Handshake

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

Insights are extremely important and should always be an input into your messaging architecture or recommendation. Market and customer insights are one of the best ways to make a case for your recommendation, in fact. So you don't get stuck in an analysis paralysis state, I'd do a quick audit...more

Curious — where does in-app copy fit in your org? Is it under PMM? Design? Other? Particularly interested in technical products, but also curious for nontechnical.

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

For my company, it's currently shared between product, product marketing and design, but that's mostly a factor of being a startup and in the process of building out each of those functions. I think about it in two ways: 1. Is the in-app copy descriptive of the product itself? Things like featu...more

Do you have a messaging template/worksheet/framework that you like to use? Always on the lookout for the best ways to really drive messaging home to internal stakeholders

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

There are a number of messaging framework templates available these days. I shared an article that I like to reference (link is below again); I also suggest you check out posts from Andy Raskin (https://andyraskin.com/) who I've worked with previously or check out this recording of Tiffany Spence...more

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When your platform does many things, how do you prioritize your messaging hierarchy?

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

This will depend on what your product/service/platform does and who the target audience is. For instance, in one of my previous roles, we had one product for one audience. Of course the platform was extensible, had different feature sets, but the value was easy to articulate to one audience. On t...more

How do you approach getting approval for messaging from internal stakeholders like Product, Sales, and Customer Success?

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

The first step here is to share the WHY behind a messaging project. If you can get every group to align on that and the outcome, getting ‘approval’ is much easier. I start with a kickoff meeting and have often shared this article (linked below), particularly in startups where you may be dealing w...more

How does experimentation fit into improving messaging? And if you find something that works in one channel, can you translate it across channels?

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

I’m a big believer in experimentation in any marketing activity. And messaging should be included in that. I see a lot of enterprise product marketers get caught up in taking on a huge messaging and positioning project/revamp that typically cuts across multiple teams and stakeholders, which can f...more

I am currently interviewing competitive intelligence firms to conduct some win/loss analysis. Anyone here have an experience to share?

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

I’ve worked with Diane at dimensional research at a couple different companies - http://dimensionalresearch.com/. Very thorough and collaborative

Question about org structures - what does your product marketing team org structure look like?

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

In my experience, it varies based on your product portfolio/customer segments... When my company had only 1 product we were separated by function (i.e. pricing/packaging, sales enablement, product launches, market research, etc.), but in other companies we were focused on segment (enterprise ...more

Any tips for successful “win interviews”? Who is typically involved?

Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake

I typically do them by myself without the sales person or product mgmt. I find the customer is more open about product and sales process that way pm and sales contribute to info we want to gather though