AMA: Salesforce Former Vice President, Industries Marketing, Jeff Otto on Industry Product Marketing

Sharing how I think about this as an industry marketer. My first step would be to huddle with my sales and product leaders and align common goals (where possible). If you are working within a larger organization, perhaps start by collaborating with your sales strategy, sales programs and sales enablement teams, then up the chain to sales/product leadership.  In addition to business outcomes (ARR, etc.) you'll want to leverage the collaboration with these teams to determine the enablement program ...Read More

As industry marketers, our hope is to get a message that we author deeply embedded into the minds of as many target buyers across as many accounts as possible. Some measurements of this ‘influence’ are quantifiable (measurable) and some are not.   When we are trying to reach a new audience of target buyers, we may look at our investments on channels where those audiences congregate and ask questions about our content’s reach (SEO, how many unique page views, impressions?). We may want to measure ...Read More

Every company is a bit different, so the structure of roles and responsibilities are specific to the situation (size of the marketing org, product portfolio mix, selling team structure, target markets), but here are a few areas of responsibility that I feel should be in on the charter of every industry marketing team.   First, an industry marketing team should know their target industry buyers better than anyone. They should lead the development and evolution of the internal buyer personas, the ...Read More

With my industry product marketers, I nurture the development of a set of skills that I feel differentiate them. These are the skills I feel an industry product marketer should be exceptional at: 1.) Know your industry buyer personas. 2.) An industry product marketer should be able to speak in the native language of that industry. They should know the industry jargon, abbreviations, and the way their business functions. 3.) They should hold themselves accountable to ensuring their messaging is r ...Read More

I’ve often found that personally delivering customer-facing presentations is a great way to test messaging and positioning and learn first-hand about a buyer and their priorities. Approach: First specialize in a relevant topic and master a customer-facing presentation that you know you can deliver impactfully. Then offer yourself as a resource to your sellers. AEs are always looking for help to drive sales pipeline, and given most sales calls are occurring virtually during the pandemic, it is ea ...Read More

At Salesforce I’ve worked for 7 different executives in just over 6 years. Each of these leaders had a different mixture of leadership characteristics, and what I try to always look for is their ‘killer app’ - the leadership behaviors, and skills that they brought with them that were differentiated. New tools I could add to my personal leadership “tool box”.  Here are a few that I strive to master: A leader who builds a coalition of influential stakeholders around their vision, who proactively s ...Read More

There are a couple dimensions to this that I find helpful to double-click into depending on your company's situation. First is creating a clear delineation between Industry Marketing and Industry Product Marketing.  To me, the initial need for Industry Marketing is driving awareness and brand relevance within a specific industry. This is done through speaking the native language of that industry with relevant content marketing, primary research into an industry’s end consumers, internal research ...Read More

Although there are so many great resources out there across every facet of technology marketing, I really haven’t found any in-depth resources that focus specifically on industry marketing strategy. [Honestly], one reason why I wanted to host this AMA was to give myself the space to reflect and write down some of the industry marketing strategies I’ve developed over the years, and provide this AMA as a resource to our community of marketers. I hope you find this AMA helpful, and if you do find s ...Read More

There is an in-depth science to this that many sales or product strategy teams leverage, so with that caveat, I'm sharing a high-level approach. My recommendation is to break down the problem piece by piece and find each variable needed to set a revenue target (and a sales pipeline target and coverage ratio based on close rates to support attainment of that revenue target).   First get a sense of the addressable market. Talk with your sales leaders (or strategy team) to determine if you have a w ...Read More