AMA: Momentive.ai Vice President, Product Marketing, Priya Gill on Building a Product Marketing Team

There are usually two sets of core metrics that I look at to assess whether our efforts are positively influencing the right outcomes: * Marketing metrics: pipeline, campaign/content performance, bookings (PQLs if you work closely with the product growth team) * Sales metrics: average deal size, average win rate, ARR There is also the kind of impact that PMMs can have that are not necessarily quantifiable - such as influencing the product roadmap in a way that eventually leads to greater market success for your product(s). At the end of the day, it all comes back to revenue and how the team’s efforts are directly/indirectly contributing to the bottom line.

Simply, we combine market, customer, and competitive insights with product innovation to deliver a unified narrative and winning GTM strategy for the company. This means focusing on four core areas: * Product: Drive market success of the product and solutions portfolio by ensuring strong product-market fit, compelling messaging, differentiated positioning, and strategic pricing & packaging * Demand: Drive demand by supporting strategic marketing plans that cement industry authority, build brand awareness and drive pipeline growth * Enablement: Drive revenue and retention by empowering sellers and customer success with the content and narratives needed to support the customer journey and sales cycle * Customer: Drive expansion revenue and adoption by supporting engagement and growth initiatives for existing customers that drive retention, loyalty, and advocacy

There are four areas where I believe that PMMs can add the most value, and that’s where I usually start my assessment to identify the lowest hanging fruit: * Product: Do we have product-market fit with our ideal buyer? Is our messaging differentiated and compelling? Is our pricing and packaging competitive? * Demand: Are we targeting the right personas, industries, categories? Where are we winning and are we doubling down effectively? Are there untapped markets worth pursuing? * Enablement: Are our win rates, average deal size and pipeline conversion strong? How does ARR / GRR / NRR look? Speak to your GTM teams (Sales and Customer Success) and run a survey assessing confidence levels in the pre and post sales process to identify areas of opportunity. * Customer: Do we have effective automated onboarding and engagement programs? How are we driving expansion in the customer base? You can’t do everything, but you should be able to identify one or two things that require attention and can have a big impact.

I’ve been hiring for quite some time now that I typically know when I have a great candidate, so I don’t believe that I need to structure the recruiting process to go slower just in case a better PMM might come along. It is a tough market, so if you have a great candidate that you and your hiring panel feel great about, hire them!

Product Marketing is an incredibly cross-functional role, and your success depends on the success of others. So building relationships and ensuring alignment with your key cross-functional partners, like Sales, CS, Demand Gen and Product are absolutely crucial. However, in a post-pandemic world, working remotely is more of the norm and you’ll find that many of the people you work with will also be working fully or partially remote. So staying connected while remote shouldn’t be as difficult as it may have been 2+ years ago.

Regular engagement and alignment in key. I meet with my cross-functional leadership team bi-weekly to ensure we’re aligned on the needs of each team as they evolve and areas of focus. Key goals and deliverables: PMM with Sales: Drive sales success by developing content needed to support the pre-sales customer journey and business goals, such as use cases, pitch decks, customer case studies, and other prospect facing content. PMM with CSM: Drive customer success by developing more in-depth content needed to support the post-sales customer journey and business goals, such as detailed use cases, QBR decks (quarterly business review), roadmap decks, and other customer facing content. PMM with Marketing: Drive pipeline and bookings by supporting strategic marketing plans (demand gen campaigns, paid media, growth experiments) that build brand/product awareness and interest. PMM with Product: Drive market success of the product / solution / service with a strong GTM strategy, compelling messaging, differentiated positioning, and strategic pricing & packaging.