AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Technical Product Marketing

I’ve only sold in B2B tech, so speaking from that POV I would say hard skills should include The tools your marketing peers use—Marketo, Demandbase, 6Sense, etc, particularly those used for lead enrichment since that’s where the fruits of your ICP analysis bloom, and campaign orchestration and tracking tools since that’s how your content and messaging reaches your target audience. the tools your sales team uses (beyond the above)—Salesforce, Outreach, Gong since that’s how you’ll measure effecti ...Read More

I think it’s important to note that when selling to technical audiences, ALL product marketers need to be technical. Insofar as all need to be able to confidently demo their product, understand their audience’s jobs/pains/gains, and alternatives. That’s pretty tough to do if you don’t understand core frameworks and relevant technologies. Beyond that, a TPMM is distinguished by what they focus on—which in my opinion is deep research followed by the ability to turn that research into positioning, ...Read More

You’ll need direct audience message testing to really nail this. We all have a habit of overloading our value statements, or trying to write for too many audiences at once. But before that, you’ll want to decide who your message is for. Is it for your executive buyer (a CTO/CIO/VPE)? Or is it for the developer? There’s overlap here of course, but a good rule of thumb is that your “how” needs to be incredibly obvious if the dev is your target audience, whereas “why” needs to take the lead for the ...Read More

I think a good exercise for figuring out how to balance the technical value and business value is to force yourself to write a single sentence with both your “why”—your business value—and your “how”—your unique approach that either creates value they thought was unattainable, or eliminates pain they thought was unavoidable. This is also useful for anchoring/orientation. Nothing else about your messaging matters if they don’t know what you’re trying to solve. Non-technical example: “The peanut bu ...Read More

I think this is one of those situations where we’ve been led to believe there’s a difference between marketing that’s valuable for developers and marketing that valuable to the business. “What is..” or “how do you..” or “what’s the difference between..” content still works for SEO because even advanced buyers appreciate gut checks. They want to know what they believe is still in line with what market leading companies believe. We see time and time again that even our most sophisticated prospects ...Read More

It’s about to play a much bigger role! I’ve just hired a TPMM, who will now share enablement with my GTM-focused PMM. There can be nuance and overlap and they’ll support eachother fully…but an easy split is having the GTM person focus on conversion rates between early funnel stages (prior to demo) and the TPMM focus on conversion rates in mid-stages of the funnel (demo through POV). With these North Star metrics, we end up seeing a natural split between the GTM PMM focusing more on AE (sales rep ...Read More

Anything that lets you provide tangible value for free. Your usual that still performs well: Stat-heavy industry/peer research reports Checklists Calculators A few different ideas: “MVP” generators (I.e. the middle ground between your product and doing everything manually. Something to save them time but show them that they’d still rather have the Ferrari). Free courses with certificates or sponsored certifications Peer connections—you have the contact info for thousands of technical experts. Ho ...Read More

That’s a good question and you might be right. I’m sure it depends on how competitive your space is. If users best understand what you do by anchoring to the market leader, e.g. “salesforce without the bad UI” then yes your standard pitch probably has differentiation baked in. Or if your market is very well established and extremely crowded with no clear leader, your top line positioning will also require differentiation “The only BI tool that unites your whole team.” But if your market is still ...Read More