What are some cornerstone KPIs that product marketers should use for every Go-To-Market strategy?

There are dfinitely many directions to take. I'll try to distill down to two metrics across external & internal GTM KPIs:

External

• Leads, or Revenue within X days of launch
• Activation/adoption within X days of launch

Internal

• Stakeholder satisfaction (survey)
• GTM on time delivery, asset readiness

The X in days depends on the type of business you're in. For B2C you'll focus on MRR and shorter conversion cycles, likely within the first 15-30 days. For B2B align it with your avg sales cycle for prospects and 75% of the time for customer add-ons.

The goal of most B2B launches is revenue--but there are many other KPIs you can track besides how much revenue you've generated! 

Customer KPIs: These KPIs all tell me how much my launch resonates with my target customer. Pipe generation; lead generation/form fills on any key launch assets like demos and datasheets; registrations/attendance to events and webinars; website views; time on-page. 

Sales team KPIs: This is how I make sure my sales teams are excited about my launch and are properly informed to have customer conversations. # attendees for enablement; # views/engagement for key enablement assets; # sales support requests; 

AR/PR: This is how I know I'm getting the right coverage. # AR briefings/inquiries; # AR reports/mentions; # PR interviews pre-launch; # press mentions

I'm glad you asked about KPIs. As Product Marketers, we don't have the luxury of a single metric or even a couple metrics. We own the health of the story & vision our company is selling. I say health intentionally. It's not just that we own the story (we do) but we also need to make sure it's landing amongst our key segments, that we have the right segments, our sellers can actually deliver the story (if you're B2B) and on and on. And it's something that we need to be monitoring regularly --- which is where KPIs come in. I see the cornerstone KPIs in four categories: Interest, Velocity, Win Rate, Cross-Sell.

For the B2B context, these are some specific examples I would expect to see in these categories. For B2C - these can still apply, but win rate will be more around engagement or purchase conversion.

Interest - Opportunity Growth - how many new opportunities is the business creating each month? Your goal is to grow this number! If it starts to stagnate - go figure out why. Is your content stale? Did your target segment change? Is a competitor stealing attention?

Velocity - Deal Progression - how long (days/weeks) does it for deals to move through the sales cycle? Your goal is to see if you can shorten it - through sales plays, content, customer stories, ROI calculators, etc. Look for where deals are getting stuck and stay close to your sellers.

Win Rate - Win Rate :) - what percentage of deals become closed-won revenue for the business? Your goal here is, no surprise, maintain or improve your win rate! Also included here is a win rate against top competitors, but as an input into the overall metric. If you see your win rate dipping that's where you need to quickly diagnose what's behind it.

Cross-sell - Cross-sell :) - what percentage of accounts purchase additional products after becoming a customer? Your goal here is understand if your story continues to work post-sale. Is the vision your company sells compelling customers to expand their business with you? Are youe expansion plays working as well as your land plays?

The challenge we face as a product marketer is we don't control a single part of the process - rather we influence all parts of the buyer journey from first touch all the way to cross-selling. Looking at one metric will never give us the full picture. Use metrics like those above to measure the impact of the work you are doing and look for opportunities to make improvements.

As always, the answer is probably “it depends” as it really does depend on what the goal of your launch is. For example, are you trying to drive awareness of a feature? Adoption? Expansion sales?

Once you’ve determined the goal of a launch, the KPIs should be relatively straightforward from there. For us, most of our Tier1/2 launches have the goal of generating pipeline revenue (for either new logos, or expansion, or both) so we look at number of demos set / pipeline generated. Even if the opportunity already exists, I’m also curious to see whether this was the thing that moved the needle for the prospect to buy.

When it comes to Tier 3/4 launches, the metrics may be more focused around product adoption and less around direct revenue impact. Did the customers we were targeting in our marketing actually try using the new feature? How often do they use it? For example, is it happening on every order/transaction they do with us, or only a subset? For product adoption you also have to determine what “success” means - that is, what is the specific ‘event’ you want to track when it comes to the feature that would make it a successful use.

