AMA: Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing, Sahil Sethi on Product Marketing Soft Skills

Four career paths Grow as a PMM. From Individual contributor to manager to director to VP, here you keep growing as you keep honing your PMM craft but eventually graduate from leading the work to leading initiatives to leading a function Grow as a marketer- Same as PMM growth path but in the broader disclipline of marketing. Lots of PMMs transition to roles in campaigns, demand-gen, brand, customer marketing or other fasctinating aspects of marketing. At a leadership level, a fair amount of B2B ...Read More

There are very few "entry level PMM" roles. Most PMM roles require some experience, especially with the amount of strategy understanding + influence that PMMs do My tip for acquiring those skills Be an amazing marketer - A lot of general marketing skills (Writing, content, planning, project management, digital marketing, campaigns, customer insights etc.) are valuable PMM skills. Strong marketers make strong PMMs. Pick a marketing lane as your first job and crush it Be an amazing product manager ...Read More

Engagement model and teams Bring Sales/CS (end user of plays), Enablement (Orchestrator), Marketing (who provide air cover) and Product (who build the product) in the same room Align on the plays we need to build (by product, competitor, solution, industry, use cases). Align on the ones we don't want to prioritize Bring leadership to sign-off The best engagement model is collaborative, transparent, gives everyone equal voice, explains trade-offs well Operating norms Lock on plays Align the DDACI ...Read More

Don't think of "stakeholder convincing" as a negotiation. Think of it as influence. Here are my influence tips as a PMM Bring data - Most orgs don't operate on data. If you back up your ideas (launch, campaign, messaging, enablement) with data, you already have an edge Bring opinions (Loudly voiced, loosely held) - One of my favorite influence tactic is to say "Here's my opinion. But my opinions are loudly voiced, loosely held". It demonstrates confidence and prescriptiveness. It also demonstrat ...Read More

Influence, Influence, Influence Influence product strategy - Customer insights, competitive intel, product requirements, Product requirement docs, Strategy memos. All these are tools to help influence product strategy and hence showcase your contribution. I've seen strong PMM teams successfully influencing product strategy using all of these tools. In my own personal instance, I once lobbied for a feature and wrote an entire requirement doc which ended up being shipped a few months later as its ...Read More

So many strategies to differentiate product. Pick from one, two, or all of the below. Most brands find multiple vectors of differentiation Differentiate on features - Features and capabilities, point solution vs. platform, scale, automation, extensibility , data and platform insights, Certifications and Compliance, Differentiate on How it works - Easy to buy/deploy/maintain/use, Low TCO, High ROI ,fewer professional services Differentiate on Support/Services/Customer experience - Better support, ...Read More