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

Question

Jodi Innerfield · Accepted Answer

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

Mary (Shirley) Sheehan · Answer

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)

Nate Franklin · Answer

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.

Hien Phan · Answer

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

Priya Gill · Answer

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

Dave Steer · Answer

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.

Priyanka Srinivasan · Answer

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.

Arianna Schatzki-Mcclain · Answer

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.

Amanda Groves · Answer

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

Jack Wei · Answer

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.

Quinn Hubbard · Answer

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.

Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

Gong Director, Product Marketing, Sherry Wu on Go-To-Market Strategy

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Brex Product Marketing Lead, Jesse Lopez on Go-To-Market Strategy

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