Since payments are not like SaaS, where you are selling a subscription, how does your product marketing team define success?

When I was at Stripe, we had a robust self-serve channel in addition to sold deals. Startups that start by processing very small amounts of volume can grow up to be quite big. Our long-term bet hinged on this cohort-based approach, so we prioritized both channels ~equally.

Pageviews and impressions can be useful proxies to understand the impact a launch had on awareness, but the north star is usage and engagement. As a PMM group, we tried our best to align our metrics with the product and engineering groups, which means we’re looking at metrics that are further downfunnel than most other marketing teams. 

While our core product was payments infrastructure, we eventually also had software products like Stripe Radar or Stripe Sigma. Since the use cases they address and the user personas vary across the products, we defined usage and engagement on a per-product basis. We set usage and revenue targets annually, and tracked progress at monthly and quarterly business reviews for each product area. Some leading indicators include sign ups and MQLs + SQOs.

Success is when my messaging leads to us acquiring leads, generating pipeline and winning deals with specific personas we are trying to reach. I start my day looking at Marketing dashboards to review the top-to-mid-funnel marketing metrics like response rate, conversion rate, and pipeline generated, always by persona type. To the extent that I can influence them, I also look at sales metrics like revenue generated and impact on the sales cycle. I’m speaking through the lens of sales-led growth rather than product-led, as PLG PMMs can usually tie their success to traditional product metrics related to user growth, adoption, and conversion. PMMs at sales-led growth companies have a more challenging time demonstrating value due to the foundational nature of their work. If you own a messaging house, the easiest way to prove out value is A/B Testing your new messaging against legacy messaging to show it creates a lift - you can do this on places like your homepage, content marketing, and digital advertising - lead acquisition can be your leading indicator and pipeline created can be a lagging indicator, depending on the length of your sales cycle. Sales metrics are a bit tougher - sales often dismisses pipeline as a vanity metric for marketing. Still, at the end of the day, marketing doesn't have much control over whether pipeline converts to revenue. If you have enough sample size you can use closed won revenue as a directional indicator of messages that work, but it takes a lot of data to be confident. This is true even for sales enablement materials - you can prove value quickly if you can demonstrate that a new talk track or first call deck converts personas at a higher rate - but once things get past the demo stage unless PMM is working as a GM and gets involved in deals all through negotiation, it's hard to confidently prove that Marketing messaging is truly the difference between winning and losing deals.