AMA: Crossbeam Senior Director Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Go-to-Market Strategy

January 24, 2023 @ 10:00AM PT

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VP of Product Marketing · Zywave

👋 Hi I'm Amanda Groves.. Philly native (Go Flyers!), Pittsburgh transplant (Go Panthers!)

💼 I currently am the VP of Product Marketing at Zywave, an InsurTech company focused on helping carriers and brokers manage, protect, and grow their book of business intelligently.

👀 Topics of interest for me are managing M&A and integrating offerings... AI product innovation/roll out and building high-performance PMM teams.

🤝 Topics I am help with... adopting agile marketing, core PMM/Solution PMM, new product introduction process/tiering and pricing and packaging.

🍦 Favorite ice cream flavor.. mochi!

What is your go to market planning blueprint?

What core elements must it encompass?
Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y
My blueprint usually consists of at minimum completing a product marketing brief that consists of:

feature name

description

value props

use cases

audience

packaging/pricing

how it works

help docs

Couples with tiering calculation (tier 1-4) you can build a scrappy GTM blue print and execute on tactics with key stakeholders across relevant communication channels.
2,761 Views
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What are some cornerstone KPIs that product marketers should use for every Go-To-Market strategy?
Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y
Some KPIs I consider across the PMM remit are:

Core PMM: Platform Adoption, Activation, and Expansion (via product and sales-led motions)

Customer and Lifecycle Marketing: Direct Revenue Attainment + Adoption and Retention

Ecosystem Marketing: Indirect Revenue Attainment + Demand Gen

Competitive Intelligence: Win/loss rate, deal velcity
686 Views
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What are the aspects of operationalizing a Go-To-Market plan that might prove to be most risky?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

The most risky operationalizations in a GTM strategy to me are spray and pray (homogenous) campaigns, broad (not segmented nor sophisticated/suppressed, not segmented (targeted) and not timely (saturated). Basically, if you are not intentional with your outreach that is a huge risk and you'll end up as noise, spam, or worse - blacklisted (and that is a huge risk).

728 Views

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Do you have a framework or process for determining what tactics to use as part of your launch?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

The tried and true 4Ps of marketing is a great framework to inform launch tactics. They involve the following four key elements: Product. The item or service being sold must satisfy a consumer's need or desire. Price. An item should be sold at the right price for consumer expectations, neither too low nor too high. Promotion. The public needs to be informed about the product and its features to understand how it fills their needs or desires. Place. The location where the product can be purchased ...Read More

539 Views

3 requests
How do you identify ideal customer profiles and operationalize them as a part of your GTM strategy?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

Love this question! I also have to call out we love joking about this acronym and affectionately call it "Insane Clown Posse" like the hip hop duo versus the marketing term. BUT for the industry term... I use existing data to inform the define who their ICP IS and who their ICP IS NOT. Good ICPs typically are orgs who: Use your software (active, increasing ARR) Love your software (positive NPS, 8-10) Short sales cycle (depends on industry but typically less than 30 days) Scales with growth (no ...Read More

1,021 Views

2 requests
Can you share some good examples of end-to-end execution for a product launch?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

A good product launch has the following attributes: Data-backed. You've identified the business need, verified use cases, validated addressable market (and revenue outcomes) and mapped to target audiences. Differentiated. You've researched why this launch is unique, compelling, and meaningful against alternative solutions and the status quo. In other words, you've clearly articulated why anyone should care. Targeted. You've identified who this launch serves, at the right journey stage, and at th ...Read More

939 Views

2 requests
What are the main components of your GTM strategy? How do those vary by product type?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

My product marketing team is responsible for bringing products to market so that customers will readily convert. We focus on the bottom of the funnel and expansion revenue. Measurement: We execute on our responsibility by measuring against the 4 As: — Awareness: demand — Activation: usage — Adoption: upsell/expansion — Advocacy: retention/evangelism Focus areas: product launches (full lifecycle e.g., pricing, packaging, positioning, messaging and enablement), competitive & market intellig ...Read More

827 Views

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How do you use market research to inform priority verticals to go after in your go to market efforts?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

We aim to diversify our revenue strategy with dynamic and compelling GTM campaigns. We use market research from internal and external sources to fuel decisions. Internal market research comes from our harvesting our own customer data to identify areas of penetration and greenfield. We couple these insights with analyst insights to invest in programming. When entering a new market, we test small segments and iterate our way to what good looks like (pricing, packaging, positioning).

