Osman Javed
Gallileo VP of MarketingDecember 20
Great question, here are 3 potholes to AVOID when building 1. Not becoming the undisputed expert on your product, market, and audience: * Great PMM teams form strong opinions through rigorous research across market, product, and competition * Focus on three areas: market/persona understanding, competitive intelligence, and deep product knowledge * My favorite research methods: win/loss analysis, paid expert interviews, Gong calls, customer interviews, using competitor’s products, and podcasts 2. Not embedding with Product Management early enough * PMM should join product management discussions early in the product development lifecycle. This ensures PMM can: * Effectively scope and plan launches with full context * Develop and review differentiated positioning before go-to-market * Have time to conduct market and competitor research and course-correct if differentiation isn't strong enough * And in many cases, influence the product direction based on market insights 3. Not getting radical alignment on your messaging house * In the early days of building PMM, it's easy for PMM to think the foundational messaging is complete and understood by the company. More often than not, this is not the case. * It takes more discussions, collateral, and enablement sessions than you'd think making sure everyone, from exec leadership to ICs are fully enabled and aligned on your brand and product messaging. * It's easy to move quickly and skip this step, but it is crucial you spend enough time evangelizing the messaging before calling it done. * Certification programs go a long way to ensuring this is done well.
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Eileen Huang
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly GoogleOctober 30
There are many ways to structure messaging and positioning docs. Effective frameworks usually contain these key components, which I’ll share with an example from a recent launch: * Target audience * CIO and executive IT * Market trends (why now) * With AI on the rise, the office of the CIO is responsible for creating an AI strategy that supports their employees’ experience while maintaining data security and privacy. * Value and differentiators * “Build the right foundation for AI by securely integrating work data” * “Deploy AI confidently with safeguards & transparent controls” * “Surface intelligent insights to deliver greater ROI at every level” * Proof points and use cases * Customer and analyst highlights from Zscaler and IDC
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Nami Sung
Ramp VP of Product MarketingOctober 25
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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Michael Olson
Splunk Sr. Director, Product Marketing - ObservabilityMay 31
Speaking as someone who has created a lot of bad sales playbooks that have collected dust during my career :-), this is a topic that I'm passionate about. Here are the main ingredients that I've found make for a sales playbook that will actually get used by sales teams. * Market Primer: Particularly for sales reps who are new to your company or space, I've found it useful to 1) define the market in which we play, 2) the market context/dynamics that are impacting our buyers, 3) the market problems that keep our target audience up at night, 4) why traditional approaches to solving the those problems fall short, and 5) to summarize the competitive landscape. I look to do this in 3 paragraphs or less. Keep it tight, but don't resort to pithy bullet points or the context will get lost. Successful knowledge transfer and taking what's in your head and inception'ing it in the minds of your sales team should be the goal. * Ideal Customer Profile: this is different from your buyer personas. Here, you're documenting the characteristics of companies that make a good fit for your products. * Target Audience: The teams and specific roles who buy and use your products. Here, I like to include guidance on example job titles (useful for prospecting), their key responsibilities, the main things that keep them up at night, their tech stack (relevant for B2B), and how our product helps them. I also like to include sample org charts in a persona guide to help sales teams conduct more effective prospecting. * Sales Process: Most sales playbooks are justifiably oriented around messaging. Messaging focuses on what to say, but a good sales playbook should also outline the sales process or buyer's journey, with guidance on what to do at each step. For example, how to research your prospect's key business priorities, how to prospect into an account, what to propose as a next step from a successful discovery call, when to run a demo, how to pull together a proposal, pricing guidance, etc. * Discovery Guidance: What questions to ask, what to listen for, and what to say in order to help your sellers confidently navigate conversations with early-stage prospects. Including guidance on what to listen for is crucial here to help sales teams learn how to pattern match responses to determine good fit/bad fit and also to design the right solution. Just providing a laundry list of discovery questions with no context on why a sales rep should ask them isn't all that useful. * Competitive Differentiation: What makes you unique and/or comparatively better than alternatives in your