Get answers from product marketing leaders
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 3
As much as I would love to share a one-size-fits-all KPIs, I’ve found that no two launches are the same. Even if you’re launching a product again in a new market, you’ve probably learned something from the first launch that will lead you to optimize your approach the next time. Instead, I break it down into these four categories and choose the most important metric from each category: * Business metrics: How will this launch help the business to meet its goals? Is it revenue, subscriptions, marketplace balance, users? * Product metrics: What action(s) do we want our target audience to take? For example, trial, adoption, retention, increased usage. * Channel metrics: Based on the way that the campaign is set up, what’s the most important way that our audience can engage with the marketing campaign? Do we want them to watch the video, click on the push notification, read the blog, ask a question or something else entirely? * Top of funnel metrics: What do you want your audience to know, think or feel based on the launch? These are your awareness, perception and sentiment metrics. It takes a lot of discipline to pick only the most important metrics and stay laser-focused on those. But I’ve found that when I’m able to do it, it gives the team a clearer mission and strengthens the impact.
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Good Product Marketing OKRs really depend on the business and what the company is trying to achieve. For example, if there's no unified launch process, you may set an objective to develop a launch program. Or another example: you're starting to lose deals to a specific competitor. You may kick off a competitive program to mitigate losses on competitive deals. It really depends on the business. For product launches: * Did I reach my intended audience for this launch? How many people engaged with our launch materials? Read the blog post? Watched the video? Engaged with the landing page? * How many existing customers adopted the new feature or product within a reasonable amount of time? * Were we expecting a certain amount of leads or pipeline from the launch? * Did we brief the analyst community properly? * Is our sales team enabled on what's new and why customers should care? For campaigns: * Content delivery * Gated content downloads * Webinar registrations and number of viewers * Lead flow For sales enablement: * What % of reps are certified on the pitch and demo? * What % of reps have gone through persona training?
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Ben Rawnsley-Johnson
Censia VP of Marketing • July 26
A go-to-market strategy is at its heart, an exercise in alignment. A good B2B GTM plan maximizes your exposure to growth by drawing a through-line across your market and its needs, your company, and its offerings in the most efficient way possible. It is built around 3 pillars: * Market Opportunity: Expressed as TAM/SAM/SOM, outlining where the fertile areas of opportunity exist where you can make money (Segments, industry verticals, buying centers/Line of Business) * Positioning: Your company's products / Solutions, expressed through value propositions that align with your buyer/user's most important needs and problem areas. * Distribution & Campaign: Outlining Route-to-market, channels, and investment/returns, as well as the competitive, messaging, and positioning needed to build compelling content and creative. As for alignment internally, this comes down to good teamwork and hygiene, starting with: * Many fingerprints: bringing in your cross-functional contributors, from GTM, as well as Product early and often will ensure you're building a strategy that everyone not only understands but believes in and is committed to. * Define what "done" looks like Establishing a shared understanding of success should be your number one goal in executing a new strategy. Clearly defined, shared goals keep everyone focussed on the money. As a general rule, I want my marketers to feel a level of discomfort in owning a big goal, such as a business's growth rate, revenue goal, or other indicators of business health. Vanity metrics that feel comfortable to marketing such as pipeline, or satisfaction rates can be helpful for measuring certain activities, but the measure of whether a GTM strategy is successful MUST be expressed in business outcomes - usually $$$ * Do the extra work to ensure understanding: Folks often recommend offering training sessions or resources to help team members understand the GTM strategy and their role in its execution. This is a good idea, but too often people misunderstand and seek to justify the quality of a strategy through too much detail. A folder of decks, or lengthy documents will remain unread, and poorly understood. Instead, take the time to craft your articulation of the strategy the way you would work customer-facing content and messaging. Shipping a 5-minute loom, supported by a well-crafted document will be infinitely more impactful in driving a shared understanding than the world's best essay or PowerPoint.
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Tiffany Tooley
Workday Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly Salesforce, IBM, Silverpop, Blackboard • March 8
I've done a lot of interviews and hiring over the years and I'm constantly impressed by how smart and driven Product Marketers are! It's one of the things that makes interviewing so much fun - you get an opportunity to talk to and learn from the best of the best. That said, I think there are a few things that really stand out for me, and they are: * Curiosity - Most candidates are well-educated and skilled, so it's the folks with humility and a curiosity to learn that really shine during the interview process and on my team * Customer-First - Candidates with deep empathy for the customer (both buyers and sales) and can show consistent examples of how the work they've done has been developed with them in mind * Creativity - Whether it's their ability to creatively solve problems or the level of creativity they bring to their campaigns and strategies, I often find that these individuals are the spark of innovations that a team or project needs! * Resourcefulness - I believe you don't always have all the answers and neither do those around you. The best candidates can share how they've identified solutions across their team during ambiguous times. They don't let the lack of clarity prohibit their progress. Instead, they take steps to build clarity. * Impact-Focused - Finally, they never forget that the reason they're leading all the projects and programs at their organization is to have an impact. The best candidates can speak clearly to the impact they have had and have a POV on the additional impact they'd like to see.
