AMA: Salesforce VP of Product Marketing, Rekha Srivatsan on SMB Product Marketing

My team is responsible for product messaging & positioning for Salesforce's core solutions for small businesses across our high-growth industries and customer & community marketing initiatives. On my team:  One PMM per key Salesforce solution for SMBs  One PMM leading our high-growth SMB Industry verticals One PMM leading our customer and community marketing initiatives  One technical PMM  This helps us align team members with the right revenue goals, balances the work on the team while ...Read More

Welcome to the PMM world! ;) My approach to this would be:  Take a closer look at the particular job responsibilities. If the job responsibilities are heavy on content creation, I'd include samples of the content you've created in your marketing portfolio.  In addition, include a variety of different content pieces too. This will help the hiring team know your diverse skills as well as give them ideas on what they can do -- making you a standout winner.  You can also look at the company's websit ...Read More

Sorry, that didn't work out! Here's how I would approach this assignment:  Study Certain's website to understand their current product messaging and positioning. And make sure your draft is different from this but not drastically different.  Play closer attention to their customer stories/testimonials to understand their use cases. This gives you a glimpse of what features to highlight in your GTM strategy.  The goal is to get more leads, so take a look at their pricing and packaging to see if t ...Read More

You have all the right line items! In addition, I'd recommend: Focus groups for messaging/positioning/pricing & packaging: I'm a huge fan of getting feedback from prospects and customers on any new changes. This helps to have impactful content.  Video editor/agency: Having a 3rd party video editor helps speed up content creation considerably. Plus, they can usually handle multiple projects at the same time and you can create new sales or external-facing collateral pretty fast. Tool to track ...Read More

Obviously, the target personas are different which informs the messaging, positioning, pricing, and packaging strategy.  But at a high level, in SMB, the user and the decision-maker are usually the same person. This means the ROI of a solution or feature is extremely important and needs to be highlighted more in the messaging.  SMBs are also really big on word of mouth, so use that tactic to your advantage -- a referral program is a great example.  Leverage your customers as much as you can in y ...Read More

Congratulations on figuring out what you want to do next! Project management skills are invaluable to any function, particularly in PMM. The reason being PMMs are often handling multiple cross-functional projects at the same time. Here's what I would do:  Shadow PMMs in your organization to understand closely their day-to-day roles and responsibilities. Develop a better understanding of what you like in what they do -- this will help you anchor your PMM role.  Ask for an "extra credit project" f ...Read More

Obviously, the target personas are different which informs the messaging, positioning, pricing, and packaging strategy. But at a high level, in SMB, the user and the decision-maker are usually the same person. This means the ROI of a solution or feature is extremely important and needs to be highlighted more in the messaging. SMBs are also really big on word of mouth, so use that tactic to your advantage -- a referral program is a great example. Leverage your customers as much as you can in your ...Read More

You are already one step ahead about narrowing down your next move to product marketing - congratulations!  Product marketing roles and responsibilities are different with every company. I'd encourage you to start talking to your target company PMMs and your current company PMMs to get a better sense of their day-to-day.  Start aligning your current projects to map to the PMM responsibilities. For example: see if there is an opportunity to partner with your organization's PMM team on a common pr ...Read More