AMA: Salesforce Former Senior Director, Product Marketing, Jason Perocho on Developing your Product Marketing Career

Analytical skills tend to be the preferred skill set of a product marketer because they are "running the business". Product Marketers own a product's P&L and must have the business acumen to drive revenue. Important the ones trying to size and segment the marketplace. Additionally, they'll probably be on the front lines trying to determine what segment, region, or geo to invest their budget.  Brand marketing's closest overlap is with the Marketing Programs PMM function. They will ensure that ...Read More

The path towards senior management is anything but a straight line. The best product marketers I've encountered worked in something other than product marketing early in their careers. These roles include sales, demand gen, or engineering.  Personally, I career transitioned a lot in my 20s and pursued whatever interested me. I started by studying IT (Database systems) and was an engineer, wrote speeches in the government, became a product manager in the Pentagon, and then became a product market ...Read More

I wish I understood how product marketing ideally works. Based on my experience, here's how product marketing teams should work together: A Product marketing lead identifes a goal. The three goals are usually to create pipe, mature pipe, or close deals. The PMM will select a target based off what the business needs. They can double down on a region/segment/geo that is working, or try to lift a poor performing area.  They'll create a positioning statement and messaging hierarchy that will be used ...Read More

The number one skill is influencing without authority. More specifically, influencing authority in a matrixed organization. By design, product marketing sits at the intersection of a multitude of functions, each with their individual KPIs. Your job is to balance the needs of your various stakeholders to drive revenue and adoption for your product(s). If your company has one product, then this task may be fairly straight forward. If your company has multiple products or multiple portfolios, then ...Read More

I am not aware of any one key certification for product marketers. I work with PMMs that come from backgrounds in campaigns, sales, engineering, and product management. Each of those backgrounds lend themselves to a specific function in product marketing.  In my experience, there are three types of product marketers:  Technical PMM Market Programs PMM Go-to-Market PMM.  An aspiring product marketer should identify their entry point into one of the aforementioned functions. If there was one skill ...Read More

PMMs are responsible for the following: Positioning Statement & Messaging - This is the heart of Product Marketing. Using our expertise, we'll create the positioning and messages we want in the market. Business Goal - We'll define what impact we're trying to have on the business. This includes what segment / industry / geo we need to go after to lift our business. Market / TAM - We'll identify and define the market and opportunity we're going after Sales Enablement - We will work with sales ...Read More

The best approach would be to ensure you have some great facing public content that you can attach to your CV when applying for a job. Post-MBA PMMs tend to be content workhorses. Leaders need PMMs that can write clearly, concisely, and relatably.  I also recommend MBAs go out and get some practical demand gen marketing experience. Start a blog and then invest a few dollars to promote it. Try and get syndicated on a content hungry site like Business Insider, HuffPo, or Forbes. This will give you ...Read More

Product Marketing is an interesting role because it puts you at the intersection of so many different functions, allowing you to "run the business". Outside of CMO, a couple other logical steps I've seen PMMs take are Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or General Manager (GM).Chief Revenue Officer is the most interesting of the bunch because it puts you at the center of all revenue growth. Most of the time, you would find a sales leader occupying this role, but I have seen several with a strong product ...Read More

First, remember there is a difference between a product marketing and campaigns/demand generation lead. Product Marketers focus their time on customer research, value prop, go-to-market plan, competitive landscape, and market programs. In companies big and small, you would probably have a demand gen specialist who would keep up to date on marketing tools in order to optimize spend across channels.  If you are part of the team that is investing in marketing technologies, you should talk to your c ...Read More

Tough question since titles vary from company to company. My answer for this question is strictly from a Salesforce perspective.  My expectation for a Sr. PMM to Director would be that they are able to build a team across all functions of PMM and align cross functional partners (PMs, AR, PR, Campaigns, Content) around an initiative that has a significant business impact. This includes, but not limited to, launching a product, repositioning a product in the marketplace, coordinating a worldwide e ...Read More

When hiring a junior product marketer, I try and balance between hard and soft skills. For hard skills, I check to see if they are good at  Diagnosing the market Identifying pains and benefits Writing.  I can't emphasize that last point enough. Make sure your junior PMM is a great writer because they will tend to be your content engine.  For soft skills, I check to see if they're good at influencing direction and are genuinely a good person to be around.  Questions that I would ask to test the a ...Read More

You're absolutley right! The first starts by understanding how much emphasis the company puts on distribution vs. product. An observation I've made is that companies who have a CEO with a sales/marketing background give PMMs more authority over product development and GTM. Companies with CEOs with an engineering/product background tend to give PMMs a more limited scope focused on market validation, positioning, and messaging.  What has made me successful in a PMM career was starting on a nascent ...Read More

Product Marketing at a SaaS company requires two distinct motions:  Acquiring new logos Expanding your install base through upsell and cross sell products.  In general, most SaaS companies lead with a core product to attract new logos. Acquiring new logos in the B2B space is a heavy lift, usually with very long deal cycle times. Product marketers must depply understand not only the persona, but must intimately understand the buying team and how decisions are made. Content should be aligned to he ...Read More

We understand what marketing channels work best for a feature rollout by talking to our customer. Everything we do always comes back to understanding the customer better than anyone else in the company.  For example, if I talk to a customer and I ask them why they haven't enabled a specific feature, I would ask them how would they like to learn about new features. I'd run surveys, focus groups, and A/B testing to determine the most effective communication strategy to ensure customers adopot our ...Read More