AMA: BetterUp Senior Vice President, Product Marketing, Sahil Sethi on Building a Product Marketing Team

Every PMM role is unique and comes with its own demands on skills, experience and cultural traits. However, I expect any PMM to be good at, (or have aptitude for) three core skills Ability to answer three questions well "What, Why, How" for any product , for any audience (Positioning and messaging) Ability to train an internal team (ideally sales or CS) on that narrative. (Enablement) Ability to storytell the product to a customer (Demo) The way to assess these is Example questions - I ask quest ...Read More

I’ve been lucky to have been part of amazing PMM teams at Microsoft, CTP, Qualtrics, Klaviyo and new Betterup. Hard to draw comparisons but my favorite PMM team was during my early years at Microsoft when I was an individual contributor Here are some reasons that made it special, which you can apply to your teams as well  Clarity of work - We were clear about what each of us were doing, definition of success, key stakeholders and how each one of us was building on each other’s work  Trust - This ...Read More

My ideal PMM team is split on both dimensions. There are vertical PMMs who are aligned by product/segment/audience. Then there are ‘horizontal’ PMMs who lead launches, CI, enablement, campaigns, etc. supporting all products and audiences In reality, you may not have the resources to build this ‘ideal’ team. In this case, focus on ‘majors’ and ‘minors’. Maybe someone is owning a new, fledgling product as their ‘Major’ while also covering enablement for all products as their ‘Minor’ If you are tru ...Read More

Such a good question. Part of the reason that “global” experience is a stated requirement is because most regional marketing roles are tactical and execution oriented in nature. In fact, most SaaS companies don’t even have a concept of regional PMMs - marketers in regions are mostly either focused on campaigns, events, case studies, comms, PR or other adjacent marketing activities If you are a regional marketer applying for a global PMM role, highlight skills and experience that demonstrate your ...Read More

TLDR In the large majority of B2B SaaS companies, PMM owns messaging/positioning for products/solutions and demand-gen/performance marketing owns the deployment of that messaging appropriately into acquisition channels like paid social, paid search, web, webinars, events etc.  Campaign ideas can and should be encouraged from anyone -including folks outside of PMM/demand-gen Campaign execution and ownership can be a gray area- keep reading below for the nuances Detail In an ideal world, both PMM ...Read More

This is such a good question. I get it. Everything is moving fast. There just isn’t enough time to discuss strategy. But if you don’t discuss strategy, you run the risk of not doing the right thing. Worse - you may be disconnected from the company and leadership priorities - which often change in a fast growth environment Here are some helpful tips that can work in the situation you have described Don’t think of strategy and execution as anything different. Good execution isn’t about working the ...Read More

The best business case to grow the PMM team, or any team for that matter, is to highlight how the team is going to tackle the biggest challenges that the business is facing. This has always been true but is particularly true in the macro environment we are in So, ask what the business challenges are. Do you have a lead-gen/pipeline problem ? Are your win rates dropping due to competitive pressures ? Are customers spending less ? Are they churning quickly ? Are they not expanding fast enough ? Ar ...Read More