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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 10
This is a great question! Given messaging is such a subjective topic - it's super important to quantifiably test and iterate on it to ensure it lands well in the market. Here's a few strategies and tactics you can use to quantifably test it: 1. During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both qualitative tests where you test specific aspects of your pitch and differentiated value or quantitative tests of words or descriptors you use. 2. Solicit early feedback from Sales and Customer support teams - We’ve recently done this super effectively at Hubspot, by essentially recording a Loom video of our pitch (keep it under 5-7 minutes) and following that up with a Google form with specific questions to solicit sales and customer success feedback on the pitch, differentiated value, use cases, imagery used etc. 3. Leverage platforms and tools such as Wynter - This has been another effective platform we’ve used to test messaging effectiveness and gain specific feedback on what resonates and doesnt with your prospective buyers. Wynter allows you to crowdsource and get real-time feedback from your target customers. 4. A/B test on your website, ad copy, social copy, search copy - these are simple and effective ways to test a couple of different messaging options with your prospects in real-time to see what resonates most. 5. Email test your messaging to prospects - This is a tactic you can easily use to test different subject lines, body copy, CTA’s to see what resonates most.
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Priya Kotak
Priya Kotak
Figma Product MarketingFebruary 24
I’m a big advocate of getting messaging in front of customers and potential customers directly. Here are a few ways I’ve done that recently: * Test messaging in product betas: At Figma we often launch features to a subset of customers in beta before making them generally available. I like to use this as an opportunity to test some messaging ideas. Not only can you test messaging in recruitment comms and onboarding decks you can join feedback calls to hear use cases and benefits in the customers’ own words * Test landing pages with target audience: When we launched FigJam we created 3 versions of our landing page, each leaning into slightly different messaging, and partnered with our research team to test them with customers in our target audience. We had them react to each page as well as answer various questions to gauge which messaging was easiest to understand and most compelling. I feel comfortable knowing messaging won’t be 100% perfect at launch and that it will evolve as we learn how users actually use the feature/product. If you’re already sending surveys and talking to customers you’re on the right track — from there you can iterate post launch. Here are some things you can do to learn whether you need to tweak your messaging: * Review performance: Look at metrics for your landing page, blog post, etc. How are they performing compared to benchmarks? Are you seeing the traffic and conversions you expected? If not, this might be a sign that the product messaging isn’t resonating — a good next step would be talking to some customers and your Sales team. * Learn from Sales: Check-in with your Sales team to learn from their experience. How has the messaging and pitch for the new product been landing? Are they using the materials you created or have they changed them? Joining or listening to calls is a great way to understand this first hand. You can also look through data in your CRM to learn who’s buying so you know whether your messaging is targeting the right personas
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Sherry Wu
Sherry Wu
Gong Senior Director, Product Marketing | Formerly MaintainX, Samsara, Comfy, CiscoJuly 19
I've worked at Series B startups all the way up to F500 companies. The theory behind product launches is the same - you want to align your launch to business goals. But, the HOW (the tactics and resources) and the WHO (the team) behind executing a product launch are really where there are differences. At a F500 company, you've got dedicated teams for naming, brand, sales enablement, web, social, and more. PMMs might focus only on launch messaging at a larger company, and spend a lot of time on stakeholder management and alignment. At a smaller company, you've got fewer stakeholders to get in a room, so you can move very quickly, but PMMs will often end up wearing those hats worn by other teams (e.g. writing email copy, landing page copy, thinking about naming and branding, etc.)
