AMA: HackerOne Former Vice President Product Marketing, April Rassa on Stakeholder Management

Traditional B2B marketing is often done through broad-reaching campaigns. Most marketers try to get their word out—as far and as wide as possible—by leveraging different marketing channels: owned, earned, and paid. The objective is to cast a wide net and put out as much content as possible, in order to act as a marketing magnet and draw a large number of leads into your funnel. On the other hand, account-based marketing (ABM) is in many ways the exact opposite. It’s about getting all your resources— your program dollars AND your people (including your sales and marketing teams)—working together in a coordinated way to pursue and convert very specific accounts. PMM works with Demand to devise the ABM strategy which includes identifying the ICP (ideal customer profile, personas, key market segments, right content, integrate into multi-channel strategy, and measure/optimize). While this is fairly obvious, you can’t do full-blown account-based marketing if you don’t even know what accounts you’re targeting. To get this right, you need to work in close conjunction with sales. ABM will not work if sales isn’t on board, since it requires both marketing and sales to focus their resources on the defined set of target accounts.

Sales enablement is about people and technology, and strategically aligning them both behind a common goal: sales successes. It helps organizations streamline sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with better, more relevant sales content and equipping sales teams with the tools they need to be more informed and productive sellers. When executed properly, sales enablement has a measured impact on time spent selling, win rates, and deal size. But before we can enable sales on how best to approach a given market segment, we need to develop our sales strategy. A sound sales strategy documents a plan for positioning and selling your product or service to qualified buyers in a way that differentiates your solution from your competitors. Sales strategies are meant to provide clear objectives and guidance to your sales organization. They typically include key information like growth goals, KPIs, buyer personas, sales processes, team structure, competitive analysis, product positioning, and specific selling methodologies.

Yes! When approaching stakeholder management, it's key to accurately identify who your stakeholders are to cultivate and nurture strong relationships successfully. You'll want to fully understand the unique points of view and needs of your stakeholders. Like any solid relationship, it requires ongoing strategic engagement and effort. You’ll need to determine the best way to involve and communicate with each of your stakeholders to earn their buy-in and support. One way to do this is to create a stakeholder profile that asks three questions: What motivates them? How does this project align with their priorities? Do they have a negative view of the project? Once you have a clear idea of who your stakeholders are and what each one needs, the next step is to develop a communication strategy to guide engagement throughout the process.

PMMs are experts on the “who” (i.e. target personas) and “why” (messaging for these personas) while Campaign is the expert on the “how” (channels/tactics to reach these personas). If the two teams take a collaborative approach on everything from brainstorming campaign themes to execution and performance tracking, it usually leads to great outcomes and a shared purpose. Our PMM team works very closely with our Growth/Campaign teams in terms of quarterly planning including content strategy, thematic product announcements, events/webinars (submission of key tracks that require a unique POV), etc. PMM leans in on the messaging and helps brainstorm on key POVs related to either a key theme we have defined for the quarter or a product announcement. 

Product marketing and sales enablement teams share an ultimate goal: to help sales teams sell more. Each team has an important role in driving revenue. Product Marketing focuses on developing content assets for the sales team to use throughout the buyer journey, and Sales Enablement ensures reps know how and when to use that content to deliver great buyer experiences and close more deals. Product Marketing and Sales Enablement are most effective when they're working with each other, rather than against each other. Collaboration starts with developing cohesive strategies and plans that complement each other and align with the overall vision and goals of the company. Partner up for strategic planning with your sales enablement team. Share priorities, plans, and calendars for the coming year to ensure they're aligned. Ask for and deliver feedback, and rework plans as necessary to ensure priorities are aligned and everyone is working toward the same goals.

This will continue to be an ongoing challenge for those in Product Marketing. Because this role sits at the nexus of all the functional teams within the organization, its easy to get pulled into the "problem du jour" and try to address it. It starts with defining the mission of the PMM team within the organization, the key areas the team will own, and areas where it can be an advisor but not a driver. Define the key priorities for the PMM team (this can be KPIs or OKRs) and get alignment across key functional leaders. Ideally, these priorities map to the company goals/objectives. Anything net new that comes in with be assessed and ranked against the priorities. If it doesn't map to the priorities, then it's not something the PMM will prioritize. 

Use customer insights and data to your advantage. Your customers should be the “why” behind your product vision and at the end of the day, there shouldn’t be anything that goes on your roadmap that doesn’t help address customer pain and solve their problems. Maintaining customer focus within your roadmap also means not wasting your team’s valuable time and resources on features that will have no impact. Investing time into meticulously prioritizing your customer’s needs and coming up with real solutions to real problems is the best possible way to keep the product roadmap relevant. Conduct win/loss analysis and review the results on a monthly basis to help inform Product, CS, Sales and Eng. Are there recurring trends that are noteworthy to highlight? Are there key competitive factors that are showing up more and more. Develop a template to socialize the results and then you can start to make justifications for certain capabilities that are impacting revenue. Devise competitive intelligence framework and back it up with relevant analyst reports. Are competitors starting to take market share in key segments that your company doesn't play in? Are the analysts starting to position you differently? These are some effective strategies to implement as you start to think about influencing your product roadmap in a much more methodical manner. 

