AMA: Barracuda Networks Product Marketing Director, Olesia Klevchuk on Enterprise Product Marketing

Wherever sales is losing deals they should be winning. That’s the honest answer. If you trace back lost deals you will find same patterns. The message didn’t land, wrong proof points, couldn’t counter the competitor. Those are all PMM problem to solve. The best thing PMM can do is get close enough to the sales motion to see where the friction is. Not just launch assets into a void and hope they get used. Actually, sit in on deals, review losses, talk to SEs. Then build the things that directly a ...Read More

Don’t treat enterprise as just a bigger version of your mid-market motion. It’s not. The whole motion is different. Longer cycles, more stakeholders, procurement, legal, security reviews. What closes an SMB deal in two weeks can take six months in enterprise. There’s real organizational risk on the line. The product has to be ready for it too. Enterprises need things like SSO, audit logs, role-based access, compliance documentation. If you’re missing those, you’re not even getting to the evaluat ...Read More

The way I think about it: every persona has a job to protect. The CISO cares about risk. IT cares about operational burden. The CFO cares about whether this purchase is defensible in six months. Practically, I build a simple matrix: persona, their primary pain point, what success looks like for them, and the one proof point that speaks to it. It forces me to be specific instead of writing vague copy that tries to please everyone and moves nobody. The end-user cares about their day-to-day experie ...Read More

When everyone started adding AI-powered onto the home pages, the phrase stopped meaning anything. You have to start moving the conversation to: what specifically gets better and by how much? If your positioning is full of words like ‘AI-powered’ or ‘next-gen’, or ‘revolutionary’ - swap them out. In my world of cybersecurity: ·      ‘AI-powered threat investigation’ - poor ·      ‘Reduces investigation time’ - better   ·      ‘Your analysts will stop chasing the same threat variant for three days ...Read More

The goal is to make sales self-sufficient on 80% of deal. That means building out core assets such as messaging blocks, proof point libraries, competitive one-pagers. Reps can pull from these and adapt without coming back to PMM every time. The other 20%, like the strategic deals, the new verticals, or the competitive knockouts, that’s where PMM gets involved directly. But you have to protect that capacity by not letting the team become a custom content shop for every rep request. If reps keep c ...Read More