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.
...Read More55663 Views
Upcoming AMAs
Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product Marketing • April 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.
...Read More29977 Views
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.
...Read More39659 Views
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?
...Read More22630 Views
Adrienne Joselow
HubSpot Director of Product Marketing • December 6
We develop personas in three degrees depending on the need: lightweight, qualitative, and quantitative (statistical). Each of these populate a similar framework: demographic details (job title, geo if applicable, age range, etc), responsibilities/needs/jobs to be done, challenges/pain points, Worth mentioning that a companion framework, the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), is often created to establish firmagraphic targeting to complement. Competitive insights are typically not included in our persona frameworks (though I hold space for exceptions here in rare cases - i.e. if credentialing on a certain product is part of a job responsibility). Instead, generally, our competitive insights are cultivated and applied in conjunction with the above. From a Challenger model, we aim to reframe the problem, introduce new/improved impavt as a result, and ultimately reveal value.
...Read More20013 Views
Kristen Brophy
ThredUP SVP, Marketing | Formerly Uber, Square, 1stdibs • March 24
It's hard to pick a favorite because most of my interviews look different from candidate to candidate. Often, my questions are focused on deeply understanding their past experience and asking for relevant examples that demonstrate the skills and compentencies that will be unqiue to the role and business need. Or, we unpack a case study together. I also go beyond the resume when I'm interviewing. One question that I typically ask is where the candidates want to learn and grow. The best answers to those also demonstrate steps they've taken recently and proactively to grow in a specific area.
...Read More9795 Views
Victoria Chernova
OpenAI Product Marketing • December 7
Goals depend on the type of business, the GTM strategy for the product, and selling motion. I will highlight a few examples from my past companies (including B2C and B2B). But first, some advice that’s really helped me throughout my career: 1. Tie your goals to marketing team goals, and even better, to the business 2. Set northstar metrics (usually lagging indicators), and corresponding leading indicators to ensure you’re on track 3. Align goals with key cross-functional partners: Adoption goals with product; revenue with other marketing channel owners; sales-related metrics with enablement I found that doing the above helps set your team and the launch up for success—even if you don’t meet every single KPI you’ve set. Now for some examples. At Udemy, I worked on the B2C side of the house, so we primarily launched consumer products (online courses). As a marketing team, our primary goals were monthly revenue, so launches would roll up into that. We’d set a monthly revenue goal for the new product, which was based on historical data from previous successful courses we had launched. As leading indicators, we’d track visits & click throughs on the course landing page—which helped us understand if awareness was the issue (visits) or landing page content (clicks). These were variables we could still control. At Asana, our team owned several self-serve motions: 1. Non-users signing up for Asana; 2. Free users moving from a freemium account to paid, and 3. Paid users upgrading their account from a basic plan to a more premium version. Asana offered a 30-day free trial for all 3 motions, which made it the lowest barrier to entry for a signup (and trials had a strong conversion rate). Therefore, many of our launches drove trial starts; this was the northstar metric we optimized for. Leading indicators included other campaign metrics like landing page visits and clicks, email opens and CTR, in-product channel views & clicks. Very quickly, we were able to identify which channels drove the most trials (email & in-product for existing users), and zero in on their performance to ensure we were on track. On the other side of the B2B spectrum, Gong is primarily a sales-led motion. When we launch new features, there’s a scaled customer campaign motion, as well as field enablement. Depending on the product, we’ll either launch strictly to the existing customer base or to prospective customers as well. My team focuses on platform and core product, so I can highlight some of the KPIs we’ve used for launches. For northstar metrics, I like to set: 1. Campaign goals; 2. Product adoption; and 3. Field enablement KPIs We use Gong at Gong, no surprise here, so we can actually track when our product messaging is being used by field teams with customers. We call this “field adoption.” We can even take it one step further by correlating field adoption with sales metrics like win rate or sales stage conversion. A very cool way of measuring messaging impact. Field adoption is a bit of a lagging indicator, so a leading indicator would tell you if your sales or CS teams are actually finding your messaging and resources. For that, a CMS can be helpful to track engagement and downloads of your content. A lagging indicator for product adoption could be daily/weekly/monthly users (depending on the nature of your product), or the # of users or companies that have completed an important action. Leading indicators could be visits to that particular product or taking the first step in completing said important action. Campaign goals could include driving demo requests from your target audience; leading indicators would be channel metrics like landing page views and click throughs, email opens and click throughs, etc.