As much as I would love to share a one-size-fits-all KPIs, I’ve found that no two launches are the same. Even if you’re launching a product again in a new market, you’ve probably learned something from the first launch that will lead you to optimize your approach the next time. Instead, I break it down into these four categories and choose the most important metric from each category:

• Business metrics: How will this launch help the business to meet its goals? Is it revenue, subscriptions, marketplace balance, users?
• Product metrics: What action(s) do we want our target audience to take? For example, trial, adoption, retention, increased usage.
• Channel metrics: Based on the way that the campaign is set up, what’s the most important way that our audience can engage with the marketing campaign? Do we want them to watch the video, click on the push notification, read the blog, ask a question or something else entirely?
• Top of funnel metrics: What do you want your audience to know, think or feel based on the launch? These are your awareness, perception and sentiment metrics.

It takes a lot of discipline to pick only the most important metrics and stay laser-focused on those. But I’ve found that when I’m able to do it, it gives the team a clearer mission and strengthens the impact.

Product Marketers should, as they say, measure what matters...and what matters is heavily dependent on the stage of the business and product. If you are earlier stage, focus on assessing whether the problem your product is solving is real and important. Good metrics for this stage: Funnel conversion, win rate, marketing tactical effectiveness (traffic, leads). For later stage, your GTM strategy should be measured by more sophisticated indicators, such as pipeline coverage, deal velocity, net expansion, overall category penetration, and customer time-to-value. 

The most important part is to understand which metrics drive the business and which levers drive those metrics.

There are different motivations for launching products. For example, beyond solving a buyer problem a company could launch a product to expand TAM, retain customers, or differentiate from competitors. Based on this business objective you should determine specific goals and KPIs to ensure you are tracking towards success. This may look slightly different whether you are B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.  

That being said, there are some go-to KPIs that most product marketing care about. As PMMs, a key part of our role is finding product market fit and then communicating value to the market. When it comes to launching new products, this is when we get to find out if all the time spent on research and testing is time well spent. Will buyers/users purchase and engaging with the product?

Key metrics to consider

1. Buyer Adoption - did your buyers purchase the product? Or, if it doesn't carry an additional cost, did they adopt the new offering? Depending on the launch, you may want to segment your buyers by persona, industry, or new vs. existing customer. 

2. Engagement - is the end user utilizing the product? This one is simple, are users utilizing the product as expected and are they satisfied?

3. Market Engagement - press release engagement and corporate comms engagement (press release, social campaign, blog post etc.). 

4. Win/Loss - If the product you are launching is differentiating or intended to compete with a specific competitor, consider setting a specific win/loss goal 

Once you have your end goals set, I recommend setting some leading indicators to help you understand throughout the launch if you are on track to hit your end goals. A few examples here include email engagement on launch emails, webinar attendance for upsells, or website landing page engagement. 

The most typical KPIs are pipeline/revenue if it’s a product that can be purchased or product adoption if it’s free. However, there are other KPIs that can be leading indicators to follow. It’ll depend on the feature/product/service you’re launching and what the goal of your launch is, so there’s no hard and fast rule here. But here are some examples depending on what you’re trying to achieve:

• Product goals
• Product-market fit: product adoption
• Product launch success: product-specific pipeline, sign-ups
• Marketing goals
• Awareness and perception: brand awareness, product awareness, brand associations
• Content and campaign performance: paid/email click-through rates, website conversion
• Financial impact: marketing-driven pipeline and revenue, MQL → SQL conversion rates
• Sales goals
• Sales productivity: win rates, pipeline conversion
• Financial impact: average deal sizes, target attainment

Some KPIs I consider across the PMM remit are:

• Core PMM: Platform Adoption, Activation, and Expansion (via product and sales-led motions)
• Customer and Lifecycle Marketing: Direct Revenue Attainment + Adoption and Retention
• Ecosystem Marketing: Indirect Revenue Attainment + Demand Gen 
• Competitive Intelligence: Win/loss rate, deal velcity

Ultimately I think that every launch should have one "north-star" goal and cascading KPIs, and you might see that varies by launch. For example, your north-star could be increasing Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), increasing customer Monthly Active Use (MAU), or increasing net new customers. Once you've landed on that, you should be ruthless about developing a GTM strategy that helps you hit those goals, and choosing metrics that help you understand if you are on track for those goals or not. 