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How do you decide on the right amount of detail to share in Go-To-Market materials?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

It really depends on the channel and material. An email will vary from a webpage or a positioning document. I would encourage you to think about buyer stage (awareness, activation, adoption, advocacy) and tailor your message and CTA by corresponding outcome. For example, a feature release for paying customers should highlight the benefit statements, how it works, and how to get started. Ideal materials would include: email/in-app post (awareness), tour for how it works, help doc for how to get ...Read More

473 Views

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How do you identify and prioritize the channels for a launch campaign?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

Try applying elements of the “t-shirt sizing” product methodology within your tiering process. For background, t-shirt sizing helps you map effort to impact. Typically, a team assigns points or t-shirt sizes ( i.e., XS to XXL) to represent a task’s relative effort/market impact. This helps illuminate team capacity, scope, impact, and ownership around projects.To parallelize this practice for product marketing, start by consulting your product manager with these standard questions (or tweak to yo ...Read More

827 Views

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How might GTM vary for the first product i.e. at a tech startup?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

GTM could very by motion (sales-led, product-led, marketing led) or packaging (free/paid) or persona (audience). GTM could also vary by time to value (long or short sales cycle) or industry segment (vsb, mid market, enterprise). The bigger the client, the more complex the sales cycle - the longer the deal. However if you're down market, you're likely facing more volatility (churn) and a crowded space (lots of competition). Many factors to consider!

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What would you say are the core elements of a strong, repeatable GTM framework?
Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y
The core elements of strong, repeatable GTM framework are:

Objective: Backed by data (quant) and customer feedback (qual) insights along with market and competitive research and business outcomes

Measureable: Tied to business outcomes (revenue, win rate, deal acceleration, NRR)

Timely: Meaningful to total addressable market (solving an acute need)

Scalable: Templatized by means of documentation, internal processes, training and enablement
474 Views
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What does the Go-to-Market process look like for a global product?

Does it differ vs. more regional launches?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

The big different to me is training, enablement and product localization. Make sure field teams are trained and enabled within geo-targets and materials are localized to support target markets. Ensure security, compliance and privacy regulations are considered given strict GDPR measures that impact marketing programming in Europe.

427 Views

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In case the existing GTM strategy is not working for the product, how can you go about redesigning the new GTM strategy? What should be the approach?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

This is a great question. I think you'd want to first conduct a retrospective with stakeholders to understand what is flawed with current GTM strat. Is it target audience? Should you go up market or down market? Or is it the approach? Sales-led, marketing-led, product-led? Price? Packaging? There are a few experiments you can run to isolate the issue, but upon identification, the best way to redesign would be to test the iteration on a small subset of existing market. Assess outcomes. Then broad ...Read More

477 Views

1 request
How do you decide when a product launch has ended in order to determine the success of the 'launch'?

Product is being iterated all the time, so where exactly do you consider to be the end of a product launch period.
Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y
There are a few key ways you can decide to end a launch and claim success:

Attach rate met (hit utilization goal)

Next feature iteration deployed (next enhancement is released to improve/expand on original launch)

Upsell/expansion rev metrics met

I typically like to use attach rate as my north star metric as it's clear and shared with the product team. It also has many influencers making it more attinable overtime.
348 Views
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Could you walk us through your most successful product or feature launch?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

My most successful launch to date was with a partner (ecosytem is everything!). It was successful because we proactively identified a rolling list of campaign activites and invested in high-quality promotional materials including co-branded explainer videos, gifs, and landing pages. The campaign was a rolling sequence of integrated activities that ran over an entire quarter. It resulted in increased product utilization, press coverage (earned media), expansion revenue, high-quality traffic and m ...Read More

1,334 Views

1 request
What metrics do you look at to say that you’ve achieved product-market fit for a totally new product?
Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y
This is a great question and totally depends on company stage. But for really early companies like seed stage or A-B, I think WAUs can be a solid metric. I also have fallen quite fond of superhuman's PMF survey where they:

"How disappointed would you feel if you could no longer use [x software]?

