Don Fuss

Outside of pipeline or revenue we leverage the following metrics:

Product awareness: surveys, brand score, website traffic

Product adoption: percentage of users of use the product after purchase

Net Promoter Score: good indicator of customer satisfaction of the product

Conversion rate: measure effectiveness of particular marketing campaigns

Messaging is the way you describe and present your product or service to the market. It will describe the customer or market challenge, your solution or product capabilities and the benefits provided. Positioning focuses more on what differentiates your product or service in the market. Messaging: Our product helps you automate tasks to create efficiencies and cost savings. Positioning: Our product leverages artificial intelligence to automate tasks. 

There are plenty of resources to leverage to hone your messaging skills. LinkedIn Learning and Udemy have value proposition courses that provide overviews of how to build a messaging framework. Interview other product marketers who have shown great ability to message. Continue to test your messaging with various audiences and learn from their feedback. messaging is very much an art versus science.

Alignment with product teams is essential to ensuring capabilities and features and positioned correctly. We leverage for following sources to derive potential names for new features and functions: sales, customers, outside agency, and our brand team. Additionally, we research out competition to better understand how our new features compare.

Churn is a critical measurement for my area of the business, which includes services: The best KPIs for churn:

1. Churn rate: direct measurement of churn

2. Customer Engagement Score: Higher engagement usually equates to higher loyalty

3. Net Promoter Score: measure of satisfaction indicates likeliness to churn

4. Customer Retention Rate: another direct measurement of churn

While software companies do house a preponderance of product marketers, the core capabilities and responsibilities of product marketing can be utilized across a variety of business product and services. As an example I done over 8 years of product marketing for services, both at PwC and ServiceNow. Storytelling, messaging, audience targeting, campaign strategy, value proposition and sales enablement can be applied across various industries in the B2B and B2C space.

• 1:1 Interviews Moderated by Subject Matter Experts

• Online Discussion Boards

• A/B Testing

• Customer surveys and Focus Groups

Even if you're not a primary stakeholder, you can still influence GTM outcomes by focusing on these high-impact areas:

• Craft compelling narratives that resonate with target personas

• Own the creation of sales enablement assets—first call decks, demo narratives, FAQs, and customer stories

• Act as the connective tissue between product, sales, and marketing

• Insert yourself into GTM planning motions—even if informally

We incorporate our commissioned research into many of our product marketing decks, including first call decks, sales enablement decks, and go to market presentations. Competitive positioning and market data are critical to building out a strategic plan to capture market share and provide opportunity for upsell and cross sell of products and services.

Messaging can best tested in numerous ways. Customers are a great source of feedback for messaging. Leverage key accounts or your Product Advisory Board to gather input. You should also test your messaging with customer facing employees (sales, customer success). The analyst community (IDC, Forrester) provides a great resource to use for testing messaging.