Knowing that marketing is always trying to quantify their metrics, how are you in Product Marketing quantifying the ROI of your work?

I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge specifically is around balance.

A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND What you can control?

This requires leadership buy-in from multiple groups — ideally they would understand Marketing and Product Marketing (this is not always the case!)

Based on Your Goals, I would then identify metrics. Some examples below:

• GTM / Revenue Initiatives —> Before and After Analysis (ideally based on something specific)
• Content —> Content Metrics 
• Support —> NPS 

That's a great question. It depends a lot on the product of course. There are some products that lend itself to a soft launch before we put any marketing effort behind it in which case quantifying marketing impact is pretty straightforward.

More generally, I'm a fan of PMM and PM co-owning several metrics. You can't parse which side drove what share of the metric but if you have a good partnership that shouldn't matter. And having that lens means a PMM should care deeply about whether we're bringing the right product to market (or what could we do to make it more successful). And conversely that means the PM should care if we're positioning the product in a way they feel like can make the product long term successful. The end goal is the product generally speaking hits its OKR which should be the north star anyhow.

Recently PMM has been very involved with top-of-funnel marketing and campaigns, so a lot of the typical metrics you might suspect in a campaign are ways we measure success for these (Leads, MQLs, MQL>Opp conversion, Opportunities generated).

For more middle & bottom of funnel content - we use a tool called Pathfactory (content tracks of content) that allow for visibility into what content is being sent out by sales, what is getting viewed, how much time spent on assets, and having this link in with opportunities influenced in Salesforce, which gives us a sense of revenue impact.

Separately, this quarter, we're focused heavily on partnering with Sales Enablement to impact a very particular layer of the sales funnel where we were seeing the highest levels of drop-off (early discovery/pain). In focusing on this, we're working on additional tooling in SFDC to capture what is impactable vs non-impactable reasons (impactable by SE/PMM training). Once breaking out the impactable %, we're focusing our efforts this quarter on activities/trainings/content that supports for early "Why Change" opening perspective messaging (via slides or whiteboard), additional discovery training/questions refinement, and a revised First Call Deck that provides more wide-angle messaging beyond product features (cliche, but check out Andy Raskin on Medium). The goal here is to zoom in on an early-stage in the Sales cycle where we're experiencing dropoff and seeing opportunity and measure the imporvement we're able to have here through a quantifiable metric.  

While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing, my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen, or product depending on what you're working on. Ideally, you'll have explicitly shared goals with one or more of the cross-functional teams you're working with. This ensures everybody is optimizing for the same outcome. For a new product launch, I'll typically have a shared adoption goal with product and/or an attach rate goal (percentage of customers using the product/feature) with sales. 

I'd also caution against only prioritizing work that can easily be attributed to ROI. Product marketing is responsible for driving a lot of initiatives (naming products, customer research, market research, etc.) that don't have an immediately measurable impact on leads or pipeline - but that work is still important. 

The question comes up a lot in product marketing. It is particularly challenging when you are in a product marketing role or on projects that lean heavy into influence or when your organization is stacked with channel owners. Simply put- there is no one metric that suits all product marketing.

 That said, at the outset of any project, it is critical to discuss what the hypothesis or goal of the work is and how you intend to measure the success of the outcome. Since product marketing is cross functional, I'd look to align goals and outcomes around known or proxy metrics and I'd urge communication- consistently + often around them.

1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate
   Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with competitive content is driving you win rates up. 
2. Influenced deals
   Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are influencing revenue. 
3. Sales confidence
   Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging.
4. New product revenue
   If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch. 

A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that your team is killing it. 

Definitely echo the fact that Product marketing KPIs need to keep evolving with the focus that the organization currently has. 

When I was at Amplitude, we came up with some strong *impact* metrics that the PMM function owns. Each metric is shared with a different team in the org:

•  Product Launches: # of deals closed where we had atleast 1 newly launched product add ons/packages purchased by customers. Our stretch goal for Q1 this year is 50% of all deals. Sidenote: this is a shared metric with the Product team and incentivizes them to work very closely with PMMs
•  Thought Leadership: # of opportunities influenced by original (often gated) content from the Product Marketing team. Shared metric with Marketing
•  Enablement: ACV and Win Rate - this is shared with the Sales & team and is a longer term, strategic metric. But in the near term, we track strategic deals with specific account-based interventions that the PMM function is making and their win rate 

Would love to hear reactions to our frameworks from PMMs out there!

Full disclosure - I work for Highspot - but we do use our own platforrm and one of the benefits of it is that we can see usage and buyer enagement analytics for all of the content we create.

It's a quick and easy way for us to determine what's working, what is being used (or valued) the most and also connect content performance with CRM data to understand how content is driving sales velocity, conversion, and quota performance.

Curious to know if there are any metrics that the Product Marketing function is accountable for any metrics?

I know there is such a wide variety of jobs that Product Marketers do, but for example, if trial conversion or adoption purely owned by the Product Marketing function, or are all the metrics shared with other teams? 

Hopefully I don't make this answer overly complex. 

I think the more important question here is what are you actively working on? Because product marketing can cover such a wide variety of activities and tactics, we can't exactly tell you which metrics would be important. 

Greg Hollander and Derek Pando both had great insights to share when they spoke on a panel about the topic of prioritization in product marketing. The key takeaway there is to know what the greater organizational goals are, and align yourself where it makes the most sense for the impact you can have. 

Example:

Your company has great awareness and lots of leads, but isn't closing enough deals. In this case, there are lots of different factors that could be contributing to the funnel leak (people entering but falling out). As a product marketer it may fall to you to understand why this is happening and address the problem. 

For the sake of simplicity, let's say that you have great demo show rates but don't convert these into customers at the rate that you think you should be. Assuming that the prospect knows your pricing and terms ahead of time, this likely points to your demos being bad. Bad could mean a lot of things so it will require further analysis.

Are your sales people doing enough discovery? Are they talking about things that actually matter to the prospect or are they just reciting from a script?

In this fantasy scenario, with the information that you've been given, it's probably fair to assume that a good metric for you to track would be increase in conversion rate. 

Agreed with the other answers about aligning impact with focus areas for the business as a whole. Though I also like to have some consistent metrics to be able to see some longer term trends.

There's a separate thread here that dives into PMM metrics:

https://sharebird.com/are-there-any-broad-metrics-you-guys-track-as-pmms

Some good points there about the combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics, and even quantifying some of that qualitative feedback.