AMA: SmartRecruiters Former Sr Director, Product & Customer Marketing, Jack Wei on Product Marketing KPI's

I go back to ensuring that the team structure is aligned to business objectives and associated KPIs. My company does have aggressive sales, customer satisfaction, and product adoption metrics (spans across the board) so I like to structure the team accordingly. I'll use a buyer journey framework to illustrate my ideal state team structure given these objectives (moving from top to bottom of funnel): 1. Content Marketer: Focuses on creating top of funnel assets to drive demand & support category creation 2. Technical PMM: Partners with our platform and alliances team to create mid-funnel assets and target a new persona, drive new business 3. PMM - Core and Launches: Subject matter expert of our main product, focusing on quarterly and ongoing product releases, drive activation 4. PMM - Add-ons: Subject matter expert of a group of add-on products, drive attach rate and category creation 5. Product Marketing associate/analyst: Support across to gain experience/ownership, build data-driven muscle Other roles not technically PMM, but on team: * Customer marketer * Lifecycle marketer * Advocacy & community manager * Marketing designer 1 * Marketing designer 2

Ultimately, the change in win rate against that particular competitor before vs. after your CI project. There are sub goals and metrics to unpack here: * QoQ change in the competitor features & functions, and messaging * The pace at which your product team is able to ship against new intel * PM survey results on the usefulness of your CI program This may be a controversial statement, but after seeing CI programs run out of Product, PMM, and Ops at different companies, I think the actual research work belongs in Product -- they're the true owners of what's being scoped and built, and should be invested in delivering a better product. PMM can stil own the pricing/packaging/messaging piece.

Internal newsletters, revenue org all-hands, relevant slack channels, and team-specific meetings. Of course, not every activity is shared through every channel. Depending on the "size" of the project or deliverable, we choose which channels to broadcast through. Thankfully we have a well-organized enablement team that manages these channel logistics, so we're able to efficiently streamline internal comms. On a personal level, it's critical that I provide key executives and other team leads with visibility of what's coming, so that they get their teams' attention and start a network effect for PMMs. Frankly, communicating across & up is something that I (and any leader) can be better about. Ultimately, you can broadcast every which way, but ensuring that recipients are attentively listening is the bigger challenge.

Having consulted for PMM teams, and built/run one from scratch, it's safe to say the areas of responsibility for any PMM is on an ever-evolving continuum. However, I see a difference between a junior PMM vs a first PMM hire... in that the first PMM hire should NOT be junior. That's not a knock on the junior role. In fact, I'm urging early stage Founders/CEOs/VP Marketing to have some semblance of a career path for PMM if your natural inclination is to maximize value from a high performing yet low cost junior PMM unicorn. It's possible, but unless that individual is truly exceptional the situation will quickly erode into lack of equity and anxiety. Why? Because it's easy to staff a PMM on any (and many) projects and not everyone can handle the load without prior exposure. To actually answer your question -- my advice to a junior PMM and first marketing hire: It was nice knowing you? Godspeed? Jokes aside, have an honest and mature conversation with your manager on the expectations if you see the mound of projects transform into a mountain overnight. A critical skill to becoming a successful PMM is stakholder management, so it ought to start early in your career whether it's with your manager, his/her boss, or your peers. Finally, don't hesitate to ask for help to prioritize when you're overwhelmed 

My answer spans the top hard + soft skills: * Hard: Well-rounded across words and numbers. You often hear that PMMs have to be strong storytellers (framing, positioning, mesaging, writing), but the highest-performing and highest-potential PMMs I've worked with are also very analytical and comfortable with some number crunching. In the B2B space, in particular, backing up any story with inspiring message, facts, and data will do wonders. * Soft: Empathy and stakeholder management. Someone who can put others first and put him/herself in another's shoes. You often hear that PMMs must act as the voice of the customer, and that is 100% true. Add to that the ability to get other people and teams on the same page (the case for most PMM projects) will go a long way. To the people who asked this question, I'm curious -- What do the best product marketing leaders have in common?

