Product marketing teams face increasing pressure to demonstrate their strategic value and contribution to business outcomes. Yet many struggle with measurement approaches that fail to capture their true impact or resonate with executive stakeholders. After analyzing measurement practices from dozens of high-performing product marketing organizations, we’ve identified ten transformative best practices that accurately capture product marketing’s contribution and do so in ways that command executive attention and respect.

1. Start With Business Metrics, Not Marketing Activities

The common mistake: Beginning measurement with activities (content created, launches executed) rather than focusing on the business outcomes executives actually care about.

The best practice: Anchor your measurement framework in the specific business metrics that matter to your executive team, then work backward to connect product marketing activities to these outcomes.

Example: Snowflake’s product marketing team restructured their entire measurement approach around three executive priorities: new customer acquisition in enterprise accounts, cross-sell adoption of new products, and competitive win rate improvement. By starting with these business metrics and working backward to identify the product marketing levers that influenced each one, they created immediate executive relevance that previous activity-based reporting never achieved.

How to Do It Right? Begin by interviewing each executive stakeholder about their top 3 priorities and how they measure success. Create a “business impact map” that explicitly connects product marketing activities to these priority metrics, showing the causal relationship between your work and their objectives.

2. Implement Controlled Experimentation

The common mistake: Relying on correlation or anecdotal evidence to demonstrate impact, which fails to convince data-driven executives.

The best practice: Use controlled experiments that isolate product marketing’s specific contribution by comparing test and control groups experiencing different marketing treatments.

Example: HubSpot’s product marketing team transformed their credibility by implementing “50/50 tests” for major messaging changes and enablement programs. By exposing only half of their sales team or customer base to new approaches while maintaining a control group, they could definitively demonstrate the impact of their work—in one case showing a 23% lift in opportunity creation from a new messaging framework.

How to Do It Right? Start with simple A/B tests of content, messaging, or enablement where you can cleanly separate audiences. Document your methodology carefully to preempt questions about statistical validity. Begin with one high-profile test where you expect significant impact to build credibility for the approach.

3. Focus on Velocity Metrics, Not Just Volume

The common mistake: Measuring only volume metrics (leads, opportunities, revenue) without capturing how product marketing improves the efficiency and speed of business processes.

The best practice: Incorporate velocity metrics that demonstrate how product marketing accelerates business outcomes—often providing impact that’s more directly attributable and immediately valuable than volume alone.

Example: MongoDB’s product marketing team shifted from primarily reporting on influenced pipeline (a volume metric) to emphasizing their impact on sales cycle velocity. By showing how accounts exposed to their new solution guides progressed 31% faster through the pipeline than similar accounts without this enablement, they demonstrated clear ROI in terms executives immediately valued: faster revenue realization and improved sales productivity.

How to Do It Right? Identify the key business processes your work influences (sales cycles, adoption journeys, competitive displacements) and establish baseline metrics for how long these typically take. Measure changes in velocity when your initiatives are applied, with particular attention to where bottlenecks are eliminated or decision-making accelerated.

4. Establish “Confidence” as a Leading Indicator

The common mistake: Focusing exclusively on lagging business outcomes while missing the powerful leading indicator of stakeholder confidence that predicts future performance.

The best practice: Systematically measure confidence levels among key stakeholders (sales, customers, partners) as a leading indicator that predicts future business performance and directly reflects product marketing effectiveness.

Example: Okta implemented quarterly “confidence pulse” surveys with their sales organization, measuring rep confidence in their product knowledge, competitive positioning, messaging effectiveness, and objection handling. They found that every 10-point increase in aggregate confidence scores predicted a 15% improvement in win rates in the following quarter, giving them a powerful leading indicator of future performance.

How to Do It Right? Create simple, consistent confidence surveys (no more than 5-7 questions) for key stakeholder groups. Establish a regular cadence (monthly or quarterly) and track trends over time. Correlate confidence scores with subsequent performance metrics to demonstrate predictive validity to executives.

5. Create Multi-Dimensional Competitive Metrics

The common mistake: Relying solely on win rate to measure competitive effectiveness, missing the nuanced impact of product marketing on competitive positioning and strategy.

The best practice: Develop a multi-dimensional competitive measurement framework that captures product marketing’s impact across the entire competitive landscape and buying process.

Example: Twilio developed a “Competitive Impact Index” that transformed how executives understood product marketing’s competitive contribution. Beyond win rate, they tracked metrics like “competitive engagement rate” (how often competitors responded to their moves), “competitive narrative adoption” (how effectively their framing of the market was adopted by analysts and customers), and “competitive displacement velocity” (how quickly they could convert competitive customers)—providing a sophisticated view of market dynamics.

How to Do It Right? Work with sales operations to enhance competitive tracking in your CRM, adding dimensions beyond binary win/loss outcomes. Incorporate data on deal-specific factors (which competitors were involved, what stages they entered or exited), competitive intelligence effectiveness, and post-decision customer feedback about competitive factors.

6. Quantify the “Knowledge Gap” Impact

The common mistake: Treating enablement as an activity metric (training sessions held, materials created) rather than measuring its impact on knowledge improvement and application.