Possible choices:

very

somewhat

not disappointed

If your org gets on average 40% of survey responses are VERY dissapointed to no longer have your software - that my friends, is product market fit!
492 Views
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How do you treat minor releases and enhancements in your GTM process?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

These are typically small launches with functionality that maintains market position, parity, and performance. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - cs/sales outreach template, targeted email announcement, newsletter, help docs update. For small piel updates, you can think of these as your soft/quiet launches that don’t require broad messaging/awareness. (Pixel changes). Communicaiton channels should includ ...Read More

1,435 Views

1 request
When you are joining an organisation that never had product marketing before and are struggling with all areas of Product Marketing (Position, Persona, Messaging, Sales enablement etc) what should be prioritised first?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

Persona! If you're able to research your persona and develop their user cases, value drivers, motivations and goals - the rest (positioning, messaging and sales enablement) will follow. Customers are the ultimate aligner, prioritize actively listening to them, join insight sessions and fuel their voice within your programs.

1,423 Views

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What are the most important sales enablement activities product marketers should be doing?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

Get positioning reps in early with your champion sellers. I like to create small collaborative pods with sales team members to test new positioning and messaging. I gather their feedback, weave their voice into my enablement materials - and then they train their team on the corresponding messaging so we GTM stronger and consistently.

1,300 Views

1 request
How do you obtain a solid understanding of how Sales sells your product?

Marketing seems to have limited access to Sales and is not invited to sales calls/meetings. How can we possibly develop B2B marketing strategy without this insight? What am I missing?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

Do you have access to a listening tool like chorus or gong? I find when we can't be in the room, listening to how sellers pitch after calls have concluded helps us gain insight on how to iterate or improve on strategy. Another option would be to peruse customer success/support tickets to identify gaps in perceived value. I would also encourage you to ask to join calls as a ride-along or silent observer!

1,272 Views

1 request
How do you keep up with competition and how do you bring insights into your strategy?

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

We have operationalized how we glean market and competitive insights as a team. From internal feedback loops, to social listening apps, to CABs, and Salesforce reports - there's a steady stream of competitve insights piped into PMM regularly to inform our programs. Howeever with knowledge comes power. Remember to build for the people who chose you (your customers) and use competitive info to your advantage (positioning and sales enablement).

1,186 Views

1 request
Once you have a go to market strategy in place, how do you "convince" everyone on the marketing team, and get the ball rolling around the strategy you've built?

I'm looking for functional/tactical tips please.

Amanda Groves

Zywave VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Crossbeam, 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • 3y

I typically back up departmental asks with customer sentiment (qual) and data (quant). This makes it easier to rally team members around our why and cultivate influence towards a new GTM initiative. For example, recently we decided to issue a new survey that required cross-functional and leadership support. We created a charter for the initiative and documented why the program was necessary, then built a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) to clearly outline responsibilities amo ...Read More

367 Views

1 request

AMA: Crossbeam Senior Director Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Go-to-Market Strategy

View AMA Answers

What is your go to market planning blueprint?

What are some cornerstone KPIs that product marketers should use for every Go-To-Market strategy?

What are the aspects of operationalizing a Go-To-Market plan that might prove to be most risky?

Do you have a framework or process for determining what tactics to use as part of your launch?

How do you identify ideal customer profiles and operationalize them as a part of your GTM strategy?

Can you share some good examples of end-to-end execution for a product launch?

What are the main components of your GTM strategy? How do those vary by product type?

How do you use market research to inform priority verticals to go after in your go to market efforts?

How do you decide on the right amount of detail to share in Go-To-Market materials?

How do you identify and prioritize the channels for a launch campaign?

How might GTM vary for the first product i.e. at a tech startup?

What would you say are the core elements of a strong, repeatable GTM framework?

What does the Go-to-Market process look like for a global product?

In case the existing GTM strategy is not working for the product, how can you go about redesigning the new GTM strategy? What should be the approach?

How do you decide when a product launch has ended in order to determine the success of the 'launch'?

Could you walk us through your most successful product or feature launch?

What metrics do you look at to say that you’ve achieved product-market fit for a totally new product?

How do you treat minor releases and enhancements in your GTM process?

When you are joining an organisation that never had product marketing before and are struggling with all areas of Product Marketing (Position, Persona, Messaging, Sales enablement etc) what should be prioritised first?

What are the most important sales enablement activities product marketers should be doing?

How do you obtain a solid understanding of how Sales sells your product?

How do you keep up with competition and how do you bring insights into your strategy?

Once you have a go to market strategy in place, how do you "convince" everyone on the marketing team, and get the ball rolling around the strategy you've built?