Brand marketing and product marketing perform very different roles in a company’s overall brand strategy, but when done well, they work together seamlessly to create a brand experience customers can trust. Let’s start with a basic analogy we use when helping a company create or improve its brand: a brand is like a person. It has a personality. It has strengths and weaknesses. It has goals. It has a voice. Now, this person also makes things. But you can see right away that it’s one thing to talk about the person herself, and another entirely to talk about what she makes. You can also see that a brand is evaluated based on criteria that, while overlapping, are largely separate. You’ll evaluate a person first and foremost based on what it’s like to spend time with them. Is she fun? Is she funny? Trustworthy? Down-to-earth? Whereas you’ll judge something they make based mostly on whether it meets your needs. Because the criteria we use to evaluate brands versus products are so different, the way we market them needs to be different too. When we’re marketing a product, solution, or service, the campaign will need to be based on how that product, solution, or service performs. There are as many ways to accomplish this as there are products to market—it can be comparative, it can be demonstrative, it can metaphorical or concrete. But it has to talk about what the product does, and how well. Brand campaigns need to do another thing entirely. They need to put you in a certain mood. What mood that is, depends on what the brand personality is. Harley-Davidson wants you to feel something much different than Volvo does. The success of a brand campaign will be whether or not consumers begin to associate certain feelings with the brand. The success of a product campaign will be a measure of whether or not it nudges consumers along in their buyer’s journey. Hope this helps, both functions are key when demonstrating value and creating an emotional relationship with the buyer. And that means you’ll not only drive sales today but you’ll also secure future sales by driving loyalty and engagement.

Once you have a plan, you can assess the data and determine the financial impact, linking it to a strategic company goal. The key is to attach to company business objectives and make a business case for why the specific project/or initiatives will drive results and how success will be measured. It may be helpful to organize goals or ideals into three categories: current, near term, and future. This will help the team conceptualize a high-level strategy for each priority item on the list.

One of, if not THE most direct indicator of a strong product marketing output is product adoption. If PMM’s high-level responsibility is to translate product features into customer value points, measuring the onboarding and usage rates of your products is a critical litmus test for any product marketer. The other key areas also include content and win rates. * Onboarding data: At the onset of a contract, are customers using the product as much as you think they should? Are they using all the features available to them? If they aren’t, is there collateral that can help them understand how to maximize the usage of their new platform? The first quarter of a customer’s engagement with a tool is a strong reflection of product marketing’s ability to showcase the product to those who are already bought-in (and likely more engaged with your marketing materials than prospects). * Feature adoption: Similarly, when product marketing creates messaging around new features or cross-sell options, how quickly is that translating to adoption? Are customers signing up for beta programs at a high volume, and are their renewals increasing in price over time? Keeping an eye on how new offerings are performing can be indicative of appropriate messaging around them. * Churn rates: While product marketing might not directly help a customer accomplish their goals, throughout the market there are competing product marketers that are making a compelling argument to leave your brand for theirs. If your messaging doesn’t instill trust in your customers, they’ll be more willing to evaluate other options. It’s the product marketers job to ensure that customers know you’re innovating and can solve their needs better than the rest of the market. Changes in churn rates signal a lack of trust in the product and, ultimately, the messaging supporting it. * Usage of assets: content views, shares, downloads, etc.: This metric is more around the growth of your brand’s authority and influence which is important for product marketing teams. Being an authoritative figure in your space makes customers more trustworthy of your products. Content marketing is a large part of both growing that influence and growing organic traffic. Potential customers do a lot of research. If leads are using and engaging with the expert content you create, that means your brand is authoritative and trusted. If your marketing assets are overlooked and not engaged with, they make not be interesting enough or resonate with your target customers. * Win Rate and Win rates in target market: Win rate is a basic, very straight forward sales metric that can determine how your product marketing team is doing compared to competitors, substitutes, and if your messaging is winning with customers. Your win rate is how many customers you win when given the opportunity. It can be in the form of an impression, demo, sales pitch, etc. You can also break down losses by “losses to competitors” and “losses to no decision”, etc. This can give you a good idea of how well your product and message do against competition and other options. You can also break down the win rate by target market to understand if your product and message perform better in specific target markets and how you can change to improve.

The key is to clearly define roles and responsibilities within your Marketing organization. For starters, let's start with where Product Marketing fits in. Product Marketing operates at the center of product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Under the general marketing umbrella, there are many teams that are dedicated to the tactical areas of marketing: digital marketing, PR, email marketing, PPC and paid advertising, social media marketing, etc. But who creates the overarching strategy on how products are delivered to market? Product Marketing. Product Marketing defines the positioning, value proposition, and messaging of a product. They educate and create tools to ensure internal salespeople and external customers understand the product that is being brought to market. As well, Product Marketing creates the strategies and plans for generating the demand and usage of the product. It's key to build strong relationships across your Marketing organization. For example, this can start with developing a messaging framework for product/or solution area and making sure each Marketing team member is versed on the messaging and how he/she can apply it to their respective program areas. Edcuate the team on your key buyers (primary and secondary), competitors, key differentiators, and key market trends. These key areas will help better setup how the Marketing team members think about the digital channels, events, and camapiagns to devise when it comes to your key solution or product areas. Remember: Without Product Marketing managing the commercialization of a product and leading the product launch, your marketing efforts will lack some key ingredients for success.

Addressed a similar question related to Campaign teams earlier. Please refer to that response. In short, Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press. Demand generation consumes the outputs from product marketing and injects them into marketing machinery that delivers content to prospects at scale consistently.

If your organization uses Slack, set up "Donut" time. Or simply set up 30 minutes monthly 1:1 with your product managers. It can be informal, build relationships. If you see a report that may be relevant to their specific product area, share it with them. If a customer insight is relevant, share it with them. Build trust and credibility and get to know your product managers personally. What are their hobbies? Do you share any interests? People are people, so get to know the people you interact with daily.