Get answers from product marketing leaders
Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, American Express, Sage • November 9
Yes, there are plenty resources out there for you to continue to sharpen your toolset and learn from others in the community as well. Here are some of my favorites 1. Listening to podcasts - Women in Product Marketing by Mary Sheehan is by far my favorite. She brings on a host of Senior PMM's in their field to discuss topics from messaging, positioning, pricing, getting into PMM, GTM strategy etc. 2. Following thought leaders on Linkedin. 3. Spend time on other websites - Some website I have come to love over time are Airtable, Asana, Snowflake, Zendesk, Gong, Drift, Dropbox, Evernote etc. Here's a good list of good B2B website examples and what makes them great as well 3. Spending time in the field with actual customers - listen to how they talk about their challenges, goals, aspirations and passions. What they like spending time doing and what they don't. Ask specific questions on how your product/service helps them, what they would do otherwise and take notes on the specific words and language they use to describe the value your product brings to them 4. Listen to Gong calls or shadow your sales/Customer success teams - to hear first hand on how your sellers sell your product/service, the slides and pitch decks they use, and their words and language. Pay attention to what resonates with customers, and what doesnt. Listen also, to how prospects describe their problems.
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Marisa Currie-Rose
Shopify Director of Product Marketing • October 12
I think about Go-To-Market plans being comprised of the following work: * Understanding the product and its value proposition * Gather feedback from current and potential customers * Understanding the competitive landscape * Identifying the total addressable market (TAM) * Setting objectives and the goals of the GTM plan * Developing a pricing and sales strategy * Crafting a messaging strategy by including the value propositions * Choosing marketing channels * Creating a launch timeline
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Alex Wagner Lavian
Origin VP of Marketing | Formerly Uber • November 22
When building a tiered product it's important to define the goals of the entire package and each tier. Once you set goals, you'll want to segment your target audience by tier to map benefits to each level. Each tier should have clear benefits and ideally one “hero benefit” to serve as the hook to get customers to sign up for the offering. While the tiers should feel distinct they should also feel connected so that customers feel motivated to earn/pay more to move to higher tiers. A clear example of this approach is building a good/better/best model where the base benefits get increasingly richer as you move to higher tiers. Once benefits/pricing is set a GTM plan that includes varied tactics and messaging will be key with flexibility to market the entire package + targeted campaigns for each tier.
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Natala Menezes
Grammarly Global Head of Product Marketing | Formerly at: GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, SFDC + startups • February 8
When I started at Grammarly, I did an audit of how PMM mapped to the product organization, our consumer acquisition and growth teams, and our B2B sales teams. The audit revealed that we were significantly understaffed (did I mention we are hiring?) And as a result, PMM was focused on launches more than product strategy and messaging. My first cut of the org chart focused on coverage – ensuring that our product partners had identified partners and that we aligned to the sales org. I also developed different PMM roles within our organization to deliver lateral growth. Our PMM team has 4 flavors of PMM: * Segment. Consumer PMMs focused acquisition, retention, and growth of a specific segment of users. * GTM. B2B PMMs focused on a segment (enterprise, mid-market, or self-serve/smb) and aligned to a sales org. * Core. PMMs focused on a specific product or set of features. For example, mobile or desktop experiences or our core writing experience. Features that are cross segment and cross line of business. * Specialists. Specialist PMMs are unique in that they provide expertise across the PMM org. For example, competitive intelligence or monetization/pricing&packaging. These specialist roles have helped me bring unique skills into the team as we grow and invest in our relationships with product and sales. I also reorganized my leadership team to map to product and built out an 18-month growth plan. It was straightforward to identify significant gaps in current coverage – but going through and understanding the roadmap and growth of partner organizations helped develop a long-term growth plan. It also allows us to be a bit opportunistic in hiring. We know which roles are critical today and which ones will be important soon. So, suppose we meet a fantastic candidate that meets the criteria for a position we might hire in the next quarter. In that case, we have some flexibility to pull that headcount forward.
