AMA: Miro Group Product Marketing Manager- Enterprise, Mandy Schafer on Enterprise Product Marketing

In general, product marketing OKRs can become quite vague and hard to measure. However, the product marketing OKRs I’ve seen that are easier to measure are:1) Successful and ontime product launches. This means the product launch was able to happen on time with all cross functional teams trained up prior to the product launch so there were no surprises.2) Completed messaging maps/documents for a target segment or new feature. 3) Completed research around target customer segments and who to go aft ...Read More

PMMs are the most important when it comes to being able to simplify what the product has built and clearly describe what it does and why it’s important. Sales teams are constantly being bombarded with new features that product teams have built, you can’t feed every single feature separately for sales teams to sell.  PMM should be able to help package up these new features (or existing ones) into a narrative to better help sales go to market with them. We did this at Dropbox by leveraging Sales P ...Read More

I'm going to talk about my experience at really early stage companies, at this point, everyone is doing everything, so the priority is to create some strcuture to help every get aligned on the same goals. When I’ve been the first Product Marketer, or only one establishing the PMM function the first thing I do is meet with sales, product and the rest of marketing to identify the gaps. Generally is there's that piece missing between Product and marketing/sales to message what has been built, and s ...Read More

Enterprise Product marketers really need to be able to understand the long, and complex sales cycles that Enterprise deals take. In addition, they need to understand all the additional nuances that come with large companies. Larger companies are generally public, and have to adhere to many more regulations and complex company policies to protect themselves, their customers and shareholders, and their own employees. Because of this, they’ll demand more features, and understanding of how your comp ...Read More

The best customer testimonials are those where you let the customers talk about their own personal pain points at work, and not have them try to focus on what the company pain points. Their personal pain is generally the overall company pain, especially in an enterprise setting. When it becomes personal, and your software is what helped make their lives better, then the true passion comes out. This personal touch is what resonates to other customers and buyers. When your software helped promote ...Read More

Great question! I generally look for folks that have a bit more of a technical background or have worked with products that are a bit more technical in nature. Specifically I’m not looking for them to be technical, but I want them to understand when they need help, and when to turn to a sales engineer or PM rather than struggle through it, or ignore a concept.  Another key component is experience working with large companies, understanding the nature of how a big company is structured and how de ...Read More

ABM is near and dear to my heart as I was in the middle of the tornado that spun up the term ABM during my time at Demandbase. As the PMM there at the time, we not only defined what ABM was, but also had to execute on it as well. Based on what we preached, when building out an ABM based strategy, I started by aligning with our sales team to identify the key accounts we are trying to target. From there, start building specific feature related messages to fit that ABM campaign, and also change the ...Read More

This happens a lot, and a lot of times it’s because PMM wasn’t established when the company started shipping products and became successful without the help of a PMM function.  The key is to really help the PM’s understand the true value of PMM and that we are able to take a lot of the work they actually don’t enjoy doing (writing documentation, building sales enablement and project managing a launch). PMs have enough on their hands working with their engineers and trying to meet tight deadlines ...Read More