AMA: Pendo Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Marcus Andrews on Messaging

There is less written about marketing a platform or suite of products vs individual products so I'll start there. There are two things I think work really well when marketing a platform. The Platform should unlock use cases or outcomes you can't achieve with the individual products alone. Like Captain Planet (sorry non-90's kids for the reference you can google it) is an amalgamation of a smaller team of individuals - your platform must feel like a single powerful entity made up of the individua ...Read More

I don't really run structured tests to test messaging very often, but I'm constantly trying to understand if our messaging is working. Here are a few things I'm always doing. This approach really works for me and my teams. I'm always trying to figure out if things aren't working or if they are. Sales adoption and specific calls with prospects / customers. Simply put if it's good sales will use it if it's not they won't. Good sales people don't waste their time with bad messaging or collateral. I ...Read More

I always try to keep in mind that is very inexpensive to tweak your story or messaging. It's a whole lot more expensive to change a product or sales motion. So if you're getting new data you trust, change the story! Try something new, see what happens. Don't be so attached to your messaging you can't throw something out and make some changes. Just do it fast. I've seen a lot of messaging changes get over thunk in bad meetings with too many people involved. HOWEVER, you want to tweak, not re-writ ...Read More

I'll give you two things you can do here. Write about Narrative Design or your version of the framework and publish it. I do this on Linkedin. Find examples, ask questions, examine different parts of the process, try and upack it for others. There is an endless amount of ways you can add to the discussion. This will help you get better at thinking about it and it'll attract people who are interested in using it. Read. To become a better storyteller and writer you have to be constantly learning f ...Read More

There is a big difference between translation and localization. I'm a pretty good copy writer and storyteller, as an American. Translate my narratives into Spanish, or German, or even just move them into an english speaking region like UKI but with a different culture, they fall flat, are misunderstood, or at worst offend people. You can't just translate stuff. Ideally you have great sales / marketing partners or even a pmm in region who can help. My advice is lean on them, vs thinking you're cl ...Read More

I think to cover all these areas you need some sort of macro story, that then makes it easier for all these parts of marketing to stay consistent, and connected, but also thrive as individual teams. My go-to storytelling framework is what I call Narrative Design. It's a framework that roots you in the world of your audience and can help you redfine your company and category or simply have a great way to start blog post - and everything in-between. This is the best resource to learn about my fram ...Read More

A few thoughts. It's best to be in front of this challenge then behind it. If you are the PMM for a product, and you are waiting till the product as outgrown the messaging to then change the messaging... not great. Your messaging should ideally be out in front of the product. It should be telling the story of the product today and then near future. Selling the vision, making sure you're unique, and making sure buyers and customers have confidence in the future of your product. The tail should wa ...Read More

Just start working on it! There are so many opportunities to do this, worse case no one notices best case you start to get pulled into really strategic conversations. A great example of this is AI. Every B2B software comapny needs an AI narrative right now. If you're to help tell that story and just go out and start doing it without being asked, good things will happen. I will say it's best to think globally but start locally. Focus the AI story on your products and your industry or segment. Don ...Read More

If you have something that is truly differentiating, you need to build a case for why that thing is so critical to the success of your buyer. And then build that into everything you do with your product marketing. Pendo as a platform generally has a data advantage over our guides only competitors. So we use it. We brand a certain part of product as "the only data driven digital adoption platform" and talk about why data is so important for you to achevive the outcome you desire. And tell the sto ...Read More