Intangibles and the ROI of Product Marketing

I’ll start by sharing two product marketing truisms (that I just pulled out of thin air): 1) You must measure and evangelize the impact of your product marketing efforts, and 2) product marketing doesn’t own the measurable KPIs most important to the business. Here’s what I mean - I’ve summarized below a few of the most critical B2B business metrics, and what team is ultimately accountable for the results:

• Revenue growth: Sales teams are ultimately responsible for closing the deals that bring in revenue.? Product marketing supports sales by delivering the messaging, sales enablement, and sales and marketing assets that help sales teams to navigate the leads through the sales cycle and eventually convert to close.
• Net retention:? A critical component of any subscription business, the combination of sales and account management/support/renewals teams work together to not only ensure current customers renew their subscriptions, but work hard to upsell/cross-sell so each customer brings in more revenue after they renew.? Product marketing helps with positioning the value of “more!”
• Product adoption: Product, support, and service teams all play a major role in ensuring new customers use the capabilities they’ve purchased. Product marketing helps create supporting content and messaging for service, support, and product-led growth (PLG) teams to educate and encourage product usage.
• Lead generation and conversion: Marketing and sales teams are both on the hook to generate high quality leads, and then it’s sales job to turn them into opportunities that eventually convert into closed business. But marketing and product marketing are on the hook to continue to nurture these leads through the buyer's journey through compelling content, campaigns, and engagement strategies.?
• Market share: Every function plays a role in capturing an increasing percentage of your addressable market. Product marketing plays a large role in driving marketing and competitive intelligence and building positioning, enablement, and supporting content to help sales and marketing to get invited to more deals and win more often.?

Quantitative metrics matter

Aside from the above metrics, there are dozens of other core sales, marketing, product, enablement, service, and support KPIs that Ops teams across the business are tracking, and that PMMs play a role in supporting. But what measurable outcomes are truly the most influenced by product marketing activities, and which ones should be used to prove PMM's value to the organization? There are some of the quantifiable metrics that I feel product marketers have the most influence over:

• Industry Analysts: In partnership with your Analyst Relations team, PMMs have an extremely large impact on if and how influential analysts cover your business. Being asked to participate and being cited in research, being part of a vendor evaluation like a Magic Quadrant or a Wave and achieving improved positioning, and simply keeping analysts informed of your customer wins, innovations, and business momentum through briefings and inquiry are all value-added and measurable activities.
• Product launch effectiveness:? Product marketing is typically responsible for managing product launches in their entirety, from partnering with product org on launch themes and tiering, to facilitating the complex cross-functional GTM strategy and execution across marketing, sales, enablement, service, and support.? There should be both internal and external metrics for a launch. Internal metrics may simply be project management type measures; was the launch on-time or delayed? Were all reps enabled on time and did they feel prepared (based a survey on training effectiveness)? Were there any unforeseen costs, resource constraints or any other breakdowns of the launch process?? External metrics need to be tied to goals of a launch. If the goal was to increase product adoption, then focus on adoption metrics. If the goal was to increase competitiveness, track win rates. If the goal was to add new customers, track new logo acquisition.?
• Competitive win rates: The sales team is on the hook to win deals in a competitive battle, but it’s up to PMM to ensure sales teams are armed with the most relevant competitive research, battlecards, and positioning to help win these deals. It makes sense for PMM to measure themselves on any increases in competitive win rates against top tier competitors.?
• Website and content engagement: Product marketing will likely own the copy on the website, and play a pivotal role in defining the right TOFUs/MOFUs/and BOFUs for content marketing that will be used to drive awareness, generate leads, and move prospects and customers through their respective customer journeys. PMM doesn’t (typically) own the actual execution of marketing campaigns, SEO investments, and website management where these assets and CTAs (call to actions) are used. But the content and positioning that goes into it is so core to what PMM delivers, it makes sense to keep close tabs on its effectiveness.
• Pricing and packaging: Not all product marketing teams own final pricing and packaging decisions, but hopefully leadership is smart enough to ensure PMM plays a major contributing role to the conversation. The more involved PMM is in these decisions, the more on the hook they should be for the pricing metrics that matter.? Depending on the goals of your pricing strategy, these metrics may include increase in average sales price, decrease in discounting, increase in x-sell, upsell, or attach rates, etc.?

The true value of product marketing is often intangible

In my time as a product marketing leader, I’ve been responsible for reporting success metrics in the forms of OKRs, KPIs, or whatever other quarterly/annual measurement philosophy my leadership team desired. And I’m sure if any of my results were crashing and burning, they would have had something to say about it!? But none of those metrics were truly how my leadership teams and cross-functional peers perceived the effectiveness of my product marketing teams. The intangible relationships and collaborations that PMM facilitates, along with the most important and least measurable, “your team is there for us, is an amazing partner, and you help make us more successful” metric.??

These are the metrics that truly matter to me as a product marketer and a leader, and I strongly encourage anyone building out or managing a PMM team to give equal thought to these intangibles.?You’ll note many of these qualitative measures are a recognition of the reality that PMM sits as one of the most cross-functionally dependent functions at any B2B tech company:

• Responsiveness: I cannot stress enough how important this one is.?Product marketing is viewed as an internal support organization as much as it is a GTM strategy team. Because product marketing works closely with product, sales, marketing, operations, and so many other parts of the business, the volume of ‘inbound’ requests, questions, and projects can be overwhelming. Sure you can measure how many requests come in and completion rates, etc - but PMM should actually not be operated as a support organization. Not every request is of equal priority, and many are not even appropriate for PMM to deliver or are not in line with business priorities. Just because PMM has skills to do things, doesn’t mean they have the bandwidth to deliver or that everything is in line with the team’s priorities. The PMM leader’s job is to help the team prioritize and give direction on how to appropriately push back when needed. But I’m a stickler for responsiveness! I have a personal SLA (service level agreement) that I will always try to respond to any incoming question or request within 24 hours of receiving it. My response may be “I can’t get to this now” or “It’s not something I can do”, but I respond!? It’s a professional courtesy that’s too often taken for granted among colleagues, and I usually have responsiveness as a performance objective for my team members.
• Rosetta stone. The best product marketers should have an ability to take the most complex product or technology concepts when collaborating with their colleagues in the product org and translate those concepts into plain language that can easily be understood and leveraged by internal sales, marketing, and support colleagues, as well as external customers, analysts, and partners. The ability to know how to present concepts and narratives to the right audiences, personas, and segments is core to what a product marketer does when creating positioning and messaging for GTM activities.?But that same skill is also critical for facilitating strong alignment and collaboration internally.?
• Cross-functional collaboration/facilitation. ?As discussed above for measuring product launches, PMMs often play that project management and facilitation role across multiple business initiatives - not just product launches.?A lack of project management skills can completely derail cross-functional projects and create massive frustration, so strong project management skills are critical and appreciated.
• External engagement. This is surprisingly taken for granted and not often called out as a primary responsibility for a PMM, but product marketers are often the faces and voices of the business. They are presenting at events and on webinars all the time. They are active on social media and publish blogs. They attend analyst events, briefings, and inquiries, and are building personal relationships with key analysts.?And they are (hopefully!) building relationships with many customers themselves. Whether it’s meeting customers at events, interviewing customers for voice of customer research, facilitating customer advisory boards (CABs) or product advisory councils (PACs), and much more.

What are some of the key measures of success you use to evangelize the value of product marketing?? I’d love to hear both the quantitative and intangible ROI!