AMA: Gainsight Former Director, Product Marketing, Priyanka Srinivasan on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

I think there could be a number of career paths for PMM. In our team, we see everything from Sales (i.e, former AE), to Product Manager, to content marketer to solutions consultant. I think each of these has their ‘edge’ - for example, coming from sales you have a really unique perspective having had to actually sell and deliver messaging on the front lines. An SC has a more technical perspective and they’re a great fit for a technical PMM role. I personally came from a combination of management ...Read More

The way I think about the ‘pillars’ of B2B tech marketing a CMO needs to be familiar with are as follows: Product Marketing: e.g, go-to-market strategy, product positioning & messaging, competitive intel, sales enablement, analyst relations, etc Demand Gen: Includes sub-pillars of Performance marketing (e.g., paid media, website, seo, nurture, etc) Field marketing (e.g., curated experiences, trade shows, etc) Customer marketing (e.g., customer stories, videos, references)  Content marketing ...Read More

I love this question. I’ll step away from PMM for a minute and say - regardless of what function you’re in at a company, you should be championing yourself and your team constantly. People who ‘get ahead’ in business not only create value, they make sure others know that they create value. What makes PMM hard is that you don’t own a number -- there’s no clear attribution. You can’t say “at the end of Q2 we grew revenue by X% YoY” in the way a sales or DG team can. So you need to constantly be ta ...Read More

Taking my PMM hat off again and putting on a general career development one. I’ve typically approached promotion conversations by first asking, several quarters before I hope to be promoted: “What do I need to demonstrate in order to move to the next level?”It’s a really important question because it gives your manager some work that they frankly should be doing anyway - laying out a career path for you along with the (clear) markers you need to hit them. Then I’d probably say something to the e ...Read More

The first thing you have to ask is - is there room for a director or team lead at my company in product marketing? My CEO once said there are basically two ways you can start managing a team: The company is growing (in headcount) and some of that can get allocated to you   If the company isn’t growing in headcount, there’s a reorg that happens where you’re given more scope / resources / headcount It’s worth noting that on (1) you need to be able to make a good case for why you should get some of ...Read More

In general, if you’re early in your career and trying to learn the nuts and bolts of marketing, I’d go for a startup only if you can work for someone who has more experience / has done it before. I’ve seen a lot of early career folks go to startups where the people above them are just as clueless about best-in-class marketing as they are. That’s not going to be a valuable experience for you.However, if you can find a small company where you’re working under someone who has a lot of experience, i ...Read More

You might considering pitching yourself for a technical PMM role - or a technical associate PMM. My guess is you have a lot of experience with the more technical aspects of the product (and you’re certainly not afraid of it!) and, depending on the company, there is often a need for a technical product marketer on the team to build out materials on things like platform architecture, integrations, security, etc. In general my advice is - find your angle in what you have already. You have an intere ...Read More