AMA: Payrix Former VP of Product Marketing, Charlene Wang on Establishing Product Marketing

I like to start by defining what is Product Marketing, what we care about, and why it matters. What is Product Marketing? Product Marketing lives and breathes everything surrounding our target audiences. We deeply understand and empathize with audiences internally and externally, creating differentiated positioning based on our products and messaging that resonates. Product Marketers are masters of storytelling, strategy, and structure. We quarterback across product, marketing, sales, and other teams to drive a cohesive and winning approach to customers and the market. What does Product Marketing care about? Initially, we care about whether the messaging we provide to the organization and market is resonating. That includes looking at messaging adoption, clarity, and effectiveness. Ultimately, we care about whether we’re driving revenue and customer success for the business. We particularly monitor win rates to understand whether our positioning is effective. We also care about how messaging impacts lead generation, product adoption, and customer retention and upsell. Why does this matter? A strong Product Marketing function drives clear and consistent messaging and a GTM approach that’s more likely to win in the market.

Every marketing team operates differently, so the answer depends on the organization. In general, Product Marketers own the core positioning of the company & products and are responsible for translating this into messaging that wins deals and market share. To do so, Product Marketers need to deeply understand target audiences, the buying process, competitors and the market, and the company and product(s). Product Marketing often sits in Marketing, sometimes in Product, and rarely in other functions. Usually, market research, positioning and core messaging, such as pitch decks and datasheets, are owned by the Product Marketing team, though responsibilities often extend beyond this. Product Marketing interacts with many other marketing teams, most commonly with Demand Generation (or Growth Marketing). Product Marketing often works closely with Demand Generation to provide input into campaign strategy and content. Content Strategy sometimes sits within Product Marketing but is more often a separate organization or a branch of Demand Generation that takes positioning from Product Marketing to come up with content to feed campaigns. In many organizations, Customer Marketing sits within Product Marketing to align customer advocacy more closely with core messaging, though this may also be a separate organization. Analyst Relations often sits within Product Marketing due to its close ties to market positioning and category creation, but can also be in a Corporate Marketing or Communications group that also includes PR. Team structures can vary greatly based on the type of GTM motion (product-led vs sales-led), the target audience (especially B2B vs. B2C companies), the size of company, whether companies have one product or multiple products, and more. Ultimately, a Product Marketing leader needs to collaborate cross-functionally and build the team in a way that best aligns to the organization's needs.

There are a handful of key measures that I care about as a Product Marketing leader. To prioritize the top 3, I would look at messaging adoption, win rates, and number of customer advocates. The primary day-to-day weapon of Product Marketing is messaging and enablement, so I first look at messaging clarity, adoption, and feedback. To measure clarity, I keep track of the consistency of key messaging points and differentiators used by sales and other field teams. Adoption can be quantified by a sales enablement tool, such as Highspot or Seismic or any system that tracks views and engagement, or through surveys. Qualitative feedback on the effectiveness of messaging and enablement can be measured through interviews and/or surveys of prospects, customers, and internal teams. Taken together, these indicators paint a picture of whether your messaging is landing with the audience as intended. None of this matters if it doesn’t drive revenue for the business. Revenue indicators are harder to tie back to Product Marketing directly but are extremely important to understand as you tailor positioning and enablement. The clearest metric here is win rates. This provides the most direct feedback on whether your approach is working in real sales cycles, and a good win/loss analysis program can also give valuable insights into the market and competitors. Beyond win rates, Product Marketers should also keep track of new leads generated and average deal size. For existing customers, I try to understand product adoption, customer retention and upsell, and customer advocacy. Customer advocacy is a good overall indicator. If your team is closing the right customers for your product, you should be able to identify a decent number of customer advocates who can tell compelling stories of how they’re driving outcomes with your product.

Delegating is extremely important as you grow! It can feel unnatural when you’re getting started, so here are some tips if you’re doing it for the first time: Scope for the person: Try to understand your new teammate and what they bring to the table. Try to understand their strengths and where they may need coaching. Based on their unique skills, define a workstream that plays to their strengths and allows them to stretch their skills, while limiting the downsides if they don’t ramp up right away. As you better understand your colleague over time, you can adjust and provide additional responsibilities or coaching. Explain why: Provide as much context as you can to your team. Since everyone is busy, there’s a temptation to just ask a new teammate to do something tactical. While this is faster in the short run, it makes it more difficult for the new person to ramp up. Try to get into the habit of overexplaining context for projects and workstreams at the beginning. This is a good investment in helping your team to become more self-sufficient over time. Align on a check-in cadence: Discuss with your colleague how frequently they should check-in. Are there specific milestones that you want to align on? Are check-ins done on a recurring basis? What deliverables require sign-off from yourself or any other members of the team? In setting the cadence, find something that drives alignment on critical decisions, without creating too much overhead. Also keep an open door for questions that come up, especially as new team members ramp up. Let go: Many first-time managers have trouble letting go of the work that they used to have full control of. Try to stay disciplined and stick with the check-in cadence that you defined with your new teammate. Only step in when critical projects start to go off the rails. Remember that your new colleague is initially unlikely to be as efficient as you and will likely make more mistakes than you would. If you scope the right projects, you can let your team make small mistakes to learn and become more effective over time. Keep an open door for feedback in both directions so that you can learn from each other and adapt over time. Take time to ramp up: Your new team member will not be fully effective on day 1. In fact, you may even find yourself with less capacity than before since you now need to help your colleague. Remember not to expect your team’s capacity to double overnight, and managing a team will always require some of your time. That’s okay! A team of 1 will always be limited by your personal abilities. Growing your team is extremely rewarding personally and professionally and will help you scale your own efforts over time.

