Lizzie Yarbrough de Cantor

I do think this is highly dependent on the type of product you are taking to market, but here are some go-tos I use. Keep it simple: Make sure you focus any training decks in the simplest, most customer centric language. It’s often easy to use technical terminology and/or internal acronyms and names that will not help that sales rep learn or relate to the customers they are interacting with! Stay value-focused: It is also really easy to go into deep detail on product features and find yourself b ...Read More

Cross-functional alignment and support of measures you will be focused on is probably the most important factor in actually achieving a KPI in my experience. This all starts with the relationships you have built as a product marketer and how well you are in-tune with business priority and what is motivating other teams. Here's my suggestions for staying in strong communication and alignment with other areas of the business to ensure your goals are aligned and supported cross-functionally. Have a ...Read More

This is a topic I am super passionate about at the moment. We are going through a lot of this with my current team. It can be so easy to find yourself launching and communicating to your customer in the way your product team is organized instead of how that customer experiences your products. Also don’t sweat too much, this is natural because of how most product marketing teams orient themselves to their product and engineering organizations. But let’s be real, it’s a bad habit. Here is how we a ...Read More

My favorite KPI related to pipeline-focused initiatives are sales opportunities that can be attributed to your campaign or initiative. As a role with "marketing" in the title it can be easy to look to metrics like leads, page or asset conversions, site traffic, or other higher in the funnel marketing metrics. While these are directionally important, I do not think they are enough stake in the game. It's not just about exposure, it's about quality of that lead and your ability to find the right p ...Read More

I love this question because Sales Enablement is one of my most consistent partners on any initiative. How you measure success of sales enablement really depends on what tools you have in place. Lots of sales enablement tools now have ways to measure usage which can be very helpful. We use Highspot and Workramp at my current company and it allows me to track usage on things like training/resource pages, completion rate on specific enablement tracks, or how often sales is sending out specific sal ...Read More

Quarter over quarter, I typically look for KPIs and metrics each team member can have some ownership of individually. I will say, multiple team members may be focused on the same north star metric, i.e. a certain growth in customers or revenue for a product line, but will have different support KPIs that help contribute to the top metric. Here are some examples: Ownership over a campaign with certain opportunity targets Responsibility for marquee events and campaigns, activities, around it leadi ...Read More

This is nuanced a lot by organization, but outside of a typical process (manager screens, homework exercises, executive sign off, etc), the most important signals I look for are in two key steps—a functional and cross-functional interview. For the functional interview, I'm looking for a pulse check from another product marketer (or marketer if you are just building out the team) to test for excellence in the areas that matter for the role. These areas vary depending on your org's needs, but I'm ...Read More

Honestly, I have no issue with shared KPIs as long as each team knows what they are contributing to influence the KPI. I think the most common example here are KPIs around a product or feature launch resulting in shared accountability with product and engineering, or product expansion/growth campaigns where accountability is largely shared with sales. This is where a strong plan comes into place—know what your KPI is as the over-arching metric and then be ok with delivery or outcome-based measur ...Read More

I have a couple of weekly touchpoints with my sales team. We hold a weekly pipeline review where all of marketing and sales leadership sit together and review the state of our pipeline and try to get ahead of any major problems before it’s too late. This is typically a sales-driven meeting, but is a good way to make sure we can spot challenges before they become overwhelming. The second touchpoint is a weekly “standup”. Let me be honest, it’s not a standup like most of us know. It’s a weekly com ...Read More

Just to share an opinion: if you need 5 separate measurements to ensure a campaign is successful, then you probably need to go back and reprioritize/reframe what you are looking to do. I think 5 KPIs is too many for a campaign to really be focused and effective. My suggestion would be to have a singular north start metric—ex. pipeline generation, new bookings, product or feature adoption rate—with one or two additional KPIs if needed. Here are KPIs I find myself defaulting to a lot lately: Marke ...Read More