently to that of a group focused on a specific product. Your measurement may also look different depending on your business model and goals, and whether your product is enterprise vs. freemium for example. 

At Intercom, we tend to ladder up into marketing and company program goals, rather than direct goals for PMM. Some things we look at include:

1. Product adoption (co-owned with product and likely other teams such as customer lifecycle marketing) - this can be on a feature level for a specific launch, or for a specific product or solution overall

2. Revenue - ensuring we are supporting the company revenue goals by contributing to new business (which can further be broken down - conversion rate, lead numbers etc. for example) and expansion of existing business. Again, this isn't something we can directly attributite to PMM, but if the business isn't meeting those goals, we'd look to see what we could improve or contribute to improve them such as better enablement, improving messaging etc.

3. Qualitaitive feedback from partners in the business - i.e. satisfaction of our partners within the business such as product and sales of the team our work is doing, how well we're influencing decisions and so on

Ooo I love this question, the three things I'd prioritize tracking overtime are

1) Reactivations

• This is 100% within our team's ability to improve and acts as a force multiplier for every department. More active customers? Mores potential revenue. More innovation opportunities. More use cases to support.

2) Product sign-ups

• Given most PMM orgs start at the bottom of the funnel - product sign-ups are a primary conversion lever to continuously manage and optimize for. Similar to reactivations, this metric is a force multiplier that adds more to the proverbial pile.

3) Expansion revenue

• Land and expand. Land and expand. Land and expand. This is where PMM gets really fun and exciting. You have converted the account (product sign-up), gotten them activated (reactivations) now expand their usage with upselling/upgrading to advanced feature sets.

These are three proven metrics that ladder up to revenue and keep teams focused on the right priorities.

There are a handful of key measures that I care about as a Product Marketing leader. To prioritize the top 3, I would look at messaging adoption, win rates, and number of customer advocates.    

The primary day-to-day weapon of Product Marketing is messaging and enablement, so I first look at messaging clarity, adoption, and feedback. To measure clarity, I keep track of the consistency of key messaging points and differentiators used by sales and other field teams. Adoption can be quantified by a sales enablement tool, such as Highspot or Seismic or any system that tracks views and engagement, or through surveys. Qualitative feedback on the effectiveness of messaging and enablement can be measured through interviews and/or surveys of prospects, customers, and internal teams. Taken together, these indicators paint a picture of whether your messaging is landing with the audience as intended.

None of this matters if it doesn’t drive revenue for the business. Revenue indicators are harder to tie back to Product Marketing directly but are extremely important to understand as you tailor positioning and enablement. The clearest metric here is win rates. This provides the most direct feedback on whether your approach is working in real sales cycles, and a good win/loss analysis program can also give valuable insights into the market and competitors. Beyond win rates, Product Marketers should also keep track of new leads generated and average deal size.

For existing customers, I try to understand product adoption, customer retention and upsell, and customer advocacy. Customer advocacy is a good overall indicator. If your team is closing the right customers for your product, you should be able to identify a decent number of customer advocates who can tell compelling stories of how they’re driving outcomes with your product.