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Get answers from product marketing leaders
Nisha Goklaney
Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, American Express, SageNovember 9
There are a host of good training options out there: 1. Sharebird - a great place to start. Here you can get real industry expertise and resources from folks in the field 2. Podcasts - Women in Product Marketing by Mary Sheehan (Sharebird Podcast), Product Marketing Insider are a couple of my favorites. 3. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It" by April Dunford. 4. Another best practice I like to follow is actually spending time on other brand sites (example B2B sites like- Gong, Airtable, Monday.com, Snowflake, Zendesk, Drift, Quickbooks.com etc.) to understand how they position their products, how they showcase their value prop, jobs to be done etc. 5. PMM Alliance - They have a comprehensive set of courses, content and how to guides that I have found extremely useful 6. Also, Linkedin is a great resource. There are some incredible marketers and product marketers that focus on covering messaging, positioning, super worthwhile to follow.
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Kevin Zentmeyer
Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product MarketingApril 26
Mock GTM plans are typically done two ways in PMM interviews. One is a live question in the interview and the other is a project typically in the form of a PowerPoint. If it is a project, you should recognize this as an opportunity. If you want this role, and you should if you are applying, then this is a high leverage moment to achieve or obtain what you want at the next stage your career. You should go get it. Consider whatever the recruiter or hiring manager indicates is the amount of time that you "should" spend on the project as a lowball offer. You need to beat all of the other candidates to get this role and many of them will spend the amount of time that they've been told to spend on it - which is great for the hiring manager, but not for you. Hiring managers want a fair way to evaluate candidates. You don't want fair. You want to win! Spend as much time as you need to have insightful answers to their prompts in your presentation and understand their business well enough to make clever and relevant suggestions. I have done three interview projects and have gotten all three jobs. Do the work so you can get what you want. If it's a straight interview format where the interviewer gives you some details about a product or feature and asks you to create a GTM question, then your problem will be limited time. It's important to establish expectations for how much of the interview session will be spent on this prompt and if they have any follow up questions so you know how long to talk - and how long you can take to think, before you start talking - which is absolutely something you should do. This question is a trap that some people fall into by talking before they know what they want to say and then they're brain needs to multi-task and catch up. Take at least a few seconds first! Now that we've mastered the format of the question, the way to handle the meat of it is to 1) ask questions to understand what problems this product solves 2) who the target market is and 3) what is unique about this one. If you know these things, then you can run your standard GTM playbook with modifications to account for how the three questions are answered.
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Quinn Hubbard
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, DirectorMay 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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Kevin Wu
Kevin Wu
Airtable Former Sr Director Product Marketing | Formerly Salesforce, AppDynamics, WeWork, AirtableMarch 2
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
Ben Rawnsley-Johnson
Censia VP of MarketingJuly 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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Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing | Formerly Apple, Electronic Arts, DigitasOctober 13
Great question and I would be very curious to hear how other companies do this! I mentioned in an earlier question that Square is very collaborative, and that means there is a mix of formal, and informal, ways in which we deliver customer feedback. Formal research / customer feedback studies: * PMM often captures customer feedback through conducting surveys, commissioning external research, listening to calls from Sales or Account Management/Customer Success, analyzing dashboards, or conducting interviews ourselves. * When we conduct these more formal studies, we always produce a Google Doc that summarizes the project objectives, goals and approach, and key findings (in addition to a link to all the raw data & feedback). * PMMs can provide immense value by taking the time to distill the insights into an executive summary, and articulate the prevalence of a specific piece/theme of feedback, and the impact it could have if addressed (e.g. will more customers adopt the product, vs. will it help with engagement or retention, etc). * In order to highlight this added strategic perspective, I haven’t found anything more effective than a well-written doc that the product teams can read and comment on. More informal ways of delivering feedback: * We host regular meetings with our Sales, Account Management and Customer Success representatives where they can surface individual customer stories and feedback directly to both PMs and PMMs. * We also utilize slack channels heavily, where PMMs and other functions can share customer feedback directly with our product managers, as we hear it. While many of these ‘one-off’ stories re-inforce feedback that has already been heard before, they provide additional insight into use cases or nuances that may not have been fully understood before. Top Tools used for delivering customer feedback: 1. Google Docs & Sheets - to summarize customer feedback, which can be translated into spreadsheets that Product Managers can use to further assess and prioritize the requests. 2. Salesforce is used by our Sales/AM teams to log feature requests, with dashboards we can access to pull top requests. 3. Gong - We also utilize Gong to listen to calls from our Sales/AM teams, and will often include links to the recordings in write-ups. And finally, I’ll mention the importance of repetition in delivering customer feedback. A well-written report may be appreciated and digested, but a PMM will gain even more trust as the voice of the customer if they are also referencing those key insights and speaking knowingly about the customer use cases in live discussions, product design reviews, roadmap planning sessions and more.
