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

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 th ...Read More

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 ho ...Read More

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 " for " 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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 indentif ...Read More

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 s ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 immediat ...Read More