Not sure I understand the question. If this is to set revenue targets for a new industry expansion where GTM resources have not yet been assigned, I'd do a top-down and bottom-up analysis of the total addressable market (TAM), then take a percentage of that TAM to set the revenue target. You'll need to have marketing-only activities ready to back up your assumptions if no other resources are available. * Top-down: Research the overall industry, audience size, propensity to spend, competitive pricing, geographical entry points, distribution, etc. and take a chunk of that market. * Bottom-up: Find a market comp or adjacent industry your company is already engaged with, and assume that you have no one in the field to go to market with (ie. sales reps) except for marketing and a modest programs budget

This ties back to business objectives (corporate level KPIs), and how your team / individual role & responsibility is structured against those objectives. You'll often see that, depending on the company stage and maturity, PMM will skew towards alignment with either Product OR Sales. But it's rarely perfectly positioned in the middle. * Let's say your business has an aggressive product growth target... well then you're likely to staff a PMM that'll specialize in launches, or maybe even a lifecycle marketer (the next hottest role after PMM in marketing, I might add). In that case the metric to hold this particular PMM accountable to is: Activation, adoption, or engagement rate within the first 5, 10, 30 days post-launch -- something to that effect. * On the other hand, if there is a clear sales target, then you could have the PMM aligned to: Revenue, win rate, close rate, ASP, etc. I recommend to stick with 1 metric wherever possible to not muddy the water. And again, enure alignment with the business objective and take advantage of the fact that most PMM teams get a comprehensive view of the business and can position against critical initiatives (and associated metrics).

1. Know the business forecasts for as far out as possible( preferably at least 1 year) -- overall strategy, revenue, R&D investments, headcount, budget, HR/hiring policies, etc. 2. Have a vision of the team structure that aligns with this strategy 3. List out the net-new roles you're planning for, prioritizing must haves vs. nice to haves 4. Assign the must have roles to a timeline (order of hiring), supported by a note on why 5. Shop this around to your manager and any other key stakeholder; confirm budget and timeline 6. Execute You're likely in an earlier stage of buildout if expanding from 1 to multiple PMMs. I recommend to stagger hiring for 1 area of skillsets at a time to build the team's "brand" when it comes to: * Content/asset creation (Sales and CSM) * Launches (marketing and product) * Pricing/packaging (Ops and Sales) But not invest all at once unless you have strong lieutenants/leaders to help oversee. I've seen others trip and bite off more than they can chew.

Such is life in business? At the risk of sounding like a corporate stiff, we must set markers to swim towards, otherwise we're just swimming in circles... So if the KPI feels arbitrary, narrow the scope or make the number smaller. If other stakeholders disagree, that's a different problem to solve. We go by setting SMART goals (google it). It is a cheesy acronym but it works. It forces you to scrutinize and be honest with yourself and your team on the goal. And it will be realistic if all boxes can be checked across Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based.

Maybe this is a better question for my team. For me, I think it's the opposite. KPIs are valuable for me as a PMM because, through all the noise and new requests/projects that I inevitably get in a specific period of time, I can pull my head out of the weeds and make sure I'm moving towards that targeted KPI. It helps to bring measurable meaning to my work. Due to the fact that PMMs don't have "direct impact" on key biz metrics like revenue or renewal/upsell/churn, the value perceived by other teams/management isn't always tied to a black and white number, or at least it doesn't stay there. When I've evaluated PMMs with executives in the room, they always bring a ton of anecdotal comments even and quickly move beyond hard performance ratings on paper.

There are dfinitely many directions to take. I'll try to distill down to two metrics across external & internal GTM KPIs: External * Leads, or Revenue within X days of launch * Activation/adoption within X days of launch Internal * Stakeholder satisfaction (survey) * GTM on time delivery, asset readiness The X in days depends on the type of business you're in. For B2C you'll focus on MRR and shorter conversion cycles, likely within the first 15-30 days. For B2B align it with your avg sales cycle for prospects and 75% of the time for customer add-ons.

I must ask back: in what context? Because PMM can flex its priorities and alignment towards Product vs. Sales vs. Customer Success (or even Marketing demand gen/comms, I go back do ensuring that whatever KPI is set supports a top 3 corporate objective that the C-Suite cares about. If you forced me to point to a specific KPI, I'd pick #leads or $pipeline generated. You see this especially at smaller, early stage companies where the Marketing team is just getting built out and the team is trying to distill down to 1 KPI a few team members can get behind -- you can map the success of a new product launch... or the ability to feed sales... to top-of-funnel interest. However, I'd work backwards and instead set the KPIs to the ultimate objective vs. something in the interim. E.g., If you set the KPI as X% activation or adoption you would need signups (leads) to get there anyway. If you set the KPI as X$ revenue you would need pipe to get there anyway, etc. And this isn't a knock on the demandgen or customer marketing teams. Leads and pipe are important metrics, just not for PMM. My runner-up unimportant KPIs for PMM: # views of a particular piece of asset, followed by aggregate NPS (unless you have a very mature and built out team that can consistently cover all personas and a ton of ground).