AMA: Fivetran VP of Product Marketing, Catlyn Origitano on Messaging

At my previous company, Sojern, we had this very problem! We wanted to translate all of our sales decks and materials but every time we tried we found that it took more effort, time, and money than it seemed to be worth - that is, the translations would always come back and be considered poor by the folks who would use them. So, we did a few things to make revamp our messaging and it had to start at the foundation. I explained to our VP of Sales - garbage in, garbage out. The first thing we did was sit with folks of the major languages we were going to translate and create a glossary of industry terms and their translations. We found that this was the area that was the hardest for our translators since they were such niche terms. AND we found out that there was disagreement within in our team on what the correct translated term should be. So getting their agreement early on with these glossaries, meant we would be better set up for success. We then went through our pitch deck itself and started to simplify as much as possible. There's some great text books out there about simplified English & selecting English words that work better for translation. So with that in hand, I went through everything to ensure it was as straightforward as possible. We also employed a new translation technology that used 'translation memories.' In theory, anything that we had translated before, it would lock in and reuse that phrase over and over again. This ensured we were consistent with our terms and saved on our translation costs (as they didn't need to be translated). Then it was more than just translation - it is ensuring your examples are relevant to the region as well as the photos. 

Most of our PMMs are in Pods - where a PM and PMM focus on a certain area of the business. Each pod shares a North Star Metric - most of which are revenue based and come down from our overall business goals. While of course we aren't 100% responsible for that goal - that is, sales has to sell it! - it helps us stay focused and measure our impact. For folks that don't have a specific revenue goal, primarily because it might be hard to measure or change quarter to quarter, we still have North Star Metrics - it might just be for that quarter. For example, we pick a key campaign and make the outcome of that campaign our North Star Metric - again because it ladders up to some bigger company goal. We then every quarter have a roadmap and retro review. At the retro, we go through every campaign that the PMMs have had a heavy hand in (e.g., built the materials, presented at the webinar, etc) and pull toghether our impact on revenue across events, content, and demand generation. Again, we don't take full credit as other folks had to set up the campaigns and execute - but it is helpful for us to point to the revenue we influenced. We have a great analytics team and self-service analytics so we can build our own dashboards in Looker to report out. 

Generally speaking, the way we've gone about it at Fivetran is with a few key gates. First, we have a messaging doc template that we use. It contains things like business pain points, personas, messaging in 10 words, 25 words, glossary of terms, etc. This is usually developed with the lead PM on the group. We listen to customer calls or do our own to better understand why customers want the thing we are building or bringing to market. If it is a bigger launch, we've vetted our messaging with analysts like Gartner before we go to market - and if it is with a partner, we've vetted it with their internal teams too. I think find it very helpful to take that longer doc and put it in a single one sheet or a short pitch deck. This helps ensure that what we have translates. We provide these materials for our teams when something is in private preview and beta and have a slack channel to get feedback on how the pitch went - and we try to sit in or listen to it. We use that feedback loop to edit it again. Once something is out, we use a lot of different tools to get a sense of how things are going. For example, when we first did a bit of our pricing change, we saw on our twitter some questions and negative feedback. We adjusted our messaging to be more direct and less fluffy, and when we went bigger with the pricing launch, there was no twitter threads about it. A few weeks later, folks started talking about how easier the pricing was! 

We do - but we are also iterating here as we speak! In the past, I have reached out to some customers and folks I know in the industry to sit down and do some quick validation on messaing. For example, when we launched our new website and put up our first billboards, we had a good sense of what we wanted to say but wanted to confirm that the direction we were going would resonate. So we schedulded some quick meetings and got raw feedback on some key phrases. We've done the same with changes to our pricing page. Now this is of course manual and only with a few folks so it isn't validation at scale. That is what we are looking to move to next. We are currently creating a process that will have us partner with Demand Gen to run paid ads testing out some of our messaging around big products and campaigns earlier on in our development process. We are hopeful that will give us more direction too!

At Fivetran, product marketing owns it. One of the main reasons is because our buyers and users are very technical folks who are turned off by fluffy marketing. As a result, our messaging must be very straight forward, factual, and concise. So it makes sense for that to originate with our Product Marketing team who knows the Product well and are constantly in communication with customers. We are only now developing more of our brand messaging - and even then Product Marketing is heavily involved to ensure we don't over promise or stray too far from what customers say about us. On a more granular level, across a PMM team, I don't believe there is one way to divy up messaging. We developed core messaging around our product itself and what customers - regardless of use case or feature - love about us. If we all align on that, then any additional messaging we create should ladder back up or supplement that. For example, one of our pillars for our messaging is that we are easy to use. This comes across in discussions of our automation, easy set up, etc. But, then, when we were bringing a new product to marketing - transformations - and we thought about our messaging there we knew it had to funnel up to ease of use. So a lot of our messaging there is about how transformations in particular is easy to use. All of that to say, my advice would be for you two to align on the key messaging and then you can better divide and conquer your particular areas, use cases, or products. 