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Varun Krovvidi
Varun Krovvidi
Google Product Marketing Lead | Formerly SalesforceFebruary 15
Today's marketing is being disrupted at an exponential pace. We are constantly being overloaded with content and the traditional marketing channels are quickly getting saturated -- all leading to users quickly losing trust in traditional marketing methods. The one skill that is invaluable for each marketer is adaptability, primarily because of 1/ Constant market shifts: With the infusion of AI into our day to day, business models and products are changing rapidly. So are user preferences. Keeping up with the latest on "where to find your users" and "how to influence them" is key. 2/ Data is no longer king on its own: As marketers, we are starting to have more data to consume but with very few meaningful insights. Adapting to new perspectives of looking at the data will make it easy for you to draw patterns and make decisions on how to adapt your campaigns 3/ Campaign volatility: No matter how well-planned, campaigns encounter roadblocks. Maybe a platform changed its algorithm, or a competitor made a surprise move. Adaptability means not panicking, but pivoting to new tactics, re-targeting efforts, or finding a creative 'hack' to stay on track.
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Nami Sung
Nami Sung
Ramp VP of Product MarketingOctober 24
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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Kacy Boone
Kacy Boone
Clockwise Head of Growth MarketingMay 25
This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you want both teams to be really proactive about sharing goals, priorities, and roadmaps in order to ensure you’re not duplicating efforts nor have competing priorities. Secondly, I think it’s important that there’s a shared understanding of the unique value each team brings to the table. In growth marketing, you’re going to have experts on channel strategy, performance, and distribution. In product marketing, you’re going to have experts on positioning, voice of customer, competitive differentiation. Get clear on that as a team. One last super tactical idea for you, I love a shared team brainstorm ahead of mapping goals and programs for the quarter. On the product marketing side, you could compile some research on customers, share the product roadmap, or do a competitive deep-dive to inform that brainstorm and help set up your teams to be aligned from the start. Hope this helps!
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Sam Duboff
Sam Duboff
Spotify Director, Head of Creator Brand & Product MarketingJanuary 27
Having a documented tiering system across your full PMM organization is really important for a few reasons — it helps create consistency across marketers who might be working on different areas of your business; it creates efficiency to PMMs don't have to re-invent the wheel for each GTM; it helps set realistic expectations with product teams to know what to expect from a launch; it creates a useful internal shorthand to talk about how "big" GTM moments are; and it helps with benchmarking, so you can easily compare launches with the right comps. I usually find four tiers to be the most helpful. If you have too many, they can quickly become semantic or meaningless. Your first tier is your biggest moments of the year where you light up all your channels with custom campaign work; your second tier is big, strategically important launches that you're going to activate most of your marketing channels for; your third tier is more routine updates that you might lightly market (a newsletter mention or tweet) and update customer documentation for; and your fourth tier is smaller updates you just want to internal comms on and maybe a Help Center tweak. To help build that internal short hand, you can give each tier a fun name that relates to your business — at Spotify, our four tiers are named after music terms from "Headliner" through "Backstage." For each tier, you'll want clear guidance on what that means in terms of project timeline (how early will you start your marketing planning), scale of marketing work, stakeholders who get involved, and marketing channels that will usually be leveraged.
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