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 questions like ‘Tell me about your experience enabling teams” or “Tell me about any messaging overhaul that you led”? etc. etc. Often these questions are built on top of what the candidate has written on the resume or described in the question “Tell me about yourself?” * Work products - I ask PMMs to share examples of work they have done. It could be a messaging brief, a sales deck, a web page, a recorded demo video. Some of this is also covered in the interview presentations that happen in the later stages of an interview process

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 team trusted each other completely. We practiced vulnerabillity and knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. When it came to being a thought partner on a difficult problem , or picking up extra work for a week, or coaching for dealing with a tough coworker - this group never shied away from supporting a mate in need * Diversity - This group was pretty diverse - not just in gender/race but also in diversity of thought and opinions. This was a motley crew of 5 and we came from all over the world. One started their career in sales, one in program management, one as a technologist and one as a strategist. We built on top of each other’s ideas and the end result was always better than where we started * A great manager - we had a manager who always had our back. He knew us well, cared deeply for our emotions (and ambitions) and helped us grow with direct, gentle coaching and the gift of feedback

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 and demand-gen (along with brand/comms teams) should collaborate and jointly build an integrated marketing plan for the year/quarter/month. The integrated marketing plan covers things like --> Who to target, what to say, in what channel, at what time and frequency. All of this comes with clear and defined KPIs, owners and collaboration models. An integrated plan is also key to identifying how much to invest (resources, $). Nailing this upfront is key to strong PMM and demand-gen collaboration. e.g. PMMs build messaging based on understanding the customer pain points, personas, segments etc. That same foundational understanding is key to demand-gen building their plans on which assets and channels to optimize for. An enterprise focus may often put some onus on webinars and ABM while a PLG focus puts more emphasis on web and content. The integrated plan identifies the channels to go after, with the right messaging , the right KPIs and informs who does what in this plan. The rest is about execution which includes monitoring and iteration Campaigns are a gray area. An ideal campaign involves the following (A) Picking a messaging theme (e.g. intelligence, security, growth etc. ) that is unique and distinctive to help the product/brand advance B) Building a campaign architecture - hero content or landing page, channels for paid/organic/social/SEO , form fills and lead captures (or not), nurturing plans, CTA, retargeting etc. C) Execution - with heavy elements of monitoring and iteration Ideally, A) is PMM owned and C) is demand-gen owned. B) Can be owned by either of the two groups and is very much dependent on org and functional maturity and individual skill set. Whatever model you follow, it is really important to have someone thinking about the campaign architecture to make sure the campaign is tightly integrated

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 strategy and messaging chops. Did you build an integrated marketing plan for the region ? Did you help improve an existing pitch deck that the ‘global’ teams sent you ?Did you lead a sales training ? Do you understand customer pain points, personas and segments well? Can you write effectively ? Can you demo the product ? Do you understand its use cases well ? Did you write a messaging brief for a campaign ? There is no PMM who has skills in all of these - even the global ones. But figuring out what the role demands, and highlighting your experiences that matter for the role will help you stand out Good luck!

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 truly a small PMM team (say <4 folks), then splitting by product makes most sense. This way - you can staff up with ‘full stack’ PMMs who own voice of customer, messaging, enablement and launches for their product. As a manager, you could lay down the process and the rules of engagement to ensure consistency across all products. Aligning by product also helps drive better engagement with PM

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 ? Are the new products not doing well ? Is there a shelfware problem (i.e. feature adoption is too low) ? PMMs can help all of the above problems, and more. Any investments in team size will, and should, directly be linked to business challenges Sometimes the challenges aren’t expressed directly but are captured in other metrics the business talks about. e.g. no of reps hitting quota, or expansion ARR, or sales cycle / deal velocity ? Or free to paid conversions ? Focus on the metric that the business is struggling with and understand if there is a way for the PMM team to impact there

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 1. Don’t think of strategy and execution as anything different. Good execution isn’t about working the plan, but is really about working the plan, monitoring the work, reporting on the work and iterating on the work. Think of the monitoring, reporting and iterating as just part of “being in the weeds”. Coach your team to constantly monitor, report on and continue to improve their work. e.g. after every launch, ask them to capture the metrics that made that launch successful (engagement, adoption etc.), report on them in every forum and plan for how to improve them for subsequent launches. 90% of “topics that need to be discussed and brought up with leadership” can be covered by this helpful framework. Most strategy and larger picture items come out of such discussions 2. Link your work to stated business goals - Think of the big business challenges your business is trying to tackle. Is it pipeline, win rates, expansions, NARR etc. ? Now try and connect the PMM work to those business goals ? Are your helping improve win rates with better enablement ? Are you helping drive new feature adoption with launches ? Are you helping convince a new audience with a new value prop ? If you can report on the ‘in the weeds” PMM work by linking it to the stated business goals (or even unstated business challenges), you are already laying the ground for a strategic discussion with your leadership 3. Move your time horizons, gradually - If you are too bogged down in project based execution (e.g. next big launch, campaign or field event) , then start moving your reporting and thinking frontiers a bit longer. Maybe start on quarterly planning and reporting. Focus not just on what went well, but what could be done better. Report on customer trends and buying behavior - everyone (sales, product, marketing) can benefit from that. All of this can help start the right dialogue on strategy. Once you have that cadence going, maybe take those horizons further - half yearly or annually. See if you can be part of the annual strategic planning process. Getting out of weeds isn't easy, but hopefully these tips can help. And remember, even in the most tactical of discussions, it is perfectly ok to ask take 5 mins and ask "What problem are we solving ?" and "What does success look like? You will help the entire group zoom out and work on the stuff that really matters