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

February 14 @ 10:00AM PT

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What are the key traits, skills, experience you prioritize when hiring product marketers? What questions do you ask to assess it during the interview?

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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 c...

1050 Views

1 request

Describe the best PMM team you've been part of, and what aspects made it stand out from the rest. What are some things we could actively employ to our own teams to make it the best PMM team they've been part of?

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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 durin...

681 Views

2 requests

How does your PMM team work with Demand Gen? Who drives ideas for campaigns?

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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 ...

1926 Views

1 request

For a Product Marketer with mostly regional product experience, what are the best transferrable skills/experiences to stress when applying to a global Product Marketing team.

Often for Global Product Marketing roles, having prior "global" experience is a stated requirement.

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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 ...

656 Views

1 request

When building a team, how would you ideally split responsibilities? By product line? By PMM function (CI, enablement, GTM, etc)?

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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...

815 Views

1 request

How do you build a business case to quickly grow a product marketing team? What metrics do you look at to make sure you're driving ROI for the business overall?

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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 faci...

673 Views

1 request

How can you allot more time to strategy and larger picture items when you're leading a smaller PMM team (less than 3 total ppl)?

Leading a smaller PMM team means you're still in the weeds many times and it can get difficult to make time for strategical thinking—topics that need to be discussed and brought up with leadership. Any tips on how to balance that?

Sahil Sethi•

Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • 3y

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 o...

708 Views

1 request