AMA: CrowdStrike Director, Product Marketing, Brandon Benke on Product Launches

The most common pitfalls I've seen derail product launches come down to two things: skipping internal enablement and measuring activity instead of outcomes. On internal enablement: launching to the market before you've launched internally is one of the most costly mistakes I've made. If the internal stakeholder teams cannot articulate the value prop of what is being launched then external messaging does not matter. Sellers especially, are the voice of the product to the custom If your sellers an ...Read More

These three terms get used interchangeably a lot, but they’re actually pretty distinct. I have seen a lot of confusion around and not getting them down can break down launch execution. Specifically, PMM plays a huge part in developing and executing all three, even if they don’t own the delivery channels. Product enablement is the foundation and is about making sure your entire organization understands what the product is and what outcomes customers should expect. This doesn’t apply only to sales ...Read More

Launch tiering is one of the more challenging and honestly political parts of the PMM role, especially when you're supporting a single product area inside a larger organization. Without a shared framework, every team thinks their feature is the most important thing launching that quarter. And sometimes they're right, but when they're not, things get messy. The way I've approached this is by getting stakeholder alignment on a tiering framework early, before the launch plan is built. That way the ...Read More

AI capabilities can feel abstract to buyers, but this isn't a new problem for PMMs. Every major technology shift has required us to take something technically complex and make it relevant to the people we're selling to. The playbook doesn't change much. The key is rooting your value proposition in outcomes and pain points your personas already care about. Buyers aren't looking for a breakdown of how the technology works. They're looking for the signal in the noise, and that signal is almost alwa ...Read More

AI buzzword fatigue is real. PMMs feel it more than most because we're the ones closest to translating new capabilities into market-facing language. When every vendor is leading with "AI-powered", etc, those phrases stop meaning anything to the buyers we're trying to reach. But here's how I think about it: the fundamentals of great messaging don't change just because the technology does. And if you're being rigorous about those fundamentals, buzzwords either earn their place or they fall away on ...Read More