At Fivetran, we actually have a few different Product Marketing teams in order to be able to do both core product messaging as well as more portfolio messaging. At Fivetran, folks find us / use us for particular analytic challenges - like Marketing Analytics, Finance Analytics, Sales Analytics, etc. As a result, we have pods dedicated to each of these areas. The core of the pod is a PMM and a PM - and they are mapped to the data sources associated with each use case (e.g., Marketing Analytics pod owns our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. data sources). The pods also have other members - a Solution Architect, a Sales Engineer, and a CSM. These folks help with additional activities around enablement, or bugs when we are moving connectors (our name for sources) through our development process. As a pod, they share a north star metric around growth of customers using their connectors as well as usage of those connectors month over month. We treat them like mini GMs of their use case and they have to report out monthly as to their growth numbers, where we churned, where we grew, and why. All of this goes to demonstrate how closely our PMMs are to their use cases - this makes developing messaging for their areas a lot easier. They are deeply emmersed in their area of business - they work hand in hand with their PM on every new development and are constantly talking to customers, prospects, and the industry. This laser focus helps them continually develop and redevelop their messaging. The way it is different is that it is very much focused on particular pain points for that use case. As an example, our core product messaging highlights that we have hundreds of pre-built fully managed connectors. For our Marketing Analytics use case, all that messaging highlights the number of Marketing connectors - over 50 - as well as the ability to bring in complementary data to build more robust reporting - like Salesforce data. Or that Marketing teams often change tools - and for someone who is building custom pipelines, that can be a lot of wasted effort. But we've got hundreds of fully managed connectors, so as soon as your marketing team changes tools, we've got you covered. 

Start with the facts. Then add in what actual customers or prospects have said. Or if you don't have that yet - a respected third party - like a Gartner. And only then try to make it clever. I think too often marketing folks start with the clever and work backwards - but especially developers, they want to know it works, they want to get into the weeds right away, and they will be put off or blow past any overly clever, overly fluffy marketing. 

We use Workramp for formal trainings - so we can see with that tool completion rates and if there are quizzes or assesments, how folks did on those. We have more informal training sessions called Scoops for our sales / csm team and then a Technical Scoop for our technical teams. We also hold office hours for newer, more technical product or feature releases. The overall questions and engagement - while more qualitative - help us assess how well enablement is going there.

Our PMM intern - who is now a full-time Associate PMM - has this exact background! And we will be hiring another such intern in a month or so! :) If you don't have the PMM experience per se, try to do activities associated with PMM work - like creating sales enablement, doing customer interviews, creating sales materials. At a smaller company, many marketing folks have to do it all - so you can start at a place like that and lean into projects that are more PMM-y.

Absolutely! I have been hearing more and more PMMs being the first hire - or leading the team. Our own CMO is a former PMM. I think a lot of it has to do with the industry - when you talk to a technical buyer, having a PMM as your first hire can really help accelerate your ability to find the right messaging, pitch, website copy, and more. 

Ultimately, we make both kinds of information available - or at least we try to! So for example, our website has a lot of high level messaging about our secruity capabilities, for example. But we also have links to our security whitepaper - which most security teams need to read as part of the procurement process. So we try to make it as much as possible a choose your own adventure - that is easy for them to find what they need. If they want to go deep, we don't hide that information and our Documentation team does an incredible job here. 

200%. The way that, when necessary, I defend messaging is with customer feedback and validation. For example, with our website copy and billboard - I got some push back that it wouldn't really resonate. So I scheduled some sessions with customers to get their feedback. With that in hand, it was a lot easier to defend my positioning - since what the others had was just a feeling that it wasn't right, while I had names and quotes about why it was. But ultimately, I, and the rest of the team, tries to adopt a test and learn mentality. So we try not to over invest mentally or emotionally in my messaging. Let's try it out, see how it goes, and be open to change quickly. That attitude makes 'defending' less likely to be necessary or happen.

If it is a new product or feature, we use promotions to get customers to adopt asap. The other tactic we look to weave throughout our messaging is the promise of what their workloads could look like if they adopted this new system, tool, feature, etc. If we make it about them, about what they could have or achieve - as opposed to just what their larger business can have - we have found it resonates better and creates a greater sense of urgency. 

We work with our PM team to create a quarterly roadmap. This helps us align with them on the major releases that are happening, discovery work we need to do, and align on key activities to influence growth. We also then do a big marketing team-wide planning every quarter to ensure that, for example, those big product releases are also on Content & Demand Generation's calendar. We then have a ticketing system where folks can input requests. We review these on a bi-weekly basis to see if someone has bandwidth to support. 

I am a project manager at heart. So I push the team to be the same. We have our roadmaps which we present and then turn into tickets for overall tracking. We also have a monthly reivew on areas of the business - so this let's us check in on how things are going and what is getting done. For messaging and materials in particular, we do a quarterly review of our materials. We try and make it fun - we listen to different music, everyone picks a song, and we go through and update and verify our materials. Building in those mechanisms are important so that they actually happen!

In-app copy does fit with Product Marketing - and Product! So technically, our PM team owns the in-product experience but PMM has full access to the tool. We have a slack channel for all in-app messaging and anyone who wants to do one posts in there following a format that says the purpose, how long it will run, to whom it will be shown, and a preview. Folks can ask questions, offer suggestions, and then we give the approval to set live. The results of these go into our quarterly retros. If it is on our website itself - we use a Drift bot. That mostly lives with our Demand Gen team but we have lots of access and support there - we are responsible for a lot of the copy on key, technical pages and again, we monitor that on a quarterly basis and report out. 

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates! We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing.