AMA: Iterable Director of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on SMB Product Marketing

Great question. Looks like you've captured a lot of the big rocks that normally go into the budget, but a few additional things to consider: * People Budget: Depending on the planned growth of your team for this year, and near-term priorities, knowing your people budget can ensure you can bring in consultants (as necessary) to bridge any gaps and help support short-term strategic initiatives. * Tools: Beyond Sales Enablement/Content Management, you may want to consider Competitive Intelligence as another tool category if you don't have one already. * Win/Loss: If you're not already doing win/loss interviews internally, there are some external firms that can help conduct deep-dives into why you're winning or losing potential deals. This insight can and should directly feed into virtually everything you're doing across Product Marketing. * Team Events/Relationship Building: If you're remote, or hybrid, as a leader you'll need to be intentional about growing relationships within your team, and cross-functionally as well. So be sure to set some budget aside for team events, get togethers, and celebrating milestones. * Discretionary: In my experience, you can budget for a lot of major pieces, but ensure you have some discretionary budget set aside for things that emerge -- such as driving reviews with gift cards for example. These are just a few ideas, but hopefully they help create a full picture of what you'll need to think about for your budget. Keep in mind this is an art and a science so work with leadership and plan effectively, and learn quarter over quarter to ensure you have the resources needed for success of your team and the overall business. 

This is so important, and not focused on enough so I'm glad you asked! A few thoughts around this: * Get your CEO and CMO involved early. Ideally you can get early drafts to them, and also get them bought into the importance of the process and value of this effort which will make every aspect of this a lot smoother. * Have a consistent review process. Depending on your size and stage of company, it's unlikely that your executive team needs to see or review every piece of messaging. If you're working on a minor "enhancement" to your product and some lightweight messaging, that probably doesn't need to be approved. On the other hand, if it's significant launch, or you're working on company/brand-level messaging, it's crucial to have a review process. During my time at HubSpot this process started with the PMM and within the PMM team for feedback, and quickly went up to the CMO as a second-round of review, and then to the founders. * Once the messaging has been decided, get leadership buy-in to help solidify this across every GTM-facing team. This is why having early buy-in from executives is critically important because they will naturally help push this to their respective teams. * Lastly, ensure you're equipping executives and teams with the resources to drive that alignment. In my experience, having one central place on your company wiki, and then dedicated enablement resources is clear path towards success.

Team structure is always a hot topic in product marketing, and there's a lot of different ways of doing it. The product marketing team at Iterable recently re-organized into 5 groups: Release Marketing, Solutions Marketing, Pricing & Packaging, Platform Marketing, and Market Intelligence. Each group has a specific charter and KPIs that align up to company initiatives and OKRs as well. Briefly, the mission of each team is: * Release Marketing: Tell Iterable's innovation story, and effectively communicate launches to the market through our launch strategy. * Solutions Marketing: Tell Iterable's value story for specific verticals and segments of the market, and work cross-functionally across GTM teams (Marketing, Sales, CS, Etc) to effectively power campaigns and content that resonates. * Pricing & Packaging: This one speaks for itself, but drivings strategic initiatives connected to how we price and package our solution. * Platform Marketing: Responsible for telling our "better together" story with technology partners. * Market Intelligence: Collect market insights to power company strategy, roadmap, positioning/messaging, campaigns, and more. The team right now is approaching 10, and will be growing signficiantly in the coming months. The above isn't the only way to structure a team -- and structure can be aligned to product, function, segment, and more. As your company grows it's important to think about how product marketing can strategically support the business. I'm happy to chat 1:1 on how this can come to fruition as well.

In most B2B settings, Product Marketing, or a distinct Enablement team (if your organization has one), spends a lot of time driving revenue and user growth through enabling Sales and CS. Whereas, in self-serve or consumer-facing teams, this time spend enabling should be redirected to users directly and communicating with them through all the channels you're utilizing -- email, in-app, SMS, etc. In self-serve, you're directly selling to your customers, and also educating them on the value of your product/solution as well. Consider balancing these and working with your grwoth team (if you have one) on ways of implementing this in-product, and testing what messaging and materials work best overall. Talk with a lot of users -- ideally a mix of successful long-term users, and others who churned quickly to understand what's working and where the gaps are so you can spend your time working on any of those strategic gaps and filling those.

There's a lot of potential variability here depending on company, exact role, industry, and more. That said, here are a few ideas of what you can show: * Cross-functional Initiative: If you've directly led a cross-functional initiatve that drovesome key business results, showcase them! For example, a sales deck that you created that drove win rates in that vertical. Talk through how you worked with Sales to create the deck and enabled the team doing so. * Launch campagin: This is similar to above, but showcase a launch campaign that you worked on and the results it had on the business. If you haven't worked on a product launch, that's OK. Instead show a piece of content that went through your development cycle, or virtually anything else that relates to a launch. * Content you've written: One of the ways I evaluate new PMMs is to look at a piece they've written, or in a writing sample. Showing that you've thought about how to talk about the business or a key aspect of your product and the value it provides is important here and doesn't require a formal Product Marketing title to do. * Write a launch restrospective and plan: I've advised dozens of aspiring PMMs on this one in particular, and they've picked an industry or a particular company and a recent launch, and recapped what they think worked well, and what could have been improved. The important part is this shouldn't be punitive, but it shows you're thinking strategically about the business and the market and those are two critical aspects to breaking into product marketing. Hope these help! As I mentioned in another answer, don't hesitate to reach out 1:1 and I"m happy to help with this.

I wrote a post a while back about getting a job in Product Marketing that is still relevant and helpful. Overall though, think about your transferrable skills. Whether that's project leadership, storytelling, market intelligence and how it can apply to the job description of the PMM role you're looking at. Everyone wants to see experience, but if you don't yet have formal product marketing experience think about volunteering for a project to build that muscle (and ensure you like doing the work).

Great question. I think there's a number of different things in these motions - but fundamentally SMB is more of a "one to many" motion, whereas enterprise is a more ABM-centric motion. Given the team structure question here, this means that Solutions Marketing in SMB/Mid-Market thinks about and works with our Demadn Gen team in marketing around campaigns and positioning, content, and offerings, that can appeal broadly to a specific trend, iniative, or vertical. Whereas with Enterprise it applies to a specific company and going deeply into strategy and solutions. Product Marketing overall should have "brand level" programs that are global and for the entire market, and then tailored initiatives -- in concert with our counterparts in Sales and Marketing of course -- that specifically go deeper.

Yes! It's absolutely possible. A few ways you can think of the transition: * Look at some PMM job descriptions and think about transferrable skills. If you've worked as a Project Manager, then it's likely you've led cross-functional initiatives, so lean into that. * Highlight an internal communication and enablement you've done as a part of project leadership, and how you measured success. * Share any writing you've done to communicate results of a project. * Since you're in Marketing Opersations, you hopefully had the opportunity to get to know the technologies your company is using. Share some of this expertise and how it's contributing to your marketing pipeline. Product Marketers (especially at a more senior level) are expected to know the business from a product, value, and metrics perspective -- so show this off if you've done any of it. Also, if you've worked with any specific marketing technologies that your company uses (for example, Iterable) then consider looking at PMM openings at those respective companies because you likely will have some expertise around the product and implementation that will serve you well as a part of the interview process and as a PMM at that organization. Good luck!