My current group has almost a thousand people, so I’ll let someone else chime in on specifics for a smaller organization. In general, the first thing I do in any new organization is try to understand the state of the business, customers, and team, including everyone I would directly or indirectly support. That means lots of background research and introducing myself to internal collaborators and key customers. I keep these conversations open ended to listen for what’s working, what’s not, and the biggest opportunities. For Product Marketing, I start by identifying the maturity of the company, the product(s), and go-to-market strategy and execution. In almost every Product Marketing role, I’ve had to start by either defining or refining the positioning of the company and/or product based on evolving customers, market, and product capabilities. I then prioritize a handful of quick wins in my first 30 to 90 days that can make the biggest impact on the KPIs that matter most to the organization in the moment, while creating a longer term plan for up-leveling the team and supporting the growth of the company.

Product Marketing is a highly cross-functional team that sits at the intersection of all customer-facing and product teams, which can be exciting and create a lot of challenges. Product Marketers often end up falling into one of two categories: a catch all for content requests or the engine of go-to-market strategy. To be a strategic partner to the business, Product Marketing leaders need to build trust-based relationships across teams and prioritize areas that move the needle. A common challenge is that other teams don’t understand the role of Product Marketing, which leads to conflict over roles and responsibilities or missed opportunities to collaborate. This can happen with teams that work closest with Product Marketing, such as Product Management, Demand Generation, Sales Ops or Enablement, and more. To address this, Product Marketing needs to clearly communicate what Product Marketing does, develop an understanding of how other teams work, and demonstrate the value of a strong Product Marketing function, including articulating how this helps everyone win. Another challenge is setting expectations. Teams throughout the organization generally want additional collateral and enablement. Product Marketers who say yes to all these requests end up peanut buttered across too many projects and unable to move the needle. Product Marketing leaders need to prioritize work based on impact to revenue and customers, saying no to projects that prevent the team from focusing on the most important areas. To do so effectively, leaders should also demonstrate accountability back to the organization by explaining where Product Marketing is focused and why some asks are deprioritized. When done well, a focused Product Marketing team will drive better outcomes, while earning the trust of people throughout the organization.

Product Marketing and Growth perform different roles in a marketing team and need to be measured in different ways. Whereas Growth is often easier to quantify, concrete measurements that can be attributed to Product Marketing only become clearer as you get further down the funnel, once deals have been created and the effectiveness of positioning is easier to see on a case-by-case basis. However, Product Marketing does meaningfully contribute to every stage of the GTM journey. At a high level, whereas Growth Marketers focus both on volume of leads and conversion from stage to stage, Product Marketers more directly impact conversion of leads. That said, a good Product Marketer should also understand what’s driving lead creation and be able to identify where positioning and messaging can be adjusted to support additional leads, e.g. through messaging on the website and other top of funnel assets. Having a solid win/loss analysis program to understand reasons for conversions is one of the most powerful measurement tools of a Product Marketer. Ideally a win/loss program should extend earlier in the pipeline, beyond even when deals are created (where many win/loss programs traditionally focus). Product Marketing teams should be able to understand wins and losses throughout the pipeline to identify what’s driving conversions across the board, create specific hypotheses around how different positioning or messaging can help, and test whether these hypotheses were correct. The impact of Product Marketing should ideally be quantified. However, measuring specific KPIs can be impractical, so more commonly impact is shown qualitatively. The challenge with measuring Product Marketing contribution is that it’s a combination of art and science. Demonstrating impact requires a strong understanding of how PMM orchestrates GTM strategy and the ability to highlight specific contributions. The best approaches I’ve seen involve a combination of explaining work that was done and why it was done, project-based outcomes that Product Marketing drove (e.g. number of case studies, improving conversions against competitors, driving adoption before and after campaigns, etc.), quantitative and qualitative feedback on messaging effectiveness, and partnering with Demand Gen and Sales to show collective revenue outcomes and specific contributions.