Get answers from product marketing leaders
Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product Marketing • April 26
To showcase your work without actually showing your work, you can instead show your process. Any messaging work will have a before and after, even if the prior state was an unlaunched product. 1. Describe what you were given. What was the new product/feature or existing messaging? 2. What was your process for determining the new messaging? 3. Were there any disagreements or misalignments about your new messaging? How did you get alignment to launch your new messaging through sales and marketing assets? 4. What was the result? How did you measure results to know whether it worked? Spend most of your time on describing your process. The hiring manager isn't hiring you for the specific messaging or results that you produced in your past role. They're hiring you because you have a repeatable, but flexible process or playbook to create effective messaging. Use the messaging you created as an example of that process and spend your time on that instead.
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Natalie Louie
ICONIQ Capital Product & Content Marketing | Formerly Replicant, MobileCoin, Zuora, Hired, Oracle, Responsys • January 11
I break up my 30-60-90 day plan into 4 phases of success for Product Marketing – it also includes focus for after your first 90 days, all outlined below. You may not get to everything in each phase, or you may move through things faster – I use this as a guide and checklist to keep myself accountable. Following this has helped me identify what wins I can crush every 30 days. You can tailor it to your needs at your company and the level you are entering at. The key is to actively listen in interviews and cross-functional meetings and if anyone is working on something that syncs with your superpowers – speak up, ask questions about what they are doing and trying to achieve, schedule a 1:1 with them and volunteer to collaborate with them or take it off their plate. When you ask lots of questions and get to a point they don’t have an answer – that’s the signal to raise your hand and offer your help. Don’t go in guns blazing, it needs to be natural and collaborative. Show humbleness and mastery. PMMs are the strategic glue between product, marketing and your customers, we are not the main show and final end point. I also treat all internal stakeholders as one of my personas – get to know their pain points, what brings them value and how to speak to them. Also, during my 1:1 interviews with them, I’ll also ask if they have worked with a PMM before. If yes, I asked what worked well, what could’ve been better and discuss how we can work together to show the value I bring. If they’ve never worked with a PMM, I share with them what value I can bring and discuss how we can collaborate together. Tips here on how to approach all your stakeholders. PMM Phases of Success The first 3 phases include execution (your wins) and they ramp up. See here for examples on quick wins. 30 DAYS: DISCOVERY * Listen, Ask Questions * 1:1 interviews with cross functional partners * Customer Interviews, ICP, personas, map customer journey * Product training, roadmap, launches to date * Analyze existing content, strategy, data * Research competitors 70% Discovery + 20% Strategy + 10% Execute 60 DAYS: STRATEGY * Think, Create, Iterate * Buy off on business plan: vision, headcount and OKRs, and PMM roadmap * Create PMM playbooks: * Messaging and positioning framework defined * GTM and product launch strategy defined * Pricing and packaging roadmap * Competitive intelligence framework / Amplification 60% Strategy + 30% Execute + 10% Iterate 90 DAYS: EXECUTION * Produce, Operationalize * Roll out PMM playbooks and frameworks * Have or identify how to get a team in place to fully execute * Uplevel existing team * Iterate and create efficiencies * Cadence established for customer interviews, GTM meetings, PMM standups, Working sessions, 1:1 80% Execute + 10% Strategy + 10% Iterate 91+ DAYS: SCALE * Refine, Scale, Expand * Focus on refining and tailoring playbooks and frameworks * Team in place is able to scale so we gain efficiencies * Ready to expand scope * Deep partnerships with cross-functional partners * Uplevel areas of development 30% Scale + 50% Execute + 10% Strategy + 10% Iterate
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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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Andy Yen
ServiceNow Global Partner Marketing Director • January 17
The frameworks that I use for positioning and messaging have changed over time, as I've advanced in my marketing career in enterprise tech. Earlier in my career (when I was in product marketing), we would approach positioning and messaging for a major product launch. There were a few frameworks that worked well for me here: * Elevator Pitch - tell me what your product does in (25 words, 50 words, 100 words) * 9-box messaging framework - call out three benefits that your customers experience from your product/solution and provide proofpoints for how your product supports those benefits. I've found that this internal document is best socialized for buy-in across larger marketing and product teams. * Draft press release - forces you to take a more outside-in approach when you're coming up with new positioning and messaging. While each of these items/assets will help you build stronger positioning and messaging; what's most important is to align and set expectations with your cross-functional stakeholders and broader marketing team. As I've advanced in my career in marketing, I've had the privilege to partner with third party agencies and brand teams to refine the core positioning assets above. You'll be amazed at how much perspective these teams will provide you in overall positioning and messaging. I'd highly recommend early-in-career product marketers who are handling a major launch to proactively take this approach. The other major component of positioning and messaging is around internal comms. It's up to you to show your work to cross-functional stakeholders, and inform people that good marketing doesn't just come out of thin air. Once you're done with all of your net deliverables I'd make sure to inform a broad cross-functional team of what you've brought to the table. You will get more visiblity and feedback from this; which will ultimately make you a better marketer.