That being said, the KPIs that I've found most common to track are: 

• Total web or app traffic and conversion rate
• Email sends / opens / conversion rates
• Product usage & MAU 
• Attributed ARR 
• Digital marketing metrics like impressions and conversion rates 
• Contribution of the launch to Marketing Qualified Leads MQLs (for B2B) 

KPIs are hard for PMMs. 

(1) we don't directly influence everything. 

(2) we have a lot of indirect influence. 

But my rule of thumb is figuring out your North Star Metric, meaning what is that one metric you can influence that drives say, pipeline, and what are those input metrics? For example, if you're doing a sales play, your input metric might be how often they have used your messaging (Gong is a great tool for this) or your assets (Highspot). In this simplistic example, your North Star Metric might be deal velocity, influencing the ultimate metric: win rates. You get the idea. 

Here are some of mine. 

North Star Metrics: Deal velocity  

Input Metrics: Use of messaging/and content at different buying stages, product adoption

Lagging Metrics: Win rates, increase in ARR, expansion 

Philosophically, I think Marketers can be very insecure, and use metrics and KPIs to demonstrate capability or establish credibility.

The truth is, no one is questioning the role of marketing. And if they are, a dashboard of metrics is not the solution.

In my experience, there are two categories of KPI that actually matter... As marketers, its up to you to build the connection of all of your work to these things.

1. Revenue & Growth. The buck stops here, it is the great unifier, it is the common measure of success for everyone in the company. While plenty of companies went broke while making money, no great company today doesn't make money.

2. Conversion, Usage & Adoption rates, together with churn. Particularly for early-stage ventures, there is a nebulous cloud of vanity metrics or "signal" that is often used to make boards and investors happy about a chart that goes up and to the right. At the end of the day though, software businesses enjoy the valuations they do because of the near-infinite potential for monetization. If a product is not being used more, then the value it is imparting isn't increasing, which means you're in trouble - see 1 above.

Every GTM plan should have different KPIs tailored to the product launch and dependent on the launch objectives - whether driving direct revenue, user adoption, or engagement (or a combination of all three)!

• Revenue-focused launches centrally track pipeline growth, new customer acquisition, contract bookings generated, and sales team utilization of launch enablement resources.

• Adoption-driven releases monitor number of new users, account signups, product trials started, feature activation rates, and customer success milestone achievement.

• Engagement launches quantify traffic to launch content, campaign email open/clickthrough rates, time spent on key pages, gated asset downloads, press announcements, and ratings/feedback scores on content.

You also can incorporate more qualitative KPIs into your GTM plan like sales satisfaction with launch materials,, perception of competitive differentiation, confidence communicating value prop, access to customer stories, and effectiveness responding to questions.

I believe the most important part of KPIs and ensuring alignment on them from the very early stages of the GTM launch plan. Every meeting you should be discussing your KPIs and how you're tracking leading up to a launch and then even more importantly once in market.

Keep in mind the specific KPIs will be dependent on your business and product, however, there are a few that I would consider fundamental for any GTM strategy especially when launching a new product:

Customer Acquisition Cost: The cost associated with acquiring a new customer, including marketing and sales expenses.

Customer Lifetime Value: The total revenue that you anticipate earning from a customer throughout the entire relationship.

Market Share: The percentage of the overall market that your product or service possesses.

Product Adoption Rate: The rate at which customers adopt and begin utilizing your product or service.

Customer Satisfaction: Measures the satisfaction of customers with your product or service.

Return on Investment (ROI): The ratio of the net profit generated by your GTM strategy to the total costs invested.

These are some of the most important business KPIs but keep in mind that they might differ depending on your timeline, resources, focus, and overall strategy.

I assume you mean KPIs that objectively demonstrate progress.

I have a simple approach that anyone can follow. It starts with clearly defined objectives. I use Win, Keep, Grow, and Steal. Win new customers. Keep the customers you Win. Grow the customers you Keep. And Steal customers from competitors.

Each objective has KPIs that are meaningful to your business. If I have a Win objective, a KPI can be the rate of pipeline growth, because a growing pipeline is an indicator of future wins. If I have a Keep objective, a KPI can be the renewal rate. If I have a Grow objective, a KPI can be ARPU.

Start with objectives, then pick 2 or 3 KPIs that objectively demonstrate progress for the objective.

My blog has an article on Win, Keep, and Grow - https://www.brainkraft.com/post/launch-objectives-win-keep-grow