Get answers from product marketing leaders
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 4
A thorough go to market (GTM) plan can provide incredible clarity for the many, many stakeholders who are involved in a launch. That’s why it’s so important for the GTM plan to be self-serve when you don’t have the luxury of walking your colleagues through it. The goal is to align your core team, plus answer the top questions for anyone else who needs to be looped in. I suggest using these 9 sections as your core elements: 1. Business context, goals and projected impact → why is this launching? 2. Product experience → what is launching? 3. Audience insights, definition and targeting strategy → who is this launching for and what need(s) are we solving? 4. Marketing brief → what are we saying and how? 5. Channel plan → where are we sharing this? 6. Campaign creative → how does it look, feel and sound? 7. Launch timeline → when is it launching and how is it being rolled out? 8. Measurement plan → how will we know what success looks like? 9. Roles & responsibilities → who owns bringing this to life? There are plenty of times when this list expands or contracts, but as long as you are answering why, what, who, where, when and how, you’ll have a solid starting point to create a successful GTM plan.
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David Esber
Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing • October 27
My first question is: what's the reason for not relying on your revenue org? Is there a lack of trust, challenges with prioritization, or something else? The best, most differentiated positioning means nothing if it's not being used throughout the customer journey – and since the majority of marketing orgs are focused on driving leads to a sales team, that messaging better be consistent at every stage of the marketing funnel. I view our sales partners as essential in building, validating, and activating our messaging. Since much of the intel we gain from sales teams is rooted in the present challenges our target audience is facing, I tend to work closely with them to identify key pain points, then validate with new and existing user research (both in-house and sourced with third parties), broad customer surveys (key trends based by audience), and by talking to customers any opportunity I have. To that end, I'll often volunteer to present a product pitch, volunteer for booth duty, or present our roadmap, just to have face-time with customers; we're providing direct value, so folks rarely object when I ask a few additional, discovery questions, or drop-in new messaging just to observe their reactions. The best messaging, though, doesn't just address the current problem, but future problems (and in an economic downturn, economic opportunities) that we are best positioned to address. So, vision-building is often more of a conversation and ideation exercise with my product stakeholders. Simply, intel from sales/customers is great for messaging that gets heads nodding, and the product vision conversations are what I use to get people excited about the future. Together, that's the peanut butter and chocolate of messaging. While this question was specifically about quant tools, it's essential to start with that qual research. Some really talented UX partners taught me that qualitative data is essential before building out quantitative research – I treat messaging the same way. On the quant side, here are a few things I've seen work: * Message testing with friendly customers/customer-facing teams (either via an ad hoc or existing VOC community – ask them for quant and qual feedback in exchange for swag, donations to a cause, or access to new features) * Painted door exercises (A/B test landing pages and ad copy with variations of content to measure CVR) * Sales training & correlative win/loss rate (train teams in new messaging and observe changes in win/loss and customer segments over time using tools like Gong)
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Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing | Formerly Apple, Electronic Arts, Digitas • October 14
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 :-).
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Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann
SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing | Formerly SurveyMonkey, Nielsen • July 13
For almost every feature launch, you have to evaluate the amount of market- and customer-facing activities it makes sense to do. For features that don't warrant a market launch (i.e. they aren't a differentiator, don't support a strategic partnership, or open up opportunities for new business) but DO warrant customer communication and customer-facing team readiness, it's still important to have launch tiers. Is this something that adds value & could enable up-sell or upgrades? Is it a major UI change that would impact their day-to-day usage of the product? Have customers been asking for this? Or is this just an intuitive update to an existing feature? You can think about activities in several buckets, listed below. Note that these are pretty comprehensive, and you'd want to trim this down based on what you're launching. You may, for example, opt for fewer proactive comms touchpoints & more reactive comms preparedness. Launch planning & readiness: Customer segmentation Pull any necessary data/lists Define customer launch segments Document customer comms strategy Channels (email, in-product, 1:1, etc) Comms schedule/phases timing Messaging framework Legal approval of messaging Internal readiness Product/Initiative FAQ Sales & Success training CustOps training Marketing/Comms training Customer communication: In-Product Comms In-product targeting In-product UX copy/design In-product entry points Update transactional emails Error message (for outage) Help Center customer facing FAQ Marketing Comms Upload/create customer send lists Email copy/creative Email localization Contnet updates (website, sales collateral) Sales/Success Comms 1:1 Customer email templates Customer-facing FAQ CustOps Comms Publish page in CustOps wiki CustOps email signature CustOps customer case category CustOps case quick-text responses Social Care team preparedness Day-Of Activation Cut-over plan (e.g. re-directs) Slack channel announcements Customer-facing team reminders Monitor customer case volume Customer onboarding and expansion: Customer onboarding New customer onboarding strategy Update onboarding email sequence Update getting started guide Customer-facing how-to videos Customer training / best practices Customer Engagement QBR template updates Customer touchpoints (email, etc) Customer Expansion Expansion playbook updates Renewal process & playbook Gainsight CTAs It's also important to note that a small feature on its own may not warrant a market splash, but if you bundle multiple similarly-themed feature into one announcement (e.g. multiple analytics features or multiple integrations), then you may be able to swing a market/press moment. At SurveyMonkey, we ladder up feature releases into thematic launches to get more market "bang for our buck" and to reduce the number of individual launch workstreams.