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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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It totally depends on what's already there when you've arrived ;) What's easier to answer is what is OFF the table -- pricing refreshes, website overhauls, launching a strategic narrative. Those are big, time-consuming initiatives that shouldn't be undertaken without a foundational understanding of customer, market, product (and that takes time to develop). Some examples of quick wins I've delivered include: * Creating a single resource for product releases -- this made our CS org insanely happy, because nobody could keep up with all the changes in the product. * Setting up a monthly blog to share with customers -- this made our sales and customers happy, because the company wasn't publishing ANY external collateral on what was new. * A readout of any customer interviews you've done. It's likely that the leadership team hasn't done extensive customer research for some time. As a PMM, you're able to offer fresh perspective on customers' careabouts, reasons for buying, challenges, etc. * Setting up a launch calendar to help product and marketing teams get visibility into key themes and major launches.
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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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Arianna Schatzki-Mcclain
Virta Health Director of Product Marketing • August 3
I strongly believe that every GTM strategy should start with researching and understanding the market, competitive, and buyer/prospect needs. Above, I mentioned more details about what types of data might be interesting to look at for verticle prioritization, but this list can also apply here. Combining market and more internal business data together helps inform your business case, which ideally happens and comes together before a decision is made to prioritize an offering onto the roadmap. If for whatever reason the business case step was skipped early on or not fully completed, you can still complete it. Better surface potential risks/opportunities before launch than wait and learn after the fact. Beyond starting with research, I recommend spending some time establishing a structure and plan to set yourself, your team, and your company up for a successful launch. This probably includes: * Identifying your key stakeholders and hosting a kickoff * Aligning on a framework/process with clear stage-gates * Decide how you want to communicate and share updates, will you meet weekly, bi-weekly? Is there a slack channel or will you use email? * Set goals and decide how you will track progress as a team * Align on who is the final decision maker on key decisions, who is responsible for each GTM task, who is contributing and pitching in, and who needs to stay informed. Often times the "informed" group may be executives so consider how you will share updates with your executive team.
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Dana Foster Chery
Samsara Vice President, Marketing • February 8
The best analyst briefing decks that I've either seen or helped build are not filled with marketing messaging. They clearly layout what analysts typically care about, which could include the following: trends you've observed in market you operate in, the challenges your product(s) solves, overview of your growth trajectory, industries you touch plus key use cases for each, unique differentiators, and insight into the product & (high level) GTM strategy and company vision. Other elements I'd suggest: Include customer success stories, lay out the ecosystem that supports your products (ie. partners, integrations, develop engagement), and share how you support your customers. Also, it may seem obvious, but I'd caution against including stats/proof points that were produced by another analyst firm. In general, have a clear agenda that includes space for Q&A and listening to their feedback.
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Varun Krovvidi
Google Product Marketing Lead | Formerly Salesforce • February 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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