AMA: Momentive (SurveyMonkey) Vice President, Product Marketing, Priya Gill on Industry Product Marketing

It first starts with identifying who your target buyers are, and building a set of “persona packs” that establish a baseline of key information in understanding buyer needs and evaluation criteria. This is critical to have so that you can properly educate your sales teams to have more effective conversations with prospects. At a high level, they include: * Distinct buying roles that exist within an organization * Desired business outcomes driven by each role * Sample org charts within each function * Your products/solutions related to their business goals and objectives * Key customer stories by persona Once I have this established, my teams update them every 6 months. This is only part of the research needed in order to influence the product roadmap. There are other insights you should gather, such as industry analyst insights (if applicable), competitive landscape, customer feedback, sales feedback, CS feedback — and use this data to inform the evolution of your recommendations around product strategy and messaging. It’s this collective insight and expertise that separates great PMMs from good PMMs, and the type of expertise that Product values.

There are multiple key metrics I look at to see how our industry programs are performing and positively influencing the right outcomes, sliced by industry: * Company-level metrics: growth, profitability and retention * Marketing metrics: pipeline, campaign/content performance, brand perception * Sales metrics: average deal size, average win rate, pipeline conversion At the end of the day, it all comes back to revenue, but it’s hard to directly quantify impact to revenue without seeing how you’ve influenced the other areas.

It really depends on the type of enablement that you’re doing and the problems you’re looking to solve. But at the end of the day, there are two key metrics I’m always looking at, which is the average contract value (in conjunction with number of deals won) and the win rates. In addition to looking at whether there’s a measurable increase/decrease, there are other factors I assess: * Consumption of enablement materials: What % of the field has been trained? And how are the materials being used in prospect conversations or follow-ups? * Gong calls: Not everyone has Gong (software that enables you to analyze recorded customer-facing interactions), but if you do, it’s an amazing way to hear whether sales has effectively absorbed the enablement material and leveraging it properly with prospects * Sales feedback: I usually have a set of go-to reps and sales managers to get quick feedback on how something is resonating with the sales team. I also like to leverage surveys, but more so on a quarterly basis to assess confidence in core areas and how that changes over time based on dedicated, focused training in trouble areas * Win/loss analysis: We leverage Clozd to conduct impartial customer interviews, and help us understand the reasons behind why we win and lose

I’m not sure what you mean by “category management”, but many of the experiences you list are key experiences that any PMM should have. Having said that, many hiring managers (including myself) look for PMMs with traditional product marketing experience. Many PMMs who’ve made the leap from non-traditional backgrounds do that within the company they’re already working in (and therefore have established credibility) or know someone personally at the company who can vouch for them.

This is a tough one because it’s difficult to set any sort of revenue targets for your industry if sales is not fully aligned and compensated to sell to that industry. You could be setting yourself up for failure. Not sure who’s requiring you to set a target in this way, but I would first ensure that you have strong buy-in from your leadership / your executive team on what the expectations will be around accountability. Having said that, you could approach it in two ways: * Set target based on internal metrics: Look at your revenue, growth rate, average contract value and win rates over the past 2 years. You can estimate a feasible target based on past success. * Set target based on external metrics: Look at the Industry TAM, CAGR and spend, and estimate what you could realistically attain based on how much of the market you (and your top competitors) have already captured.

PMMs and Industry PMMs are very similar in terms of the core skill sets needed to be successful in their roles. The biggest difference is that they need to intimately understand the industry or set of industries that they are responsible for and the unique needs of the personas that they’re targeting in those industries. With this lens, there are 3 foundational areas an Industry PMM needs to be exceptional at (all of which are powered by deep knowledge of their industry, customers and competitors): * Driving market success of the targeted industry with a strong GTM strategy, compelling messaging, differentiated positioning, and strategic pricing & packaging * Driving demand through strategic marketing plans that cement industry authority, build brand awareness, and drive pipeline growth * Driving sales success by developing content needed to support the industry customer journey and sales cycle, such as use cases, pitch decks, case studies, and other customer and sales facing content.

First off, I'll say that I'm never a fan of making someone create messaging/positioning and defining a GTM plan about the interviewing company's product because you're never going to get to the level of knowledge as someone in the company...and it takes way longer to do it right. OK, rant over. :) Typically when I ask candidates to give a presentation, it's less about the specific products they're presenting, but rather HOW they present it. Can the candidate articulate how they effectively approached their GTM strategy, from ideation to execution and beyond. Can they clearly understand the customer pain points and technical capabilities of the product, and translate that into clear marketing messages that resonate? Can they effectively launch a product/feature and properly engage the right cross-functional partners to make that launch a success? Are they outcome-oriented and think about the metrics they're trying to drive with a given launch? Those are just a few things that I would be looking for in a presentation. My hunch is that you were missing some of these things in your presentation.