Beyond the click: How to tie product marketing activities to revenue

Buckle up, PMMs. This is a heavy topic, but a super important one.

⭐ Once you understand marketing attribution, you’re well on your way to product marketing leadership and advancing your career.

⭐ Speaking clearly about revenue and data will make you invaluable to leadership.

⭐ Focusing on data-informed activities differentiates you from the PMMs who only focus on launch activities.

⭐ Understanding revenue and funnel metrics positions you for more strategic roles and greater influence over product and marketing strategy overall.

All in all, this is the stuff you need to know to level up!

Product marketers often find themselves in a unique position. They’re deeply involved in understanding the product, the market, and the customer. However, they can struggle to show how their work influences the company’s bottom line.

While metrics like clicks are handy for showing engagement, they don’t tell the whole story. They’re often even referred to as “vanity metrics” because they are hard to tie to impact. To prove value, product marketers need to know the numbers that tie their efforts directly to revenue and now to influence them.

This blog is here to guide you through key metrics and opportunities to influence them, so you can strategically connect your work to revenue generation.

Let’s dive in.

The foundation: Lagging vs. leading indicators

To start, let’s explore the difference between lagging and leading indicators.

Lagging indicators reflect past performance. Metrics such as subscription revenue, customer acquisition costs, or operating income are often lagging indicators. Lagging metrics give a snapshot of overall business health and what’s already been accomplished.

Product marketers also need to focus on leading indicators that anticipate future success. Let’s say your company just published a new thought leadership article introducing a new concept to the market. This piece generates a spike in conversion in your website’s lead capture forms. This high conversion suggests that the message resonates with your audience and may contribute to a strong sales pipeline in the future.

Scenario #1: Demonstrating influence on early-stage pipeline

By showcasing value and benefits, PMMs build awareness and reputation for their product areas. Awareness directly impacts the top of the sales funnel. But how do you tie your marketing activities to awareness and revenue?

Metrics to watch:

Unaided and aided awareness
Consideration
Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)

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Successful positioning leads to an increase in unaided and aided awareness. Increased awareness can lead to greater marketing efficiency because it drives consideration.

How to tie it to revenue

The crucial link comes with expected revenue from SQLs. If your messaging and positioning efforts are successful, you should see an increase in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) converting to SQLs. This demonstrates that your marketing efforts are creating early-stage sales opportunities.

Let’s go deeper. For example, if your company saw an 11% year-over-year decline in MQLs converting to SQLs, it might be time to revamp your messaging. Conversely, if MQL to SQL conversion is increasing, it validates your messaging.

Scenario #2: Optimizing demand generation for qualified leads

Product marketers often aid demand generation by attracting potential customers through launch activities. The challenge is to ensure these efforts generate qualified leads that convert.

Metrics to watch:

Demand generation MQLs
Qualified responses
MQL conversion
Prospect web traffic

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Don’t just focus on the sheer volume of MQLs. Instead, prioritize the quality of those MQLs.

Demand gen MQLs

A demand gen MQL is a qualified individual on an account that hasn’t been connected with sales yet, so we don’t know their expected revenue. These leads have the potential to convert to SQLs (where they’ll have estimated revenue).

Track the activities that MQLs complete before they become SQLs to understand what drives your buyer’s decision-making. This is a key driver of pipeline growth and revenue generation.

Knowing these value drivers can also strengthen your messaging by alerting you to the most important value for your buyers.

Optimizing for demand gen MQLs

If your demand gen MQLs are significantly below target, that could indicate inefficiencies in your demand generation campaigns. You’ll need to analyze your product-marketing-driven content, audience segments, and channels to focus on the leads that convert.

To analyze your content, start by asking these questions:

Which content pieces (such as solution pages, features, product blogs) are driving the most MQLs that convert to SQLs? Are there specific topics or formats that perform better?
Are we seeing higher conversion rates from leads sourced from specific industries, company sizes, or job titles? How can we refine our audience targeting based on this?
Which marketing channels (e.g., organic search, paid ads, social media, events) are producing the highest quality leads that convert? Can we reach our audience more efficiently?

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For a deep dive into how to segment out your top-performing customers, be sure to check out PMA’s Segmentation Masters course!

Prospect web traffic

While prospect web traffic is an engagement metric, it’s a leading indicator of attracting customers.

A decline in web traffic warrants attention. It may signal that your SEO efforts are missing the mark, or you’re reaching the wrong audience. To solve this problem, start by refining audience characteristics and key messaging. Provide these updates to your demand gen team, then track changes. If you’re driving more qualified prospects to the website, you’re positively impacting revenue.

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Tip: Start small! Try improving the conversion of one landing page that contains your messaging. Or share the success of one sales enablement asset that made a difference for your reps. Small wins can lay the groundwork for you to work on more influential projects.

Scenario #3: Influencing pipeline progression and conversion

Marketing’s role extends beyond initial lead generation. Once leads become SQLs, product marketers still play a vital role in moving leads down the sales funnel. The key metric to watch here is deal conversion.

You’ll also want to pay attention to pipeline progression, which shows how effectively deals are moving through the pipeline.

Low progression might point to issues in qualification or sales execution bottlenecks. Product marketers can impact this through sales enablement. For example, you could collaborate with sales to create FAQs or share insights from a product beta with late-stage buyers.

Scenario #4: Demonstrating return on marketing investment (ROI)

Ultimately, all marketing activities should contribute to a positive return on investment. By tying their spend to generated revenue, product marketers can prove ROI.

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Your go-to formula for measuring marketing ROI: closed-won revenue or ACV/spend

This represents the direct return on investment from marketing spend. A higher ratio demonstrates greater efficiency in converting marketing spend into actual revenue.

Product marketers impact this by optimizing the entire marketing and sales funnel to drive conversions and maximize the revenue of closed-won deals. Content created by product marketing can improve nurturing and sales enablement efforts.

How to improve your marketing ROI

Let’s say your marketing ROI ratio is low (e.g., $3.25 in closed-won revenue for every $1 spent). This highlights opportunities to improve conversion rates, deal velocity, or value retention through the funnel.

You’ll need to analyze customer touchpoints throughout the funnel to refine your strategies and demonstrate product marketing’s contribution to the bottom line. Start by understanding your sales funnel and key customer touchpoints. As you find low conversion points or areas of friction, you can test new messaging or content to try to improve conversion (and thus revenue).

What if I don’t have this data or don’t know how to get it?

🤔 Ask the right questions: Who owns this data? How can I get access? What are the basic reports I should pull? Speak out about what you’re trying to accomplish and see if someone in another team or your manager can point you in the right direction.

🔎 Start small: Try to measure some impact, even if it’s not perfectly attributed revenue. For instance, you could track downloads of a piece of PMM-created sales enablement content and correlate it with qualitative sales team feedback. This demonstrates your thinking around data and the desire to influence revenue.

📊 Advocate for better tracking: It’s possible your organization doesn’t have great sources of data for you to track. Identify the gaps in your org and flag to your manager or leadership the need to better track marketing activities’ influence on revenue.

Conclusion

Knowing your impact means looking beyond surface-level engagement. Start by understanding the difference between lagging and leading indicators so you know the best way to focus your time.

Partner across the marketing org (brand, demand gen, content marketing) and use your messaging and positioning savvy to create compelling content for key points during the buying cycle.

Product marketing plays an influential role. By focusing your efforts on revenue-generating work, you’ll not only influence your stakeholders but revenue as well.

Finally, remember it’s also important to understand how you influence, not just what you can measure. Read up on stakeholder management to round out your influencing skills.