What are tools or processes that we can use to tie our metrics closer to revenue? It's difficult to quantify the impact of sales collateral, for example.
I’ve found it helpful to orient cross-functional teams, including product marketing, around clear metrics linked to revenue. Here's a good way to think about some of the key metrics that PMM can influence:
Direct Revenue Impact
Bookings and pipeline touched by PMM initiatives like sales plays
Win rates (by segment, product, competitor)
Average deal size
Sales Effectiveness
Pipeline conversion rates by stage
Sales content usage and engagement
Deal velocity and sales cycle length
New rep ramp time
Customer & Market Validation
Product adoption rates
Feature usage trends
Customer satisfaction scores
Win/loss analysis insights
The secret sauce is to combine quantitative data with qualitative feedback through:
Regular conversations with Sales and your GTM teams (what's working/not working)
Customer interviews (what their pain points are and why they bought)
Deal desk reviews and interviews (patterns in successful vs. unsuccessful deals)
That way, you can understand the story behind the numbers and suss out reasons for any trends or anomalies. And from there, you can put together an action plan to iterate and improve.
Content management tools like Highspot and revenue intelligence tools like Gong are hugely beneficial to product marketing teams trying to demonstrate impact on revenue. With these solutions, you can track and measure content utilization, prospect engagement, and sales execution and answer questions like–
Is our new pitch deck being used? Is it resonating with prospects and helping accelerate deals?
Are sales reps putting the new skills and knowledge they were trained on into practice successfully?
Is our new competitive positioning landing and helping sales reps get past objections/hurdles?
Moving further up funnel, if you have strong attribution in place, it's also pretty easy to point to organic traffic, leads, and pipeline from product marketing led campaigns as a direct impact on revenue.