category? Differentiation is one of the hardest things for a product marketer to nail, but it's one of the most important since the most common question sellers field from prospects is "how are you different from competitor X?". * Use Cases: What are the scenarios or jobs-to-be-done in which a buyer would use your product? I take this a step further by aligning required capabilities (i.e. things your product does) to pay off each of these use cases. * Demo Script: What do you show during a meeting with a prospect to pay off your messaging and prove value / technically validate your product as the solution to the customer's problem? I like to structure demo scripts in two-column layouts, the left column documenting what to say (with clickpaths embedded in the talk track) and the right column showing a screenshot or animated gif of the main capability or workflow you're showing. Also, demo scripts should NOT be feature tours. The best demos tell a story by outlining a relatable scenario that's tailored to your prospect's problems and desired outcomes. * Customer Stories: What are your best customer examples that you want every sales rep to internalize and be able to share with prospects? * Resources: Lastly, it's helpful to curate a list of your most helpful sales tools (sales decks, cheat sheets, prospecting tools, economic value calculators, etc.) and customer-facing content (eBooks, white papers, solution briefs, analyst reports, blog posts, etc.) that reps can share with prospects.
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Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing | Formerly Google, AdRollJuly 13
I think a cover letter and portfolio are both important when applying for PMM roles, as well as referrals if possible. A cover letter gives you the opportunity to explain why you're the best person for the job and detail your qualifications, while a portfolio allows employers to get a better sense of your personal vision, style and work ethic. Here are some specifics: * Your cover letter should be tailored to the specific job you're applying for and emphasize how you meet the role's requirements. * Additionally, it's always a good idea to keep your resume up-to-date and have tailored versions for various roles you are applying for. * For your portfolio, choose projects that demonstrate your ability to lead a product strategy, implement successful tactics and measure results. * A more important thing might be getting referrals: When you ask someone to refer you - have a ready-to-go blurb that they can add in or send to a recruiter. * Make sure to follow up no matter which way you go and keep in touch with those that you are networking with. * Finally, research the company thoroughly - review their current products/services, get familiar with the competition in the space, and understand what they are looking for in terms of product goals and objectives. Show that you can be an instrumental addition to their team. In short, having a stellar cover letter and portfolio, referrals from other professionals in the space, an up-to-date resume, and knowledge of the company all play important roles when applying for PMM roles. Good luck!
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Claudia Michon
Automation Anywhere Senior Vice President, Product & Solutions Marketing | Formerly Salesforce, L'Oreal, Godiva ChocolatierApril 26
Generative AI is a tool, an assistive technology. We all need to keep this in mind, especially leaders who erroneously think how they can replace their people with this tech. Why is this the case? The tech (today) cannot do one critical thing - creative, strategic thinking. It's dumb. It can serve data and knowledge, but it doesn't have wisdom. What makes the best PMMs is wisdom, having the ability to harness past experiences, customer needs, and sales requests, understand the market and the technical components of a product - and use all of that to make decisions, craft stories and bring something new to life. Keeping that in mind, I think of generative AI as helping with the microtasks that slow our work. Get a great tool that's flexible to grow with your team. There are quite a few out there. We have a tool that we use company-wide that's sanctioned by our IT team. In addition to Chat GPT there is also Glean, Jasper, Writer - and many more. You can create your own "GPTs" - essentially building knowledge bases with relevant inputs and data and training them to meet your needs, like giving them skills. I have a list of GPTs my team has built or plans to build. You're going to have to experiment here, so be patient. Example GenAI for PMM Use Cases: * Research a competitor's product lines or messaging * Turn video transcripts into blog posts * Create engaging demo scripts from step-by-step how-to's * Email nurture series generation based on core messaging and target persona * Create customer case studies from interviews * Create a GPT for a specific persona and rapidly generate value prompters and objection-handling documents * Brainstorm product names, taglines, or website headlines Will the tech get smarter? Of course. I recently heard a great quote from Seth Godin - "it's clear that AI is as dumb today as it will ever be again tomorrow." We all must keep up and become expert users to elevate our skill sets and remain relevant contributors to the success of an organization. Have fun!
