AMA: Morningstar Head of Product Marketing, Elizabeth Brigham on Collaborating with Sales and Marketing

Hi everyone! Great to be here with you today! Thanks for sending me so many thoughtful questions...digging in now! This is a tricky one as I've seen 3 different models in my recent career history: Mid-sized tech company where product marketing and demand gen were separate groups, yet connected at the hip Small start up where I ran all marketing functions and thus we were one :) Morningstar, where my team has both product marketing and demand generation responsibilities, although we do share pipe ...Read More

The most important KPI is closed won business. If your sales team knows to whom, how, what and at what time to sell (e.g. when to walk away), you've done your job.  Other internal metrics to consider are: Managers' qualitative review/certification of sales ability to pitch and demo (the demo piece may vary based on the size of your business or product complexity) How often sales teams are using marketing materials in sales cycles, how clear they are to prospects and if any were critical to closi ...Read More

I'm not sure I'm fully understanding the premise of the latter half of this question, so I will address the first part. For those interested in this question, if you can provide me more explanation around what you mean by "support revenue growth reactively," I'm happy to respond. On the former, how can product marketing own more of the funnel strategy. I'll highlight how we're working at Morningstar on my team in the three areas you laid out: Acquisition - Product marketing has a particularly st ...Read More

Hmmm...I actually haven't had the experience of PMM not having budget to spend, so not sure I can really speak directly to this. I have worked at a start up where we basically have no budget at all, but that's another story on scrapiness. In general though, any time I've had to write a business case to get funding for an initiative, I typically follow this format: How will my initiative materially affect the business? Revenue growth? Cost efficiencies/economies of scale? Market expansion? Why am ...Read More

I find the root cause of this problem is a lack of trust. Everyone wants to get involved because either they don't feel like their voice will be heard otherwise or because they don't trust what has been delivered in the past. This is a tricky problem, but here's how I'd break it down: Product Marketing has a responsibility to clearly articulate and hold themselves accountable to delivering on their promise to the organization, full stop.  Spending time with, listening to (really listening to), a ...Read More