Proving PMM impact without perfect metrics

A few months ago, I was in a meeting with my VP and my entire team when our CEO asked me a very simple question.

I’d just walked him through everything I’d built to support and sustain a new platform launch in November: decks, messaging frameworks, website, demo videos, enablement materials. The whole library.

He looked at me and said, “Well, how do you know any of this is working?”

I didn’t have a good answer.

The discomfort of that moment made me realize something: the systems most companies use to measure impact were never built to measure the work we actually do.

So, in this article, I want to share a different way to think about PMM impact – one that doesn’t rely on a dashboard. I’ll walk through where to look for signals that your work is landing, how to trace and communicate that impact, and a framework you can apply to your own work.

A quick bit of context

I’m Tricia Salata, Product Marketing Director at Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm with a digital line of business serving HR teams. When I joined two years ago, the company hadn’t had a PMM function for five years. Nobody was quite sure what we were there to do; mostly, they were hoping we’d send them leads and polish their pitch decks.

Since our team has been in place, we’ve had regular quarterly meetings with the CEO of our business unit. Early on, he’d ask what we were working on, and we’d walk him through everything we’d built. 

After a few quarters, the question shifted: “How do you know it’s landing?” The honest answer was that we didn’t. 

We didn’t have a demand gen team to support us until just a few months ago, so we had no clear pipeline attribution. Our web analytics were pretty basic. We had no content system telling us what sales was actually using out of all the materials we’d created. So, we had this growing body of narrative and strategy work, but no dashboard to point to.

Even if no one’s asking you that question directly, you’ve probably felt the tension. It’s hard to tie PMM work to revenue, but in most organizations, revenue is the only language of impact. That’s worth pushing back on. Revenue is one expression of impact, but it’s not the only one.

The deeper issue is structural. Most organizations measure downstream outcomes: pipeline, revenue, conversion. But product marketers work upstream, defining ideal customer profiles (ICPs), crafting narratives, and shaping positioning. When you try to measure upstream work against downstream metrics, the work becomes invisible. That’s not a performance problem. It’s a system design problem.

Impact is movement

Lately, I’ve started thinking about impact a little differently. Here’s where I’ve landed: impact is movement. Something has changed. A conversation moved forward. A decision became clearer. Where there was once confusion, you can start to see alignment.

This felt like a real “aha” moment, and I was honestly pretty impressed with myself for a minute. Then a question occurred to me: if impact is movement inside the business, why is it so hard for product marketers to prove it?

The answer is pretty simple: we’re rarely in the rooms where that impact becomes visible.

Impact shows up in business conversations, sales calls, pipeline reviews, roadmap debates. Product marketing often sits two or three layers away from those discussions. So, we default to reporting on the things we can easily track, the tangible assets we created. Leadership looks at that and says, “Okay, but what’s changed?”

However, our influence doesn’t live in the assets. It lives in how the business behaves once those assets exist. Most organizations don’t give us visibility into those spaces by default, so it’s up to us to create that visibility ourselves.

How to see your impact as it happens

There are a handful of places where you can reliably spot whether your work is landing, and you can put yourself in them: