AMA: Narvar Former Head of Product Marketing, Ajit Ghuman on Messaging

The success is positioning is about proving that your work made your employer known for something in the market.  One of the most common ways PMMs do this is by showing how they get the company a top quadrant or wave leader spot with Gartner of Forrester respectively. Nowadays, G2 reviews and or even reviews by influential developers can help - as long as they buttress your product's differentiators.  You can also demonstrate by showing how your work let do growth in a certain business segment. ...Read More

I used to suck at Messaging, and I don't claim to be a guru at it either even today. But let me elaborate: At one point in my career, I would attempt to write a product one-pager (circa 2013-14) and my boss would redline the entire thing and hand it back to me.  I improved a bit. I learned to write about features as benefits, not about features themselves.  But I was still not stellar.  My work only increased by a step function when I took a step back and changed my approach. I empathized intima ...Read More

I generally think of PMM owning areas of responsibilities, a subset of which is key assets. I point this out because assets are tactical elements and may change depending on need.  That being said, generally, I've seen PMM owning the following assets: 1. First Call Deck 2. Demos and Demo Scripts 3. Packaging Decks/Spreadsheets 4. Competitive Analysis Cheat Sheets/Battlecards 5. One-Pagers 6. Whitepapers 7. Product Videos 8. Feature Decks 9. Pricing Calculator 10. All Product Page Content on Webs ...Read More

One of the most effective tactics here is to build a product marketecture. Building a marketecture will help you keep the integrity of the two products intact while being able to create a framework for the entire platform. I've written a detailed blog on this topic, here: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2020/09/15/polish-up-your-product-how-to-win-with-marketecture.html In addition, the way to utilize the marketecture is to come up with the following levels of positioning and messa ...Read More

I'm not sure about courses, but recommend the following books: 1. Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind 2. Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller 3. Win Bigly by Scott Adams Outside of that, there is no better training than practice. Relook at the positioning on your website, on sales decks and decide whether it is consistent with strategy and if not, then come up with new positioning and messaging.  Daily life provides a lot of observations on positioning. From TV ad slots, to political campaig ...Read More

I made a similar transition many moons ago when I working at Medallia. What helped me, and I reckon what will help you, is having an intimate understanding of the customers, their needs and how our technology uniquely solved their problems. The training you are getting in Customer Success will go much further in helping you build mental models that you will routinely use as a PMM, than external trainings.  That being said, I did like doing the Pragmatic Marketing set of GTM courses when I was a ...Read More

You don't need to spend a dollar on external validation. But you do need external validation.  One of the things I remember from a Pragmatic Marketing course I took early on as a PMM was the term NIHITO -- Nothing Important Happens In The Office If you have customers, asking them for feedback will not cost any money You should also ask feedback from prospects, I generally use InMails to target 10-15 buyer personas. (Linkedin generally gives you the first month free) Analyst feedback is generally ...Read More

The world does trillions of dollars of business for FMCG products every year. They are all commodities, and yet they are continuously fighting a positioning and messaging battle against one another.  In the first episode of the TV Series Mad Men, Don Draper when consulting for the cigarettes brand Lucky Strike, selects an attribute from the production process - toasting. He then uses that attribute to create positioning "It's Toasted" and associates the product with freedom and youth.  So the pr ...Read More