AMA: New Relic Director, Product Marketing, John Withers on Market Research

Market research is a must-have for a product launch. As Marketers, one of the requirements for doing our job (well) is to have a thorough understanding of the market. That means 1) identifying the personas our product(s) are intended to serve, 2) understanding each persona’s pain points and needs, 3) analyzing competitors and their abilities to serve the needs of the market, including understanding how our solution is (hopefully) differentiated, 4) having a sense of customers’ willingness to pay ...Read More

One of the fundamental skills a Product Marketer must develop is the ability to influence others across the organization. This includes their manager, other Marketing leaders, their Product Manager counterpart(s), and executives. This ability to influence others is highly dependent on one’s credibility within the organization. An experienced and trusted Product Marketer might be able to more easily influence others even without rigorous analysis to back up their point of view–this may or may not ...Read More

I laid out in another answer that Product Marketers should be reading competitors’ press releases, blogs, product pages, 10Ks, and any other collateral you can get your hands on. By doing so, you’ll get a sense of the following: Their company strategy (where do they see the market evolving? What are the biggest opportunities and risks?) Their product strategy (where are they investing their resources when they build?) How they go-to-market (How to they message? How are they launching? What campa ...Read More

Understanding personas and ideal customer profiles is, in many ways, the foundation for all that we do. If we don’t understand our users’ and customers’ pain points, then there’s very little chance that we’ll build, market, sell, and support the right solutions to meet their needs. At my company, at a strategic level, we have done a rigorous analysis of our market, of our personas (broken down by users, influencers, buyers, and more), and we regularly reevaluate what we believe to be true about ...Read More

Create a template with a number of questions that are well thought out, in advance. The questions serve two purposes: To guide the conversation in a deliberate way (one that you’ve mapped out in advance, without the pressures of coming up with questions in real-time), and... To drive a consistent process, which, hopefully, will help you identify useful patterns. To emphasize the first point, you should approach every customer conversation with a very specific goal: Something you want to learn, o ...Read More

Start by building relationships with the field (and if you need help doing that, ask your manager). In a healthy organization, where Sales and Product Marketing work well together, AEs will likely be receptive to working more closely with Product Marketers. From an AE’s perspective, they tend to assume that Product Marketers have the inside scoop on the product roadmap, or how that cool new feature works (and can you demo it?).  Here are some tactical steps that I’ve seen lead to success: Determ ...Read More