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

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, messaging, enablement, sales tools, demos, and other [mostly] bottom-funnel content. The most valuable thing a TPMM can do is dig deep into a competitor product, extend a demo environment for a new use case, write a white paper on model differentiation—all activities requiring more than topical search to make a meaningful difference to technical buyers. On that note, when hiring TPMMs I so often hear, “but I can learn xyz.” That might be true, to a point. But context is much harder to collect on a short time horizon. The question becomes, how much effort will it take you to learn not just a new technology, but enough about it to see something our sales engineers can’t—enough to form an opinion about it—enough to produce something that teaches our audience something. My most effective TPMMs were practitioners, architects, product managers, and sales engineers first.

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 effectiveness of your positioning * Research tools like survey monkey or Wynter * Spreadsheets (not kidding—the best pmms are deeply analytical and quantitative, but you often don’t need more than some SFEC exports and few well constructed pivot tables to start to make sense of things)

Leaving TPMM I most often see folks move into: * Head of Product Marketing * Head of Solution Marketing * VP Marketing * VP Product Coming into TPMM, I most often see folks coming from: * Sales engineering * Solutions architecture * Product management * Customer engineering/support * Practitioner (formerly in the role you’re selling to— engineer, data scientist, infra specialist, etc)

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 who are deep into bake-offs and evaluations with other companies will read a “what is an internal developer portal” blog on our website. By focusing on marketing that educates (not just content but events, roundtables, webinars, etc) you’ll cover all points in the funnel as well as audience maturity—beginner developers who want to skill up and use your brand as a trusted guide, an advanced buyer who wants to make sure they’re staying ahead of the latest definitions, and your own business by building organic search and brand awareness.

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) support and the TPMM focusing on SE (Sales Engineer) enablement.

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 exec. Devs want to know what you’re doing, and how it’s different from what they already have. Execs want to know why it’s worth 6 figures. I use Wynter for message testing, but you could also send quick free Google form surveys to new buyers asking what resonated with them!

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 butter and jelly sandwich without the load of dishes.” (Uncrustables) Technical example: “the no-code audience builder.” (Census). This sentence doesn’t need to be your tag line, but it’s a useful tool in guiding how you keep your business value anchored in reality, and how you keep your technical value from losing sight of “so what”

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. Host meetups, small-scale forums with folks in the same industry, or facilitate mentorship pairings. Finally, I would experiment with different mediums but eventually commit to picking your pony. Don’t waste time on your blog if it’s not working for you, don’t do videos if no one is watching. Don’t host webinars if signups suck. Go all in on that podcast if you get traction.

This is very dependent on the solution you’ll be selling. But I’ll share that my “screener” question for my last TPMM hire was, “When was the last time you did anything on the command line, and why?” That question tends to reveal whether the candidate has the chops and (and interest!) in manipulating things at a foundational level—at bending systems to their will (ok that’s a bit dramatic) to build the right solution, not just the convenient one.

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 small, and has a few equally weighted competitors, your top line should spend more time focusing on convincing the buyer why this way of doing work even matters. You’re still selling the problem, not the solution. In this situation I can see why your team might want a slightly more in depth differentiation pitch, when a prospect gets past the “why” stage to the “how.”