AMA: Splunk Director, Product Marketing, Rinita Datta on Messaging

Simply put, if your cross-functional stakeholders change behavior or execute differently based on conversations with you, you have influence. If they nod politely and nothing changes, you have work to do. In addition to all the markers noted in other questions in this AMA, watch for the following things: Are sales reps heavily rewriting and reworking your messaging and assets? Did your ‘voice of customer’ reporting change the product roadmap? Are there shadow PMM teams or roles emerging to close ...Read More

A/B testing is difficult in B2B as sales cycles are long and more often than not, there’s not enough volume to prove statistical significance. Even so, here are some things you can try: Work with a research firm or your own research org to do message testing. You can choose to disclose your company or not (blind testing) and go through rounds of 1:1 interviews with target personas/ICP, form your hypotheses and validate them with a mass survey. This is a good mechanism to see which words, terms, ...Read More

All you need is a repeatable narrative report that ties your initiatives and efforts for a release or a quarter to the resulting revenue impact, change in market perception and share, customer satisfaction et al. Here’s a sample format, It is best to keep this report to 2 pages max, show the before and after metrics and keep it consistent for every release. 1. Release overview - always set the context first What was launched Target ICP / segment Key message(s) Goal (e.g., increase adoption of fe ...Read More

What your buyers care about changes as your product matures towards market leadership. At the earliest stages, you show the vision and sell ‘possibility’. Then comes customer proof which accelerates deals, followed by trust, reliability and certainty. Pre–Product-Market Fit: Focus on the problem you are solving, not feature depth. Show the vision, create urgency, and explain “why now.” As full customer stories are hard to wrangle, rely on showcasing founder credibility and design partners. Your ...Read More

This is the process I have usually followed: Get all your key stakeholders on a call and align on the objective first. What would success look like? Is there a metric that is suffering that you are trying to fix - eg. win rate, trial conversion, sales cycle length - which makes it straightforward. If this is a new initiative, ask questions like what behavior do we want to change. That will give you ideas on the right metric to anchor on. Eg. it doesn’t make sense to measure DAU for a feature tha ...Read More

Here are a few ways you can test for message market fit before investing heavily in campaigns: Hire a research firm to do message testing with your ICP through interviews and surveys. You can do this through a NDA-protected customer forum/advisory board/community groups as well. You want to hear your prospects/customers relate with and expand on your positioning of the problem your product is solving, using the same language. Test your messaging with sales reps - get early feedback before broad ...Read More

The best way to measure how well your messaging is working is to track metrics like opportunity stage and trial-to-paid conversion rates, and watch for positive shifts in objection handling and win rates. A combination of your CRM tools, sales enablement DAM, survey tools, an excel sheet and a LLM are enough to do this regularly. A good step by step process to follow for rolling out new messaging would be: Write down your hypotheses, eg, “if we position X like this, Y metric will improve by Z in ...Read More

Yes, multiple teams influence growth, meaning they are responsible for growth. At the same time, PMM is accountable for building the foundational messaging and marketing strategy that drives this growth. Here are few quarterly leading and lagging indicators that you should add to a PMM impact dashboard to attribute revenue impact to product marketing: New sales pipeline contribution ($) from marketing, capturing paid conversions from trials, events, regional activations, digital sales and more.  ...Read More