The best practice: Systematically measure knowledge gaps before and after enablement initiatives, then track how knowledge improvements translate to performance gains.

Example: DocuSign revolutionized their enablement measurement by implementing pre/post knowledge assessments for all product marketing enablement initiatives. By quantifying exactly how much sales knowledge improved on specific topics and then correlating those improvements with subsequent deal outcomes, they created a clear line of sight from enablement to revenue impact—demonstrating that reps who improved assessment scores by 30%+ generated 24% more pipeline.

How to Do It Right? Create brief knowledge assessments (5-10 questions) covering key areas of product marketing enablement. Administer before and after major enablement initiatives to quantify improvement. Track performance metrics for individuals or teams based on their knowledge improvement to demonstrate the business impact of closing knowledge gaps.

7. Implement “Message to Money” Tracking

The common mistake: Failing to connect messaging and positioning work to tangible financial outcomes, leaving executives unclear about the value of these core product marketing activities.

The best practice: Create explicit “message to money” tracking that connects specific messages and positioning elements to pipeline and revenue generation.

Example: Atlassian implemented “message tracking” in their CRM and customer journey analytics, tagging specific value propositions and messaging elements used in sales conversations, marketing assets, and customer communications. This enabled them to analyze which messages most effectively drove pipeline creation, sales advancement, and deal closure—providing clear evidence of which positioning elements delivered the greatest financial impact.

How to Do It Right? Select 3-5 key messages or positioning elements to track initially. Create simple tracking mechanisms in your CRM where sales can indicate which messages resonated in specific opportunities. Analyze which messages correlate with desired outcomes like larger deal sizes, faster sales cycles, or higher close rates.

8. Develop Customer Journey Acceleration Metrics

The common mistake: Measuring product marketing’s impact only on initial customer acquisition while missing its role in accelerating the entire customer journey from awareness through expansion.

The best practice: Create metrics that capture how product marketing initiatives accelerate customer movement through key journey stages, from initial education through adoption, value realization, and expansion.

Example: Figma implemented “journey velocity” metrics that transformed how executives viewed product marketing’s impact on their product-led growth model. By measuring how specific product marketing initiatives (like use case content, onboarding guides, and expansion playbooks) accelerated customer progression through key journey milestones, they demonstrated how product marketing reduced time-to-value by 35% and accelerated expansion revenue by creating scalable alternatives to high-touch customer success motions.

How to Do It Right? Map your ideal customer journey with clearly defined stages and milestones. Establish baseline timeframes for progression between these stages. Implement tracking to measure how product marketing initiatives influence progression velocity, with particular focus on removing friction from critical transitions.

9. Connect Content Directly to Revenue

The common mistake: Reporting content performance with engagement metrics (views, downloads) that fail to demonstrate business impact or justify content investments.

The best practice: Implement closed-loop tracking that directly connects content consumption to revenue outcomes, creating clear ROI for content investments.

Example: Salesforce’s product marketing team transformed content measurement by implementing multi-touch attribution that tracked content consumption throughout the buyer’s journey. Rather than reporting only on downloads or engagement, they could show specifically how different content types influenced pipeline creation, opportunity advancement, and closed revenue—revealing that technical deep-dives generated 3x more pipeline per view than general thought leadership.

How to Do It Right? Implement content tagging and tracking across marketing automation, CRM, and sales enablement platforms to create visibility into what content is consumed before key conversion points. Create attribution models that assign appropriate credit to content at different journey stages. Analyze patterns to identify your most revenue-impactful content types.

10. Create Executive-Ready “Impact Stories”

The common mistake: Providing executives with data dumps of metrics without synthesizing insights or creating compelling narratives about product marketing’s impact.

The best practice: Craft concise, data-backed “impact stories” that connect product marketing initiatives directly to business outcomes executives care about, using a consistent format that builds credibility over time.

Example: Datadog’s product marketing leadership transformed executive perception by replacing traditional metric reviews with “impact stories”—crisp, data-driven narratives that followed a consistent format: business challenge, product marketing approach, measurable outcomes, and next steps. This narrative format made complex product marketing contributions understandable and compelling for executives while still maintaining analytical rigor.

How to Do It Right? Create a simple template for impact stories with four components: 1) Business challenge or opportunity, 2) Product marketing approach and resources invested, 3) Specific, quantified outcomes and their business impact, and 4) Insights and next steps. Keep each story to a single page or slide, with supporting data available if requested.

Putting These Best Practices Into Action

Implementing these best practices doesn’t require a complete measurement overhaul or substantial new resources. Start by assessing your current approach against these principles, then identify 2-3 areas where immediate improvements would create the greatest impact on executive understanding and appreciation of product marketing’s value.

Remember that measurement should be a strategic asset that drives better decisions and demonstrates clear value—not an administrative burden. The most effective product marketing leaders use these practices not just to justify their existence but to continually optimize their impact and elevate their strategic influence within the organization.

As Google’s former VP of Product Marketing Adam Grenier notes: “The product marketers who gain the most executive influence don’t just measure what they do—they measure what they change. When you can quantifiably demonstrate how your work changes business outcomes executives already care about, your strategic value becomes undeniable.”