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I need to unpack this in therapy but for some not-yet-fully-explored reason, I hate messaging houses and marchitecture like that. Perhaps it feels like it's forcing structure. Perhaps it feels too permanent and untouchable (because it's housed??). Not sure. But I do concede that they can be useful and are helpful for many, many people. So, for me, if I'm trying to get internal buy-in on messaging, I try to keep it as simple, concise, and as contextual as possible. * Target audience, * value prop, * 3 benefit or RTB pillars, * and corresponding proof points (like a product or feature). Then, I take that and set it in context to provide positioning guidance and build a larger, more interesting narrative. * What's happening out there in the market and why are we talking about this? What's the challenge our audience is facing in this market? * Then insert our claim we just worked on. * Include validation (customer quotes, product metrics, analyst reports, etc.). * And articulate your CTA - inspire your audience and give them a call to arms.
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Varun Krovvidi
Google Product Marketing Lead | Formerly Salesforce • February 15
As with any role, growing into "next level" requires two things: 1/ An understanding of what is the value provided to the organization by an individual at the next level 2/ Identifying and developing the right skillsets to provide that value. For example: Next level from a Senior PMM in a startup to mid-size company will require you to influence GTM direction (with deep market understanding), collaborate cross functionally (to drive results across teams), and improve full-funnel expertise (from top-of-funnel awareness to product adoption and retention strategies). Whereas the same next level from a senior PMM in a large organization might be required to manage more products in their portfolio or start to manage people. If we were to generalize, there are couple of skills that are common across these situations in general. For example, if you want to propel your career into a Director of Product Marketing role you need to become: 1/ Strategic thinker: Cultivate the ability to see the big picture. Start to understand deeply your market trends, competition, and company's overall goals. Translate this understanding into building narratives that align with broader company strategy – not just individual product needs. 2/ Data-driven decision maker: The closer you can tie GTM and marketing strategies directly to business and revenue metrics, the better. Back up your vision with the cold, hard numbers. And lastly, learn to tell stories about your strategies with data across leadership in different functions. 3/ Collaborative Leader: You will only maximize your impact and influence by working with other functions. For every strategy you develop, start to question how you can 10x the impact by working with other teams. Practice communicating with empathy, bring them into your process early, and share goals with them to build trust. 4/ Team multiplier: The most important tenet is to shift away from pure task execution and towards adding value. Learn to delegate strategically and if possible start to mentor talent early. Lastly, start to build a clear goal for your career. The next step is only a stepping stone. Is your path leading you to a VP of Product Marketing role, CMO, shifting into Product Management, or starting your own firm. Work backwards from there to build the right skills and path.
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp. • August 8
My framework for analyzing customer feedback after a launch involves implementing multiple voice of customer channels, then analyzing the data to inform our product priorities and launch strategy. Here's an overview of my process: 1. Build dedicated voice of customer channels: * Set up dedicated Slack channels for the Revenue teams to share customer questions and feedback * Monitor community forum discussions * Track comments across social media channels * Collect questions raised at events like webinars 2. Analyze and extract themes: * Utilize AI tools to analyze and categorize the feedback 3. Share insights with marketing channel and Product teams: * Share insights to inform product roadmap decisions and post-launch activities
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Robin Fontaine
Shopify Senior Product Marketing Lead • November 15
There are a few approaches I have found helpful here. 1. A good ol' SWOT analysis may be what you need. This is a pretty common framework where you list strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your own product, and a competitor's. Placing the two side by side can illuminate areas where your team should focus. 2. Sometimes a feature comparison table is helpful if you need a more granular view of how you stack up against a competitor at the feature level. Here you can use a spreadsheet or table. List all the features you offer or are considering, and features your competitors offer in the left side column. Then add your company or product at the top of the next column, and add your competitors across the top. Then go through each feature and mark which product or company offers it. When you're done you'll have a very granular map of where your product is strong, and where you may be missing features that competitors have. 3. Gather and analyze data from internal teams. Leverage your support, community, and social teams to see if they can provide data on how often a particular feature is requested. If you have a sales team, find out if they can query their CRM tool for keywords related to the feature(s) you want to consider. Bonus points if your sales team can help you associate the potential revenue lost due to a lack of a particular feature.
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Kristen Kanka
Morningstar Head of Marketing, Enterprise Solutions | Formerly CaptureX, Medline Industries • January 26
Storytelling is the biggest trait is look for. I want all of my product marketers to be able to tell stories that anyone can follow that inspire action. Everyone I interview is asked to provide a writing sample so I can see if they’ve got “it.” The next trait is problem solving: In every interview I ask the same question: Tell me about a go-to-market that failed. I don’t care so much about the “why” of the failure; I want to know how you determined it was off track, and what you did about it to get back on track. And third is collaboration. How does someone build relationships? How can they earn a seat at the table with a diverse group of stakeholders? If they aren’t able to collaborate, it isn’t a role for them. You have to want to be the glue that holds a team together.
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Ryane Bohm
Clari Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Gong, Salesforce, GE • November 3
One of the biggest pitfalls I see in product launches in underestimating enablement. Don't skimp on this, you want to make sure your customer facing teams are armed with right tools to take your product launch to the next level. A solid enablement plan will stem off these 4 questions: 1. WHO is the internal audience? (SDR, AE, SE, CSM, Segment) 2. What do they need to KNOW? (Timelines, expectations, goals, FAQs, etc.) 3. What do they need to SAY? (Messaging, discovery questions, business value, etc) 4. What do they need to SHOW? (Deck, demo, etc) By enabling the right teams with exactly what they need to know, say, and show, they should be ready to sprint and handle anything that comes their way.
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