...Read More4878 Views
Daniel Kish
Conveyor VP Product Marketing • November 10
Let's assume that you've got the pricing set, the feature packaging defined, and the product technically built. What happens next? Enablement! My laundry list of things to do includes: * Work with the CPQ/Systems team to build out the commercial workflow of what a SKU looks like, how discount approvals and escalations flow, product special terms, and configuration policies * Build a training deck for different audiences (Sales, CSMs, Implementation, Support, Deal Desk) that describes what the product is, who typically will buyer, details on the ideal customer profile, the pricing, who can sell, discount structure, positioning, and selling "rules of engagement" * Generate assets like price sheets, seller guides, proposal/ROI calculators, and feature-packaging breakdowns * Work with the customer marketing team to push content to the install base * Work with the revenue marketing team to push content to prospects * Set up the measurement apparatus on KPIs like average selling price, average deal size, cumulative ARR, and discretionary discounting all broken down by segment, region, deal type, and competitive-threat * Work with the Documentation teams to incorporate feature differentiation into key help center or customer advice channels Because pricing and packaging will touch almost every area of the business, you'll have to prioritize! My method is to start with where the product is most likely to be sold. For example, are you primarily selling to the install base? TALK TO CSMS! Is it mainly for smaller customers? PRIORITIZE THE SMB SEGMENT!
...Read More6110 Views
Jodi Innerfield
Salesforce Senior Director, Product Marketing Launch Strategy & Emerging Products • January 12
Each geography is different, so don't treat geos as "one size fits all." Make sure you understand the nuances of the region you're launching in--what language resonates best in messaging? What channels might be different? How does the perception of your organization or product change based on geography? What legal requirements are different? Lean on your regional counterparts and colleagues to make sure you're really tailoring the launch for the region
...Read More19460 Views
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing | Formerly Apple, Electronic Arts, Digitas • October 13
This is a great question and a situation that many PMMs will find themselves in at some point in time! A few thoughts here: 1. Building trust takes time: Before you can be seen as a strategic partner, you need to build trust with the team and demonstrate you know and understand what they are trying to achieve. As quickly as you can, become an expert in the product, and your customers. You need to know both of them inside out in order to do the work to connect the amazing product being built to the audience you believe most needs & would best benefit from it. Don’t wait for someone to show you - dig in and set up demo accounts, schedule calls with customers, research the industry, and ask to join roadmap reviews / design reviews / sprint planning sessions / team retros. 2. Show your value. While you’re learning the product, the customers, and the team, you’ll probably uncover work that isn’t being done, or is missing. Go do that work! Find some white space where you can both be proactive and add value to the overall mission at hand. Share what you’re doing, why you think it’s important, and the results. Do this over and over again -- explaining WHY is incredibly powerful, as is showing the impact of your work (can be metric-driven or new insights, etc). As you deliver key insights about the audience, and offer opinions on what features you think might be most important to invest in (and why), and how you can capitalize it for the business, your value will become understood. 3. Educate, educate, educate. Product marketing as we know it today is a relatively new function. There will always be someone you work with that has had little exposure or experience with PMMs. It is probably useful to have a few slides in your back pocket that explain “what is product marketing” and “how to work with PMMs” that you can share with teams (over and over again!). Be sure to include the part about product marketers being key inputs into product strategy and roadmaps, too :-).
...Read More17356 Views