AMA: Procore Head of Industry/Audience Marketing; Director of Product Marketing, Zachary Reiss-Davis on Industry Marketing

I don't think I can help you on the full assignment within the scope of an AMA; especially since the sub-question reads like the company probably is going to be using this question for other candidates in the future. However, here are a few tips for any take-home interview round like this: If you're given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, make sure you do so; one key part of the exercise is seeing how you learn and research. Make sure you do your homework; know what the current messagi ...Read More

I love this question -- and it's actually one I ask candidates during my interview process as well, because the way that Product Marketing is measured overall varies widely across organizations.  Right now, I think of it across these five areas: Stakeholder alignment. This sounds "soft", but in industry marketing, your stakeholders are often even more broad than product marketing, and each group -- this includes Sales, P&T / R&D, Demand Gen / Campaigns, Enablement, Customer Success, and ...Read More

When industry marketing is working successfully, this question becames harder to answer because it is a core component of the product marketing organization, and so it's harder to tease apart. In general, pricing & packaging, win-loss analysis, competitive research, release marketing, product launches, and core assets such as pitch decks or demo videos tend to be the most industry (or audience) agnostic, while positioning and messaging needs to be divided out by industry, as does much of the ...Read More

Research has to be an ongoing, continual process -- if you aren't continually talking to market experts, customers, and prospects, you lose credibility both with your sales organization and with your product organization.  True standardization is less critical than repetition and at-bats, and building the muscles to produce high quality results quickly. If you can do that well, you'll have earned a seat that the product leadership table to influence roadmap because it won't be "so-and-so the pro ...Read More

Every single company, starting on the very first day that the founders have an idea on a napkin, should think, and resource, industry-first. Surprising? Well, that's because early stage startups need to have an extremely narrow focus on their ideal customer, which tends to be within a single industry at first. After that, and at scale, it can really depend on the type of product you're marketing, and how different the value propositions are by industry. At Procore, we've found that our core solu ...Read More

This is really tricky to do well, and requires strong executive leadership and business operations support to pull off. Right now, at Procore, I work in an environment where our sales teams -- and thus revenue targets -- are set by our three primary segments, so I don't have this issue, but our Product teams do -- and I've talked to them a lot about it, and I have also had this experience back when I was at Salesforce.  A few recommendations: Use modeling based on prior year attainment by indust ...Read More

First off, I think of both industry and solution marketing as specializations within product marketing; and there are cetainly successful companies that don't divide out their product marketing organization this way. The key distinction is the focus, and what the marketer needs to be a true expert in.  All product marketers, of course, need to "know" their products, solutions, buyers, and market and the key messages and value propositions of the union between each of those things. But in compani ...Read More

I've tackled this question a bit in other answers already, and I encourage you to check those out as well, but in essence -- industry marketing is one specialization in a mature product marketing organization, focused on key value propositions and message by industry. It's required when your ideal customer profile's needs, challenges, and the value that you can bring to their problems varies enough by industry that it's difficult to have "universal" positioning apply to each of your target indus ...Read More