AMA: Snowflake Product Marketing Lead-Retail & Consumer Goods, Kelly Xu on Industry Product Marketing

I would start with learning more about the account. What are their company priorities and key initiatives? What personas are you meeting with and what are the pain points they’ve shared? What technology are they using today and what are their key areas of technology investments? I would go from there to put together the personalized pitch, highlighting the use cases and value prop that will resonate the most with the challenges they are facing. 

There are multiple criteria to decide whether a dedicated industry marketing resource is needed. First, does this vertical need distinct, industry specific messaging and GTM motion? Are the use cases very different from other industries? So different that an industry agnostic story wouldn’t be effective? If an industry needs some industry specific features, or faces industry specific regulations and maturity curve, it might warrant dedicated marketing resources too. Second, does it have alignment with sales? Are there a critical mass of sellers who are dedicated to sell to accounts in that vertical and can take your messaging & positioning to market? Third, does the industry have a big enough TAM to justify the investment? What are the sub-vertical within the industry or accounts and partners that are in the ecosystem? Fourth, are there proven customer success and ongoing resources to keep investing and growing this vertical? Does the company have a lot of opportunity to win and grow in that vertical? An industry led GTM motion is a long term commitment, sales need to get familiar with the vertical specifics, the marketing team needs time to develop assets, the funnel takes time to nurture and the pipeline takes time to grow. Without a long term commitment, you won’t be able to make the most out of your initial investment.

First and foremost is the industry sales team. Usually industry PMMs have sales teams that are also mapped to a particular industry. Sometimes there’s also verticalized pre-sales or post sales teams that the PMMs work closely with. Second is the industry specialists team. This team usually has deep industry or functional expertise and are great thought partners with PMMs on a variety of GTM motions. It can be collaborating on messaging, pitch decks, speaking sessions and developing the key use cases. Third is the rest of the marketing team. Industry PMMs are internal SMEs for the rest of the marketing org to understand the key personas, use cases, top customers, key publishers/conferences where we can reach these audiences, and work with the cross-functional marketing partners to develop the overall marketing strategies and campaigns.

I think Sharebird has a lot of great content on product marketing overall. Industry product marketing also has a lot of similarities to solutions marketing, audience marketing and outbound product marketing in general, so any content that touches those topics would be a good resource. Another great source of inspiration would be to see how other companies are marketing to a particular industry. What are the key pain points and use cases other vendors are highlighting, where do they show up and what campaigns do they run? If you find another vendor has a compelling story or smart marketing strategies, even if they are selling very different products as you do, chances are they’ve done their research and have something you can learn from.

In principle, new product launches and horizontal use cases should be centralized. Industry PMMs should decide which features are the most relevant to their vertical, and own the end to end GTM strategy for their vertical. Of course the specifics can differ based on team resources and where there’s synergies and overlap.

"Talking to customers" doesn't always need to happen via a customer call. I have personally found the following ways to be very helpful: 1) Industry reports published by analysts, consulting firms and relevant market research firms in your domain. These reports usually highlight customer priorities, challenges, pain points and top use cases at an aggregated level, and can be a very effective way to understand the broader market trend. 2) Online communities, be that X, Reddit, G2, Medium, LinkedIn, etc, anywhere your target audience are sharing with each other. 3) Leverage insights from existing calls/analyses. Without setting up an additional call, you can get a lot of customer insights via sales calls, QBRs, user research, regular newsletter/readouts that touches on customer use cases already. 4) Speak to colleagues who work with a lot of customers regularly. This is particularly effective if you have a specific question or want to workshop something for your messaging or campaign.