AMA: Amplitude Director of Product Marketing, Hien Phan on Go-To-Market Strategy

KPIs are hard for PMMs.  (1) we don't directly influence everything.  (2) we have a lot of indirect influence.  But my rule of thumb is figuring out your North Star Metric, meaning what is that one metric you can influence that drives say, pipeline, and what are those input metrics? For example, if you're doing a sales play, your input metric might be how often they have used your messaging (Gong is a great tool for this) or your assets (Highspot). In this simplistic example, your North Star Met ...Read More

Whether a brief or a presentation, you should always have a core internal doc outlining your strategy and roadmap. I am religious about this exercise—given that it will evolve. Otherwise, you're doing something that someone might not agree with, which will screw up your GTM efforts.  Within that presentation, you should have documented your core persona and ICP, competitive landscape, positioning, messaging, differentiated value, and capabilities. Alignment shouldn't just be the broader GTM team ...Read More

ICP is a funny topic. First, it's not about persona. I think there is confusion around ICP and persona. ICP is about the propensity to buy, which involves firmographic (what kind of company are they from), technographic (what kind of tech stack is favorable for you and your team), compelling event (usually people buy your product because of some pain or unmet needs), persona (title, background, etc..), and last the channels and community that they live in.  Usually, you will need both qualitativ ...Read More

When I think of GTM, it's from demand to advocacy. You aren't responsible for every step of this journey but are a significant contributor to enabling and owning the customer buying journey. Questions I always ask myself when I join as a GTM PMM are as follows: 1. Do my fellow marketers have what they need to create demand, growth, and brand campaigns? Do they have the strategy, positioning, and message to do their job? Do they understand the persona/ICP segments? What's missing? How can I enabl ...Read More

So I have three principles framework for strategy: the diagnosis, the guiding principles, and the coherent action. This framework has guided me in three careers, including tech. You can read about it in a famous book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.  So if your strategy isn't working. How do you go about redesigning it? Well, first, you need to diagnose the opportunity or the problem. This first part is where you should spend the majority of your time. Why did it fail? What does your crucial ...Read More

Tbh—this is very hard since most of us sit in North America, and we think the world ends in North America.  The key here is to listen to their priorities. They are on the ground and might have different needs. Start with your internal customers before you push for a global GTM strategy. Make sure the diagnosis of the problem in your strategy includes their issues. If their issues are addressed, the rest is more about alignment and ensuring they have a stake in the game, meaning they have to do s ...Read More

This question is a great one. First, you don't build the GTM strategy in a vacuum. It's not an exercise of a product marketer where she goes into a dark room for ten days and comes out with a brilliant strategy. You must co-build this with your stakeholders—marketing, and sales. Otherwise, you will have a more challenging time convincing people.  In the past, I've set up checkpoints and collaboration time with key contributors and stakeholders. This approach allowed me to evolve and build my str ...Read More