AMA: SAP Director of Product Marketing, Danny Sack on Solutions Product Marketing

If the marketing machine has been created correctly, this should be fairly measureable. In a prior role we had an excellent demand generation team who tracked how different messaging worked over time. We could run little A/B tests on our dotcom and outreach to see if any messages were particularly effective.   All of this is really nibbling around the edges though. Your product messaging needs to clearly articulate the problem customers face, and how the product helps them.   A colleague once sa ...Read More

This is an interesting question. In my experience, the most important soft skills needed for PMMs are influence management, and public speaking skills.   Influence management would be getting people from outside of your department or team to work on your project. Good influence management is not just asking people to help, but making sure they understand the value of the work they're doing. If someone says they can't help, going to their manager to help with priorities needs to be done with a so ...Read More

This is a really great question and one that will define the role you play in the organization greatly. I like to say that when the PMM team sits in Product Management, they become capital P Product, lowercase m marketing managers (PmM). The focus is heavy on technical capabilities and you're going to spend a less time with the Marketing team. Often this felt like I was throwing my work "over the wall" to the marketing team. When I've sat in Marketing it's reversed. Lowercase p, capital M (pMM) ...Read More

In smaller organizations, I've found this is much harder. The marketing team, sales team, and product team might all sit very close to each other. Small organizations essentially require everyone to have a technical/product expertise that just doesn't happen in larger orgs. The sales teams will just ask the PM directly, and the marketing teams will focus on the key messaging for the product(s) that drive the company. As the company grows, the roles required within marketing, sales, and product g ...Read More