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp.August 9
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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Patti Lew
Glassdoor Head of Consumer Product MarketingSeptember 27
1. There are a number of foundational research reports and insights you can provide to your product partners before they delve into the development process. These include: 1. A broader overview of the competitive landscape and market landscape 2. As well as a closer look at the health of your brand and how it fares against it competitors over time through brand trackers and CSAT (consumer satisfaction) surveys 3. In terms of users and target audience, they can draw on segmentation and persona research 4. And I find that my product partners greatly appreciate and rely on value proposition research to frame their design decisions and utilize messaging insights to better frame the end product to our users. 2. In terms of how we present these insights, we find it helps to give a preview to Product leaders first to clear up questions or reframe as needed given their feedback so they can become early supporters and proponents of the research. Also, when sharing out more widely to the product org, as calendars can be hard to manage, I find it easier to be added on as an agenda item on a recurring Product team meeting, as most of the team will be in attendance. Another way we are currently experimenting with having Product partners ingest and internalize insights at Glassdoor are through immersion workshops. This allows them to digest insights we currently have before developing new hypotheses, like incorporating new segmentation research. In this case, we can develop a shared understanding of the unmet user needs, break down the jobs to be done and identify user pain points of our target audience.
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Calvina Cheng
Suki AI Head of Product MarketingFebruary 22
I’ve created competitive webpages in the past and that’s been a huge success with sales. Whether you make these webpages easily accessible on your website (top nav or elsewhere) is a good discussion to have with your growth team. These webpages are so useful to sales because any time they are asked about our (top x) competitors, they can easily bring up those pages, talk through the key differentiators, and then follow up with an email to share these pages with their prospects. Slides and/or one-pagers work well too since they are easy to share. I'd say the webpages have definitely gotten more traction and enthusiasm from Sales!
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Beth McGrath
Lyft Senior Director Product Marketing | Formerly Google, ShopifyMarch 27
Good PMM work should always be measurable. It’s easy for PMM to become a catch-all for things that don’t fit anywhere else. Without measurement it’s hard to stick to prioritization and drive meaningful impact. That said, it can be very hard to track Product Marketing KPIs, especially on short timelines. I have found in several PMM roles I’ve held and in some teams I have led that the team can fall back onto output or activity metrics and lose focus on actually driving impact. Setting input metric / leading indicator goals for the team that can be impacted in-quarter is a best practice for measurement within the team and to ensure you’re demonstrating your impact to cross-functional teams and external co-marketing partners. The most critical metrics PMM should focus on: 1. Product adoptions -- If PMM does nothing else, the function should drive awareness and adoption of new product features. For new companies and established companies, the goal of product marketing should consistently be driving adoption for new and existing products. 2. In-Product Activation -- In-Product activation is something that should similarly be owned by product marketing, both from strategy to execution. This gives product marketing the opportunity to segment the audience and deliver targeted messages to different audiences,build and test a content strategy with different customer segments and drive direct impact on product goals -- all with limited budget investment. 3. Organic Passive Reach -- Passive reach is anywhere potential customers or current customers are engaging with the company -- but they are not yet a qualified lead. (e.g. content on .com, blogs, community posts, changelogs, social content, thought-leadership content on external sites) It’s also critical to be clear with cross-functional and external stakeholders the importance of patience with product marketing’s impact. I have found that the metrics I use to measure my team’s impact often take a long time to shift, with both large and small populations. Building a good measurement model, with leading and lagging indicators and strong hypotheses on how the indicators interact is critical. The above three metrics are the most critical for PMM; any other metric in the traditional software marketing funnel can be affected by someone else in the organization, but these are measures that PMM should always take responsibility for.
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