AMA: Oracle Group Vice President, Industry Marketing Jon Rooney on Industry Product Marketing

Certainly Sharebird, which is always good for a wander around Q&A's and other content. There are a few podcasts I really like, like Product Marketing Insider, the Product Marketing Experts and Product Marketing Life. There's some good stuff in Forrester's Sirius Decisions about Industry Marketing but it's also helpful to follow certain influential folks in an industry, even if they're not marketers, to soak in the language and topics that matter. Especially at senior levels, industries are smaller than we think they are from a people perspective - all the IT architects in the big banks know each other, the community of drug safety executives is pretty tight, etc.

Metrics around awareness and demand in a given industry. For awareness, web traffic and enagement, press coverage and customer reference stories are key. If there are industry associations and trade publications, there are no shortage of lists and awards that tend to lay out the landscape. If your company is in the mix there, you're doing the right things. For demand, marketing-driven and marketing-influenced pipeline from programs targeting an industry whether the products or verticalized or horizontal. What's your penetration in the top 10 commercial banks or top 10 online retailers etc? If you don't have an industry lens for these measures, your sales teams can hit their numbers while your industry footprint is spread so thin as to not be relevant in the space.

Once there's not only product market fit (which almost all companies prematurely declare victory around - sorry but it's totally true) but also determination and commitment that a given industry or industies are the decided way to GTM. If products are horizontal and sales teams are horizontal then having just the marketers aligned vertically spells trouble. An industry-first approach has to be resourced beyond marketing, dabbling's not going to get anyone anywhere.

Generally, I'd say two things: 1) having enough familiarity and understanding of an industry to know how to craft a message that lands with a given audience and avoid missing the mark by either being vaguely horizontal or not speaking an industry's language. Every industry has their own tone, lexicon and tribal knowledge that need to be understood to connect with that audience. A great PMM can have the use cases, feature set, benefits and competitive landscape down cold and still not sould like they "get" a given industry, lessening the effect your story has on customers. 2) Unlike PMM, industry marketing (in my experience) is a broader marketing function that includes campaign strategy, digital execution and field marketing coordinated to deliver demand generation in the form of delivering net new pipe or helping move opportunities along to close. The hand-off from PMM to industry marketing is super important but, if done right, it's complementary not overlapping.

In my experience - product marketers should continue to own all core PMM elements like product/solution-level messaging & positioning, enablement, AR, launch management and competitive intelligence. Industry marketing needs to deliver a great customer-focused message that sits above product/solution-level messaging (like a "<Company> for <Industry>" first call deck any account team can use) anchored in the language and dynamics of a given industry. Talk about what matters to your customer as a commercial bank or online retailer or wireless provider and how, with your company's help, they win over customers and outperform their competitors. How your company can help in a given industry eventually clicks down into the specificity of product/solution-level messaging but it's a coherent customer journey rather than a jarring feature pitch. Beyond the message, industry marketing needs to design and execute campaings that resonate in a given industry, reinforcing that your company "gets it" especially if you're a large, multifaceted player competing against smaller, niche firms who are 100% rooted in the industry. This could mean joining industry associations, platforming internal thought leaders in the space and publically providing POVs on broader topics, not just amplifying product press releases.

It depends on what the charter of the industry marketing team is at your company, but in my case I came up as a product marketer and went on to build and lead product marketing teams, which is a pretty good proxy for industry marketing. The traits are all fundamentally the same, starting with the ability to quickly and repeatedly synthesize lots of complex information into a simple, compelling message that people understand and remember. Being able to not only formulate that message and indentify who needs to hear it, but then also build a marketing machine that knows how effectively use all the GTM tools in their toolbox - from web copy to highly targeted account-level interaction - to reach those people with that message. As for interviewing candidates, it sounds simple but in my case I look for interesting, coherent stories that are told well. Stories about someone's career, their current or past company's journey in a given market or about the best/worst things they've done in their career. It's the foundation of product, industry or really any marketing role - strong communication skills that make an idea stand out in a crowded field. Of course vertical/domain experience is important as is functional marketing experience, but being an deep expert in a given industry is great and an important input, but the important output is delivering a message that reaches people. 

It's a bit of a white whale in a lot of organizations, but ideally you want to measure not just consumption or certification rates, but the percentage of closed/won opportunties in which the account team directly applied a specific enablement program or content. If the assumption is that sales people who are sufficiently enabled on customer needs, the market and your solution win deals at a higher rate, faster and for larger dollar values, then any sales enablement measure would ideally track those outcomes. Often sales enablement measures are very "top of the funnel" in that they track the percentage of sales personnel who've either completed or passed an assement on a given pitch or value assessment. Sometimes there are utilization measures that track how often certain content is accessed or programs applied by sales teams during an opportunity's lifecycle. These methods seem to be how most organizations measure sales enablement succes. However, in my opinion, companies should measure sales enablement success by the impact enablement has on closed/won opportunies. Did this enablement help the team win the deal faster and at a higher dollar amount than if the team had charged forward without any enablement? Sales enablement is best measured via cohort analysis rather than incremental consumption or utilization measures. 

Formally, sales and sales ops should be setting revenue targets and the associated pipeline coverage targets needed to drive marketing strategy. At least for enterprise software companies with direct, quota-carrying sales organizations, compensation structure drives the ship so you wouldn't want to construct revenue targets apart from the sales team - that's bound to cause all sorts of alignment issues. If, in a marketing role, you decide that an industry focus is the right driver for messaging and campaign investment, any allocation should be lined up to how marketing, sales and product/strategy collectively see the market. Even if the sales team isn't specifically aligned around industries (vs. geo and company size), you can prioritize industries with the highest concentration of prospects in a given geo/segment and that allows the marketing team to execute around industry messaging while supporting the sales teams in their existing patches.

I imagine any company would be open to hiring people for PMM roles with this range of experiences. There are multiple paths to product marketing and all of these functions cover part of the responsibility of the role. PMMs are, at least in my experience in enterprise software, a true hub role - with connections and visibility into seemingly every part of the business from strategy to product to customer success. Category Management, or Brand Management, at a CPG company might not always immediately translate to an enterprise PMM role, particularly if it's a senior role and requires experience working with Gartner/Forrester/IDC, etc and building sales plays, but in my experience any of these functions would be a valuable onramp.