AMA: Salesforce Head of Product Marketing - Security, Integrations, Mobile, Harish Peri on Go-to-Market Strategy

How does your company think of its 'market'? This is essentially a segmentation exercise but sometimes the hardest part. This requires alignment between sales, product, and marketing and is a great starting point for PMM to make an impact. Decide on the GTM 'vector' early - ie. verticals, company size, revenue band, geo, use case, needs based. Decide on the definitions of each and write them down For a given release or launch, what are the priority segments?. Not everything is going to be equall ...Read More

Making assumptions about pricing and not vetting them with sales VERY early in the process Assuming that its a 'handoff' to sales enablement vs in reality its an ongoing partnership where PMM needs to lean in quite a bit to help Not factoring in global requirements VERY early on and discovering late in the game that its not just a 'localization' issue that will handled by the 'local' teams Not factoring in migration or EOL requirements and just focusing on the new, shiny products. Customers have ...Read More

I always come back to the fact that each segment in your GTM plan needs its own launch approach. This is why there's no one-size fits all E.g. if you have a target segment of self-serve customers, the best launch tactics would involve in-product marketing, guided help, short videos, blog posts, social engagement, really using tools like Intercom to push information contextually to where your users are E.g. if your target is large enterprises, the launch tactic would be more of enabling the accou ...Read More

Making the assumption here that vertical = industry. Industry definition - which taxonomy are you using. NAICS, SIC, propietary, DUNS, Clearbit? This is important because there is a lot of nuance hidden in sub-verticals, so getting your language aligned is key TAM - what is the actual addressable market for your product or portfolio or launch? This can be based on historical win rates by industry/sub industry for an existing product, or can be based on focus groups/survey data of your prospect b ...Read More

This was a product I helped launch more than a year ago. It was a product that had high market demand and was long overdue for the target buyers. If you reference the question I answered on 'GTM blueprint', this launch had everything in reverse. Unclear Target Segment - we didnt have alignment on who the exact segment was based on launch-day product capabilities, use cases, company size, etc. The broad feeling was the target was 'everyone', which is always a recipe for failure. Misalignment on s ...Read More

It comes down again to segmentation, target and positioning. How critical is the new release/features to your target segment? Alternatively, it might seem like a small feature but can unlock a new market. Depending on the answer to these, you need to decide how big a deal you want to make of it.   The right amount of information for your GTM teams is based on their sales process. If they need a datasheet, a demo, a first+ second call deck, and supporting landing pages to match their opportunity ...Read More

Success is only as good as the definition of success. So in the early days of the launch you need to have a aligned defintion of what the launch goal is. Market share, awareness, competitive takeouts, upsell/cross-sell. Define it very clearly and define what the metric is for success. Also define the expected timeline for success, and ensure you have the actual instrumentation to measure it.   Then the launch leader should commit to regular updates to the launch stakeholders on success metrics, ...Read More