Alex Gammelgard

In any SaaS business, “adoption” is a company-wide priority. If customers aren’t happy and using the product, you’re just putting your sales/marketing investments into a leaky bucket. So it makes sense that Marketing -- and PMM specifically -- would monitor adoption closely, and even set KPIs in this area. While I see Product as primarily responsible for tracking the usability of the features they build in a detailed way (i.e. did moving the button make a difference/did a given change resolve br ...Read More

The short answer to your question is that I agree with your approach -- laddering the team up to a larger north star metric against which all activities can be tied is a great solution. I think a simple rule of thumb is, if you’re working on an individual project that isn’t tied to a company outcome, you shouldn’t be doing it. Every OKR should be tied to solving company challenges, and should be measured by outcomes for the business. This is a great north star that keeps teams motivated, even wh ...Read More

Whenever I’m reporting on PMM results, I include a slide called “PMM across the funnel.” This allows me to showcase how specific PMM programs impact the effectiveness of the entire team. For example, a lot of competitive projects/sales enablement efforts have nothing to do with pipeline generation, and are more focused on cycle times, competitive win rates, and close rates. In-product campaigns or assets associated with a product launch may be tied to adoption for a specific user segment, and ot ...Read More

PMM can be one of the most impactful orgs in the company - we have a unique view into the market, the competition, and engage daily with product, CS, and the entire GTM team. We also often have a seat with Finance, given our responsibilities in pricing and packaging. That’s why it always surprises me when PMM shies away from taking on KPIs that show true business value. Everyone wants to measure the outcomes of a product launch/major campaign, or look at content usage, etc., but the things the C ...Read More

A cornerstone of my PMM strategy, and how I set/socialize PMM KPIs is something I call the “state of the customer report.” This is done quarterly, and is a look at the market based off of win/loss interviews, revenue and churn data, competitors, and other insights relevant to company performance. The report establishes where we are seeing the biggest breaks in the sales funnel, biggest gaps in terms of product adoption/NPS, and any other threats/opportunities perceived (for example, a new compet ...Read More

At most startups, the business founder is the first product marketer. This makes sense bc the founder knows the problem deeply, as well as the market, the product vision, and the opportunity ahead, and is willing to do the work to get those first sales across the line. The challenge is, knowing the landscape and the challenges is VERY different from knowing how to action your knowledge into playbooks, so very quickly, not having PMM to scale the story and GTM process causes problems. What I typi ...Read More

Any KPI, no matter how small, can be important if it’s tied to organizational performance. That said, my biggest pet peeve is when PMMs attempt to show the value of their team with KPIs that aren’t actually tied to anything outcome-based.  A common one that comes to mind is setting goals for “views” of a specific piece of content. Content views are something that should be tracked for diagnostic reasons, but not as a team KPI, unless you want to become a team of “list marketers” checking the box ...Read More