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Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 3
This is a great question because, as every PMM knows, each launch holds a surprise hiccup. If you can mitigate as much risk as possible before that time comes, then you’ll be successful in solving those last minute snafus. Assuming your marketing brief and GTM plan are finalized and approved, a successful GTM execution comes down to organization, stakeholder alignment and (the hardest one!) seeing around corners. Here are the riskiest components in each of those categories and how to mitigate that risk: 1. Lack of organization: * Misaligned plans * Losing track of documents and creative files * Overly tight timelines * Rehashing previous conversations How to mitigate: Keep a source of truth document (or spreadsheet, my personal favorite) where you track every single launch component, including status and timeline, meeting notes, resources, channel plans and assets, launch day tick tock and more. 2. Missing stakeholder alignment: * Vague R&R * Lack of resourcing * Unclear expectation-setting How to mitigate: Bring your cross-functional and marketing partners along for the journey by pulling them in at key strategic milestones when you’re creating your plan, then holding regular status meetings up until launch through to a post-mortem. 3. Not seeing around corners: * Lack of familiarity with the deployment tech * Broken user journeys * 11th hour feedback How to mitigate: This one tends to be company-specific, so ask your colleagues about unexpected day-of discoveries on previous launches and then prepare for those specific scenarios. Also, it never hurts to build a buffer into your timeline and have an extra set of eyes on the creative before it goes out the door.
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Come with data and frame your initiatives for your leaders. Part of your first 30-60-90 days will involve understanding what's working well and not-as-well in the GTM. Talk to sales, CS, and RevOps to get a picture. Are you seeing steep discount rates in a certain segment? Are reps complaining that it takes too much time to find collateral? Is your win rate against a certain competitor low? Is your churn rate high? Look at the data, dig in to understand the why behind the trends you're seeing, then make the case for some PMM and team investment with senior leaders. And if you don't have the data at the ready, find a way to get it (without boiling the ocean). "Hey, VP Sales, you mentioned that rep productivity is a top priority for you this quarter. As I was meeting folks in my first week, I noticed a lot of AEs complained that material is super hard to find. I ran a 5-minute survey with the team and it turns out that 70% of reps spend over 2 hours each week just searching for product collateral. If you could get your reps back on the phone for those 2 hours this week, would that be a worthwhile initiative for you this quarter? If so, I can lead the charge with support from your sales enablement team." Why something like this works: * Clearly articulates the business problem in a way that's aligned with your stakeholder's priorities * Backed by data - it's irrefutable * Shows collaboration and leadership -- you're proposing to lead the initiative, while bringing along your leader's teammates for the ride * Make change less frightening -- show that you've got a plan and an idea. Even if you don't get buy-in on the idea right that second, it will help illuminate that you're thinking about the business and know your stakeholder's careabouts. It's also a great way to check in (again) on whether your initiatives are aligned with those of the business; it might turn out that the VP Sales (in this example) is worried more about competitive pressures rather than rep productivity, which helps guide you to work on something that is urgent and important to the business (which will definitely be appreciated by leadership).
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Typing quickly, so excuse any typos! Competitors will always have a common set of features. Every pizza needs a crust and some toppings – what they are, how they manifest, how they taste – that's what's different. So, first, I'd think: 1. What's unique about my set of features? Are they solving for exactly the same use case? How do they play alongside our other products and features, in ways that they unlock a different set of use cases? This relates to a previous question about marketing a group of products instead of just focusing on one. Combinations of ingredients can lead to different solutions. 2. What's unique about how my company approaches the problem set and delivers for customers? Think outside of the set of features for a minute. What are my company's differentiators? What's been different and defensible about our approach? (For example, intuitive design and user-centricity? or tied to a greater platform? or velocity of development and improvements? or administrative oversight? intelligence built into every step? etc). Think about how that unique approach (overall) makes the set of features more differentiated. 3. What are the competitors' weak spots? What have they gotten flak for from users, from the press? How can we show that our solutions are different in just that way? Let's poke them. 4. Some features are going to be tablestakes. If they're complete mirror images, won't lead to any competitive advantages, moats, and more of a reassuring-yeah-we-got-that, then include it and don't fret. You can't focus on every little feature. Hype up what is different, defensible against competitors, desired and beloved by users.
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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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Marina Ben-Zvi
Atlassian Principal Product Marketing Manager • December 14
There are a lot of great frameworks out there and they all have common elements. I recommend reviewing a few and customizing to what’s relevant and actionable for your company. I like to include: * our differentiated POV * positioning statement (internal-facing) * tag-line * brand personality * value pop * 25/50/75 word descriptions * 3 messaging pillars with core message, use case, business benefits, and proof points under each * high level persona descriptions and messaging by persona Competitive positioning needs to be at the heart of your messaging. It's the key input that you build your messaging around. Positioning is the strategy and messaging is the execution — the words and narratives that bring your competitive positioning to life and have it land with your personas.
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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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