AMA: Crossbeam Senior Director Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Building a Product Marketing Team

Why product marketing? - Tells me their motivations. If they have a drive to serve customers and a discipline for storytelling, it'll shine through. If not, I'll know it's not a good fit. How do you define and measure success of product marketing? - It's important to suss out if your philosophical belief/metrics in PMM aligns with your candidates' view. They can often be different, and in some cases that's okay! But this question is a great level-setter to establish domain expertise, perspective ...Read More

PMM with Sales: I ask for links to chorus/gong calls to listen to customer's positioning. We tackle enterprise needs on-going and jam on enablement materials + content market fit. I also pitch new concepts/messaging to sales for reaction and ask for on-going market feedback on concepts/campaigns. Success is measured by revenue attainment but more specifically, how PMM can influence closed/won rate - deal velocity - pipe gen - upsell/expansion and AVC. Deliverables: pitch decks, one-pagers, enabl ...Read More

Great question, I look at the data to identify areas of red and strategize against those ebbs and flows overtime. It's easy to get excited by ideas, but the data we have is the most tangible means of assessing performance/needs. Beyond data assessment, I have a regular sync with front line teams to suss out what's working, their needs, and also tour competitive playing field to ensure our bases are covered. These exercises ensure I'm approaching PMM execution and priorization with an informed le ...Read More

It depends on seniority level of hire, but typically I look for experience in a customer-centric role: marketing or customer success in SaaS (B2B a plus). Key attributes for me are: detail oriented/technical prowess, storytelling/written abilities, empathy, collaborative, curious, systems mindset and high level of owernship/autonomy.  You can suss out traits like these by choosing a short take home assignment upfront as a screening assessment. Ask the candidate to "teach you something" (anything ...Read More

I stay aligned with my leadership by building in public. I share our on-going updates on Slack to ensure teams know what's on our plate, along with performance stats and learnigns. I also utilize all hands and MBRs to share what's working, what's not, and plans for executing against goals. Agility comes from staying centered on the north stars. As long as I'm working on the business priorities, I'm able to take on tasks that help us perform against goals (or remove what isn't) to stay focused, a ...Read More

We have an established cadence of enablement with our internal teams where we bundle features/collateral into market themes. When rolling out a new feature, we organize content into two buckets: technical (CS) and value story (sales). For the value story elements: we create "how to sell" slides and a launch packet that includes case studies, demo overview videos, and other relevant material for the sales cycle. We then quiz the remote sales team on their learnings (via Kahoot!) to keep folks acc ...Read More

Notion. Notion. Notion. We use Notion for everything and build product and product marketing operating systems on Notion. My VP of Product and myself have built databases that automatically alert us as items move across the product development lifecycle. This triggers cues for PMM when we need to lean into certain projects (once they've hit the development stage v. scoping for example). Beyond Notion, I've established a formal tiering process for new features that involves a calculator and produ ...Read More

The biggest challege (for me) is certainly managing alignment across product and product marketing. As teams grow and scale broadens, working in a distributed manner across the globe makes it hard to stay in touch/row in the same direction. The best way I've found to influence the global product marketing strategy is to make time (early mornings/late evenings) for 1:1s with your global peers. During this time, ensure you have tangible assets for them to review (related to your strategy/philosoph ...Read More

It definitely depends on the company stage/goals. So I start there - get alignment from exec leadership on what the company North Stars are and begin building a crawl, walk, run strategy to cover departmental growth. In parallel to strategic alignment with leadership/executive team - you must, I stress MUST, complete listening tours. Meet with your customers Meet with your prospects Meet with your sales team Meet with your customer success team Meet with your product team Listen to how they talk ...Read More

Protect your calendar! Set aside Do Not Disturb (DND) time for strategic thinking and honor that time. Try to establish a "no meeting" day at your business where you have dedicated space to GSD and think strategically. Set the expectation that if you accept a meeting, there must be a clear agenda along with expected outcomes for your attendance. That helps to narrow down how to spend time so you can prioritize the most valuable/impactful sessions. I also run a lot so that helps to create space f ...Read More

Firstly, I'm always happy to be a resource on this subject - just ping me on LinkedIn, this is quite a meaty ask/task. I would suggest splitting product coverage between the two of you, and contract out (via consultants) anything where you need additional coverage for long-term projects i.e., partner marketing, voice of the customer work. The growing cost of an external vendor can help make the case (sooner rather than later) for internal dedicated resources.  In terms of hierachy of product pri ...Read More

Since rev gen/attainment is our north star, we prioritize efforts based on TAM per region. There are also localization dependencies for a global SaaS strategy, so we work with security and legal to ensure our product is servicable to global solutions before prioritizing market entry/SoW takeover. Fortunately, many of the assets we create in the US market can be repurposed in a global environment, we just depend on boots on the ground resources to reorient for common use cases/provide market feed ...Read More

I do not consider PMM accountable for pipeline, no. We certainly influence overarching business performance (everyone on staff does whether directly or indirectly) but to me: marketing (traditional demand gen/content) builds the pipeline along with an outbound motion from sales. From there, PMM can influence velocity of customer journey stages via nurture campaigns, but ultimately sales/revops is responsible for actively forecasting, weighting, and reporting on pipeline. Because I am not account ...Read More

Great question. TL;DR: Put in the time up front to know what you want in the role, set your expectations for the hiring team, and establish what you could compromise on along with the non-negotiables. Do you have a 70-80% of your hit rate on non-negotiables? That's a solid candidate right there, lean into that. Also know that it's better to wait for the right hire v. feel pressured to hire fast because of the "labor market". Everything is fluid, and the cost of a bad hire is far worse (up to 30% ...Read More

I tend to coalesce early-ish stage PMM teams by product pillar/functionality. For example, if you group certain features into capabilities, split roadmap ownership betwee you and your PMM. Bucket those product capabilities and divide and conquer (full PMM GTM lifecycle responsibilities). Once you've achieved product market fit, you can consider organizing the team by relevant personas and begin to hire specializations like: core PMM, customer marketing, lifecycle marketing, competitive intel, et ...Read More