AMA: BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing, Kelly Kipkalov on Product Marketing Skills

I'm going to answer your question slightly differently. PMMs can acquire skills as they develop in their careers, that's a given. So when I hire PMMs, I'm not just looking for skills, I'm looking for a specific customer-first mindset. Do you understand the customer problem you're trying to solve? How do you know it's a problem, and how painful is it? How do you typically engage with customers? How do you validate your ideas to make sure they resonate with your customer? I will often hear things like "I validated my messaging with sales," or "the survey data says..." but to be an effective PMM you need to deeply understand your customers and their pain points. So the skill set matters much less to me than the mindset.

I'm not sure the distinction you're making between data-driven vs data-informed but I'm going to say that you should be data driven. There's some narrative about PMM that says PMMs don't need to be analytical, or comfortable using data and I don't agree with that at all. Instead of intuition, you should have strong hypotheses - grounded in a customer insight - that you want to use data to validate. Intuition is super subjective and very hard to defend, but almost no one will refute a hypothesis that you're looking to confirm or deny.

In our PMM career ladder at BILL we evaluate PMM career progression in the following areas: * Ability to uncover market insights * Influence product strategy and development * Create positioning and messaging * Orchestrate Go To Market plans At the level you're asking about - PMM to Sr PMM - there are two areas we look for a step change in performance. (1) We like to see more fluency in your ability to leverage market research to bring insights back to product managers; and (2) and we also like to see that not only can you execute against a GTM plan, you have started to create small scale GTM plans, and that you are able to drive execution through others in marketing.

My answer to this is that 'it depends' on where you are in your career. If you are early career and just starting as a PMM, I would typically be making a hiring decision solely based on soft skills. There's no expectation that you have a well rounded set of hard PMM skills as an entry level candidate. But as you progress in your career, that dynamic will come into better balance and hiring managers will be looking for both. Starting at the manager level, I would be vetting candidates for specific PMM craft (your hard skills), not just soft skills.

Of all the skill sets I think are important for a product marketer, brand marketing isn't on the top of the list. In fact, it's probably the opposite - particularly in smaller tech companies where brand = product - where I think a brand marketer could benefit from experience as a product marketer. The relationship between brand and product marketer is important to ensure that products being built deliver on the brand values (like Volvo and safety or Staples and easy) but you don't have to be a brand marketer to be a good product marketer. I'll take the analytical skills all day long. PMM is part art and part science, and the importance of being numbers driven is underestimated. Understanding statistics (market research level), using data for decision making, measuring the impact of PMM are some examples of area where analytics skills can help make you an invaluable product marketer.

Even if you get a very specific product marketing question during an interview, I promise you that your soft skills are still being assessed at the same time. Are you a clear and confident communicator? Were you able to use influence and persuasion to get your work done? Did you take initiative to drive your own outcomes, or follow in the path others made for you? Communication, influence, and initiative are all soft skills that can make a break a product marketer. Maybe think of the PMM questions as getting at 'what' you've achieved as a marketer and think of soft skills as all about the 'how.' Can't have one without the other so you should be able to respond to each question with a what and a how answer, and then you've checked both boxes.

Such a great question! Sales enablement - although you're right it's a narrow focus - is still very transferable to the more customer facing aspects of customer marketing. You still need to understand how to build clear value props and messaging for sales so they can win deals, it's just that the audience is different. That said, my biggest suggestion is just to really push yourself to develop new tools and content that might be outside your company's playbook, particularly if the playbook is a little predictable. Build interactive demo tools, create Figma prototypes, develop pitch decks tailored to a specific persona or customer profile, create modularized video salespeople can send to customers. You'll find that even though your focus might be narrow, you are still putting transferable tools in your toolbox.

I'd be happy to have some back and forth on this, but I'm not sure I fully understand the context of the question. Are you writing emails to sales, and if so, what type of content are you sharing? Or you writing emails for sales reps to send to customers? Feel free to email me back and I can take another stab at answering.

There's another question I fielded about soft skills, so take a look at that one in the feed. The soft skills I listed there: * Clear and confident written and verbal communication * Ability to influence others (particularly product) * Strong drive for results/taking initiative There's one more I'd add: * Bias for action

I've hired people straight out of undergrad, it's possible. Look for entry level titles like product marketing analyst, or specialist...they are out there. BUT, I will say don't despair if you don't see a lot of entry level PMM roles, and instead just try and land a marketing role in a company where you care about the product. There will be plenty of time for you to transition into a PMM role when opportunities come up, and there's no downside to starting on a different team. Your early career marketing experience will set you up well for PMM whenever the opportunity arises.

Great messaging isn't as easy as people think! Two things come to mind. First, learn the art of writing a single minded proposition, aka "SMP." If you aren't crystal clear on the benefit you're selling and why a customer should believe in the benefit (RTB or reason to believe) your messaging just won't make sense. CPG marketers have been doing this for years; it requires you to be disciplined and to make tradeoffs otherwise your message will be muddy. Second, remember that less is always more, and too much is just messy, particularly in messaging. Challenge yourself to keep things short and sweet. If the words aren't in service of paying off your SMP, then delete delete delete!