Marie Francis

The end game is for customers to choose your solutions and brand over the competition, so the most meaningful KPI is your win rate against against different competitors when you encounter them in deals. To measure that, you need to make sure your sales team is documenting who they encounter in each opportunity. As a personal KPI, you could provide a quarterly or even monthly analysis and update with actionable insights and recommendations regarding competition. In my experience, a lot of real-time and one-off competitive intel gets lost. Product development cadence and process is just different than marketing and sales. Documentation and timely injection of information are really important when introducing insights from the marketplace into product development. You can also set some goals across the customer journey--admittedly, some of these are boxes to check as opposed to metrics to measure. Top of Funnel: Including competitive differentiation in your primary brand messaging and properties (websites, marketing campaigns, social, etc., wherever you think prospects are gaining awareness and familiarity with you). You can measure your SEO and web performance against close competitors. Middle of Funnel: Including competitive differentiation in the materials, campaigns and other plays used to get prospects engaged with you and especially in product education materials. Bottom of Funnel: Enabling the sales team with battlecards, objection handling, rip-and-replace customer stories, and updating sales materials to reflect what has been learned. 

Hiring! My big challenge right now, to quote our head of sales, is that there's not enough of me to go around. That's not meant to be self-congratulatory--when the need for your function exceeds your resources, it's a challenge and frustration! You have to be relentless in your prioritization and accept that you will not do things that people need sometimes. All the other challenges are the type that a person is lucky to have in their job. A lot of PMMs find that other leaders in the business want to get involved in or even takeover things they do, but it's almost always because what we do is intellectually interesting, strategically valuable, and highly visibile. Having a job that others want is a good thing in my book.

I agree with James that it is best to go third pary, but I have seen data and heard from customers that while they will discount the validity of any materials coming from the vendor as being slanted, they will pay attention to results metrics and use them in their buying decisions. So I believe it is still worth the effort to measure and present economic impact results to prospects and customers, even if you don't have the option to go with best practice. If you are going to do this in house, I suggest starting small with a partial economic analysis as opposed to total. You'll need three key pieces to conduct any supportable economic analysis: 1) a definition for the metrics you want to track, 2) the "before" measurement, and 3) the "after" measurement. The hardest part in my experience is getting the "before" measurement from customers. Chances are they aren't reliably tracking the metrics you need, or at least not in the way you prefer they do. So once you have defined 3-5 metrics you want to track (for example, sales velocity measured as average length of deal cycle in days, don't make it complicated), you'll need to train your sales team and/or professional services team to capture this information from the prospect during the sales cycle or before go-live. Give them a clear place to capture this information, such as a dedicated field in CRM. I also suggest training your team on how to ask for this information without making it a burden on the customer. If you can't rely on other teams to get this information for you, figure out a way to get it for yourself. Then, you'll need to make sure there is a point or mulitple points in the customer journey during which the "after" information is captured. Partner with your Customer Success teams for this. They want to show their success as much as you do. Hope this is helpful!

Revenue, revenue, and revenue. Assuming the product is launched to generate revenue. Not all are. Some products are launched to test ideas, some might exist simply to check a box with influential audiences, others might be there to block or signal to the competition. There are also different metrics that should be considered at different points in time and are dependent upon your business model. Obviously, revenue is not solely attributed to a successful launch. Lack of revenue certainly can be, though. Long answer: the question seems designed to get crisp, actionable responses but doesn't lend itself to that.

1. Have a true desire to partner, and explictly tell them that's what you want to do. 2. Tell them what you are working on and why. Show them how they can be involved. Be specific. 3. Ask what the 2-3 most important things they need from you are. Learn why those are the things they want. Figure out how to give them what they need without blowing up your priorities. 4. Tell them what you need from them, then ask how best to make that happen so it doesn't duplicate or burden. 5. Be nice, even when it's hard or not reciprocated.

While I agree with Mary's answer ("data") and the other great points that have been added here, I would caution against taking the exact same approach you would to influencing product as you would to influencing culture. If data were sufficient to change culture, the world would look dramatically different. Culture is theoretically owned in people, HR, operations, and exec leadership. It's an intangible and can be attached to personality. That's a different audience and perspective than a group of product managers and engineers. Put your marketing hat on and adjust your approach accordingly. Lead with data/logos, appeal to and be sensitive of pathos, and make a case for kairos. 

Agree with Steve (Hi, Steve! 👋) and would like to add that there should be a push-pull relationship. Some good conversations to have with your brand marketers are around how brand and category positioning should show up within product marketing, and how product differentiation should show up in brand identity. It's a good place in the business to apply some consumer marketing conventions... "Our Brand is where these buyers find this category of product with these special characteristics to get these high value benefits." 

I periodically survey my sales team and ask them what their most challenging conversations are with buyers, what materials they have found the most helpful and WHY, and what their most burning need is. When I push them new materials or highlight something I've already sent them, I specifically reference the survey results whenever possible. And whatever the biggest request is, I make a point of delivering ASAP, again connecting the dots for them: "You asked me for this, and now I'm delivering it to you." This approach has yielded many benefits, not the least of which is credibility with my sales team. 

I made a major career change a few years ago from public sector to enterprise tech, and some of the most useful things I did were adjust my language, incorporate marketing terms into my vocabulary, and learn how to explain in marketing terms what I did in other places. Many skills and experiences translate across industries and roles, with "translate" being the keyword here. If you are going to be a marketer, you need to speak the language of your audience. Practice this in conversation with friends in marketing; listen to how they talk about their jobs and ask what their KPIs are. Get into detail. I've found working in tech that many other functions lack a meaningful understanding of the machinations of marketing. If you are going to convince a hiring manager that you can be a marketer, you'll need to sound like one.