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Every company has its own system or values that they look for during candidate review. During interviews, especially at larger enterprise companies, the recruiter or hiring manager usually has a rubric that assesses how much the candidate fulfills the criteria. Here are what stands out for me in a pool of PMM candidates: 1. Achievement - how do they take initiative and demonstrate that they are results-oriented 2. Influence - how do they convey ideas that can influence others without formal authority 3. Leadership - how do they build on the work of others and help develop others 4. Adaptability/ Resilience - how do they navigate through ambiguous solutions and how do they pivot when needed 5. Self Awareness - how do they handle constructive feedback and how aware are they of their own strengths and opportunity areas 6. Problem-Solving - how well do they analyze situations, identify key issues, and produce an alternative solution 7. Strategy oriented - how well do they think beyond their current activity/scope into a broader vision The more senior the role, the more emphasis I have on finding a candidate that can address all 7 characteristics on this list.
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Ben Rawnsley-Johnson
Censia VP of Marketing • November 8
For new products especially, pricing and packaging should inform, and be informed by the broader GTM strategy (it's why I'm so bullish about the role PMMs play in contributing to P&P decisions). For example: * Our GTM strategy answers "Who is the market, persona?" * how do they prefer to buy? (PLG vs. direct sales), * How long is the deal cycle? * How senior is the economic buyer? * and how formalized is the procurement process? * Does the customer need implementation services, integrations or infrastructure effort to realize value? * The answers to these questions help you determine the minimum viable, and likely deal sizes required to sustainably generate margin using these channels. The more boundary conditions like this you can apply to your pricing strategy, the faster you will arrive at a high-confidence hypothesis you can test in the market. Another example: * The GTM strategy will outline the likely TAM/SAM/SOM, but for Pricing and packaging, you need to be crystal clear on the FIRST segment. * Honestly, unless you work at Amazon, if you're launching a new product alongside existing product lines, the reality is that your beachhead market will almost entirely comprise existing customers. This means you're going to align to existing pricing and packaging principles that you've already trained your customers on - e.g. if your company always offers a free tier, holding back high-value features in up-sell editions, you should apply that same approach here to reduce the impediment to buy.
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Vidya Drego
SmithRx VP of Marketing | Formerly HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce • January 20
It's an interesting time to be in product marketing because I think there will be significant shifts in the next few years in how we think about go-to-market. There's a fair amount being written today about how go-to-marketing motions have evolved from inside sales to inbound marketing to product-led growth and are heading towards more community-led growth. Each phase is additive to the one before it (i.e. companies are not going to stop doing one and move to the next but find more success in combining strategies) but I think a lot of the same skills will persist. First, PMMs will ALWAYS have to be exceptional communicators. Specifically, they have to be able to simplify the complex and not only write in their own voice, but typically in the voice of their company or sales team. They have to be able to understand a process or scenario that they're often not a part of and come up with ways of influencing it. And they have to be able to tell a story. Secondly, they have to be able to understand the dynamics of their market. This starts with who their customers are and how these people are changing or being challenged. The means by which a PMM influences or relates to their customers has changed and will continue to change but constantly listening to those customers and periodically picking your head up to evaluate whether the dynamics of the market have changed can often help you partner with experts to execute in the right way. As an example, my team has and will invest much more time with our customers telling their story, helping turn them into acvocates and build and develop their own communities. This is different from where we spent our time five years ago but involves many of the same skills.
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Apurva Davé
Aembit CMO • May 26
Think about what matters most to your customer, and then what matters most to your company. * Is your base platform something which your customers will natively interact with and drive value from? * Is it something that a new user in your target accounts will benefit from (eg, developers) ? * Or is your platform something that allows you to accelerate development, so the customer sees more value from the platform faster? Thinking through this will tell you how to build your messaging. While most companies want the platform concept to take center stage, it might not be right for your customer. Or it might appeal to one audience more than another. Or, your platform might really just be like a "feature" that customers only need to know about tangentially.
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Raman Sharma
Sourcegraph Chief Marketing Officer • February 7
[Warning] Extremely Opinionated Zone starts now :) * Value Proposition answers the question of whether buying your product is a good value exchange for the customer/prospect. The pain you are reducing or the delight you are introducing - is it worth the commercial exchange and a good deal for the prospect? * Messaging is the act of clearly articulating the value proposition through words that resonate with the target audience. * Pitch is a succinct and impactful delivery of the messaging, frequently customized (with examples) relevant to the person being pitched, done with an intent to create urgency of action. * Story is your unique point of view about why your company/product exists, and your position in the market/industry.
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Christina Lhi
Square Head Of Product Marketing • September 15
It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ultimately, you shouldn't use these as a crutch, you should invest more energy and time up front to build the right strategy and make sure execution is able to ladder back to that strategy.
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