AMA: Pomerium Head of Marketing, Nikhil Balaraman on Enterprise Product Marketing

As a PMM, I believe one of the most important things is showing business impact…so Pipeline and Revenue. And, typically because of how PMM is staffed, understanding how to build leverage/scale yourself. So when getting established, earn trust through showing impact to revenue. Webinars that help target high value use cases and build top of funnel and key collateral such as customer stories that help accelerate deal cycles. All of this will help inform your leverage/high scale work such as positi ...Read More

The best way to transition to a new role is not to move companies. If you can find a way to work with the team/manager/peers who are in Enterprise PMM, you already come equipped with a lot of the foundational aspects of knowing the product and while the competitors and customers might be different/or how you talk to them might be different, you’ll have a strong understanding of the product, now you just need to learn a new audience. And look, everyone always needs help. Offer to do some collater ...Read More

High touch vs. low touch. Buying committees versus single buyers. 7-figure multi-year deals vs. 3-4 figure monthly credit card swipes. Those are some of the differences, not to mention the additional hurdles of procurement teams, security reviews, legal reviews, and at least one executive sponsor who has never used the product. So what do you do as a PMM? Well, for enterprise PMMs, you focus on equipping your champion to sell internally because there are going to be 5, 10, 20 people you never me ...Read More

Riches are in Niches. If your product is functionally similar (and not truly differentiated) to competitors at 2x the price, you have one of three real options, and most of them are not pure PMM problems. Option one: find the segment where you're worth 2x. Twenty-year-old products usually have a customer cohort for whom switching cost, integration depth, compliance posture, or service relationship genuinely justifies the premium. Your job is to identify that cohort with surgical precision and st ...Read More

Claude Co-work...How good are your prompts? Competitors are pushing out tons of collateral. It's actually pretty easy now to go grab a few key pieces of collateral...always have a fake email address just for this purpose, i use a google apps domain that costs $10/yr or whatever and a few bucks a month for the email seat. You can use all this information to your advantage to see how these companies differentiate their products in a crowded space. And now with benefit of AI, you can automate a ton ...Read More

ABM is targeted and in support of the Sales team. Obviously there's more nuance to it, but I think of it as much more mid-funnel exercise. You already know the 20-100 or whatever accounts you want to target. You can tier those up if you want and dedicate more time/resources/etc to the top accounts, but ultimately everything for them is going to be more bespoke. Whether that's high touch events, product demos, lunch and learns, etc. or even bespoke digital ad targeting. You want to measure the en ...Read More

Product teams should view PMMs as their distribution channel. What are their needs/wants? Typically to drive awareness and usage of features. For more self-serve products, perhaps that includes revenue goals as well. So how can PMM help them and where? I'd say, awareness, adoption and pipeline is the right funnel to build to measure product and pmm performance against. Tactically, I've found holding weekly or bi-weekly sessions depending on how imminent the launch is to ensure that the launch pl ...Read More

There’s a ton of tools that can do this for you, let alone building an AI stack to rebuild these videos for whatever the cost of the tokens consumed are.  Especially in this current dev environment where product UIs/feature/functionality are changing rapidly, the expectation to have a single video that “demos” the product is unsustainable. Instead, focus on building out a series of mini-videos that show off various use cases/jobs to be done. Post those on your youtube, have your sales reps use t ...Read More

Product education doesn’t stop with sales, it has to extend to post-sales/account management/CS teams. While a lot of this might be achievable at larger orgs/mature products with product and usage signals, sometimes just giving these teams a nicely packaged outreach email, landing page, video and talk track is enough for them to re-engage with a happy (read: quiet) customer and get them excited about that expansion opportunity. Packaging this into QBRs as we do at Pomerium is also an easy way to ...Read More

You have to start at the ground floor with a consistent narrative. Company-level positioning, the master deck, the hero one-pager. This is the “I have a first call in 5 minutes what do I pull up” starter pack. You as the PMM should be able to take these calls with 5 minutes notice (not hypothetically…like actually. Go and see if a rep you’re friends with will let you do this while they shadow and fill in whatever gaps you might have). Next, you will need to have vertical and use-case specific co ...Read More

Days 1-30. Senior PMMs need to be experts on the product and sales process within the first 30 days. Especially in the world of Claude co-work, call recordings, etc. data can be synthesized and analyzed quickly. They also need to be building relationships across the sales/customer and product/engineering orgs. By the end of the first month they should have a good pulse of how the company/business works internally, and how our customers use us externally. Days 31-60 should be focused on deliverin ...Read More