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Jesse Lopez
Jesse Lopez
Dandy Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Brex, Klaviyo, Square, Intuit, PepsiCo, Heineken, MondelezMarch 24
Many methods exist to identify ideal customer profiles (ICP) for your product. The simple approach is to look inwards to understand product-market fit among your existing users. 1) Power Users: Identify your power users and understand why they love you. Typically, these cohorts help inform ideal targets for your ICP and how you go-to-market to acquire more customers that fit your ICP profiles. Analyze what quantitative and qualitative commonalities these cohorts share to inform your ICP profiles (e.g., industry, geographic footprint, annual revenue, use cases, pain points, key features used, etc.). Key things to learn from your power users include: * What pain points were they looking to solve with your product? * Where did they hear about your product? * What factors and/or criteria drove their decision to choose your product? * How effective has your product been at solving their pain points? * What aspects of your product do they enjoy the most? * What outcomes or impact have they achieved with your product? * Note: The "power user" criteria can vary by company - for example, you can define them by most loyal to your product, most profitable for your company, most active in your product, etc. Work with your Sales and Product teams to define the key metric(s) you want to optimize for your GTM efforts. 2) Emerging Promoters: Identify sizeable and attractive audiences for expansion. In addition to power users, you want to identify other highly satisfied audiences that may not represent a sizeable share of your existing user base. Typically, these are incremental industry verticals or use cases your product is well equipped to serve based on functionality. * Tip: Leverage product usage data and surveys to identify these opportunities. NPS and CSAT surveys are great tools to identify promoters of your product. Pack these surveys with firmographic, demographic, product usage, and attitudinal questions to fully understand these audiences. 3) Churners: Research your churners to understand why customers leave you. Typically, this will help you flag key audiences that may prove difficult to acquire and may be challenging to be candidates for your ICP (e.g., industry vertical, company size, use case). Understanding their key challenges with your product will inform when they can become candidates to be included in your ICP (e.g., once a specific feature or capability becomes available). Summary Understanding these three audiences (power users, emerging promoters, and churners) will help shape your ICP profiles and inform how you go to market. Net-net, you want to attract, acquire, and retain customer profiles that have proven fit for your product vs. depleting your resources on audiences that churn due to a weak product-market fit.
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Nami Sung
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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Kacy Boone
Kacy Boone
Clockwise Head of Growth MarketingMay 26
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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Christina Lhi
Christina Lhi
Square Head Of Product MarketingSeptember 15
Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment collateral across product and marketing.
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6554 Views
Justin Graci
Justin Graci
HubSpot Marketing Fellow - Partner GTM & Product ReadinessNovember 24
Here are a few tips for ensuring your sales team leverages the content you create: * Make sure the content can easily be found. Have a central, go-to place that reps can find all your content. This can be a 3rd party platform such as Highspot, Seismic, or Allbound. Or it can be a more simple Airtable/Spreadsheet that has proper filtering if you're on a budget. Of course with a platform you'll get data/insights into what's working, what's not, so I recommend a platform vs spreadsheet. * Keep the content up-to-date. If a sales rep loves a piece of collateral, but continues to find that it's outdated and missing the latest info, then they'll quickly lose interest in using it, and they'll lose trust in the marketing team. * Host monthly 'marketing/enablement showcases'. At HubSpot, we've hosted monthly meetings that are around 45-60 minutes, and attended by sales reps. During this time, the team walks through the latest content, collateral, and campaigns. And we don't just show what the asset is... we show reps why we created it, when they should use it in the sales process, and often try to share a recent sales-win from using the asset. * Showcase any rep wins attributed to your content. This one has worked REALLY well for us. If you find a rep who leveraged an asset from Marketing and it led to a good engagement with a prospect or customer, then get a quote and showcase that to the broader team. Once other reps see another having success, they're more willing to use it. Bonus - if you can show these wins to Sales Managers, who are willing to share with their teams, that'll work even better. At the end of the day, marketers who support the sales org need to focus on QUALITY and not quantity. Don't get yourself in a place where you're a content factory. Instead, do research with your reps, find what would be most impactful and useful, and commit to a small number of high value assets.
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Tiffany Tooley
Tiffany Tooley
Workday Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly Salesforce, IBM, Silverpop, BlackboardMarch 9
This very much depends on your company size, but I'd say the basics are: * Messaging & Positioning * GTM Strategy Development & Execution * Sales & Buyer Enablement * Campaign Support * Competitive Support * Consistent partnerships with Product, Sales & Customers There are always a ton of questions about TAM, Pricing & Packaging, Personas, etc. I've been on teams where those things are certainly supported or led by PMM teams, but as the business scales, I often find the TAM, Pricing & Packaging work tends to transition to strategy or pricing teams and the persona work is typically either folded into the enablement workstreams that PMM leads or is supported across the organization by a multitude of teams.
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Michael Olson
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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