How do you build a business case to quickly grow a product marketing team? What metrics do you look at to make sure you're driving ROI for the business overall?

There are few things i'd look at based on the rhythm of the business. How fast is the business growing? How fast is the organization innovating, and how fast is the sales team growing. How many product managers are there (the PM to PMM ratio should be at least 4:1). 

How often are there launches that need to be supported? What does the competitive landscape look like. 

Factoring all of this you can get an assessment of how complex the solution is, how large the addressable market is, and how much content needs to be produced. Work that math to see how many PMMs are needed to support the business.

Some of the key metrics to track are win rates, deal velocity, deal size, ARR. 

There are usually two sets of core metrics that I look at to assess whether our efforts are positively influencing the right outcomes:

• Marketing metrics: pipeline, campaign/content performance, bookings (PQLs if you work closely with the product growth team)
• Sales metrics: average deal size, average win rate, ARR

There is also the kind of impact that PMMs can have that are not necessarily quantifiable - such as influencing the product roadmap in a way that eventually leads to greater market success for your product(s).

At the end of the day, it all comes back to revenue and how the team’s efforts are directly/indirectly contributing to the bottom line.

To build a solid case to quickly grow a pmm team, a product marketing team must partner with customers and the entire product, revenue, and strategy org to:

• Drive pipeline and top-line revenue growth, inclusive of new logo and cross-sell / up-sell (land & expand growth)
• Partner with enablement to Ensure quota-carrying teams know what to say to whom and when
• Bring customer feedback into the product and technology team in order to inform product roadmaps.
• Prioritize, open, and adapt to new markets 
• Drive home differentiated and unique value

Metrics that I look at to drive ROI are: 

1. Industry/Segment NARR
2. Gross Pipeline
3. Win / close rates
4. Industry/Segment ASP

The best business case to grow the PMM team, or any team for that matter, is to highlight how the team is going to tackle the biggest challenges that the business is facing. This has always been true but is particularly true in the macro environment we are in

So, ask what the business challenges are. Do you have a lead-gen/pipeline problem ? Are your win rates dropping due to competitive pressures ? Are customers spending less ? Are they churning quickly ? Are they not expanding fast enough ? Are the new products not doing well ? Is there a shelfware problem (i.e. feature adoption is too low) ?

PMMs can help all of the above problems, and more. Any investments in team size will, and should, directly be linked to business challenges

Sometimes the challenges aren’t expressed directly but are captured in other metrics the business talks about. e.g. no of reps hitting quota, or expansion ARR, or sales cycle / deal velocity ? Or free to paid conversions ? Focus on the metric that the business is struggling with and understand if there is a way for the PMM team to impact there

Any business case for expanding PMM should be built around the expansion of target use cases or audiences. If your company is selling new stuff to existing customer types OR existing stuff to new customer types OR new stuff to new customer types, chances are you'll need more PMM coverage to cover messaging, positioning, launches, sales enablement, campaign design, analyst relations, etc. When modeling, tie additional headcount to projected net new projected revenue, aligning that investment to necessary engineering, PM and sales investment. Look for metrics like average deal-size, average deal cycle, churn rate, monthly recurring revenue and make the case that incremental PMM headcount is a needed to hit targets.