AMA: SurveyMonkey Director of Product Marketing, Mike Greenberg on Self-Serve Product Marketing

The right team structure is going to be highly dependent on your business, so there's no one right answer. I've been on teams that have been organized by product, vertical, customer segment, and GTM motion (self-serve vs. sales assisted) with equal success and equal lack of success. Company-level priorities can provide a great North Star to align your team's structure and accountability to. For example, if one of your top goals is to improve NPS by 10 points this year, you might do well to have ...Read More

This sounds like the classic "leaky bucket" problem: your bucket is leaking (users), and you're not sure why, so it's hard to figure out what to do about it. Solving this requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative insights. As a starting point, make sure you understand exactly where and when in the customer journey you are losing engagement with users. This might be really granular: if people are signing up for your service and then never come back, there might be an issue with your ...Read More

Thanks for sharing that article! Though I can’t speak directly to Slack’s land-and-expand tactics, we follow a similar strategy at SurveyMonkey, and I'm happy to share some insights into what makes it work. In a bottom-up SaaS expansion strategy, the end goal is typically to get to the IT buyer by growing an installed footprint in an organization that’s too large (for IT) to ignore. This is how Slack has grown, and it’s fundamentally different than a top-down strategy where you’re more typically ...Read More

Great question. There's still a lot of internal enablement involved in self-serve GTM, as we need our website creatives, email marketers, social media managers, and so on to be well versed in our product and value messaging so that they're empowered to drive awareness and sell through digital channels. In a perfect world, if we do our jobs right, outbound marketers are able to do this without too much PMM intervention, which frees our team to focus on high level GTM strategy, delivering market a ...Read More

Great question — it's all too easy for self-serve marketers to get disconnected from customers, especially if you're used to gathering this feedback through customer-facing orgs. As a leader at SurveyMonkey, I'm going to be a bit biased here, but I'll provide some general guidance on choosing a feedback solution, and you can guess what product I'm recommending: Research teams are great — we have an awesome one — but lots of orgs don't have dedicated product/market research functions, or those th ...Read More

As a partial answer, it's helpful to think about some of the things that Sales and CS roles might typically contribute to the customer journey or your understanding of customers, and how you can obtain that value in a proactive or self-serve way that's scaled and repeatable. As a self-serve PMM without the benefit of those roles, you need to be considering: Do you have all the pieces in place to help people through the pre- and post-purchase customer journey without human intervention: Is your w ...Read More

Marketing fundamentals are the same whether your growth strategy is PLG or traditional outbound marketing (and the two are not exclusive!): you still need to understand your target market, develop effective messaging, and get in front of the right people at the right moment. At SurveyMonkey, we engage in both PLG and traditional marketing as part of our overall GTM strategy. With PLG, we are thinking strategically about how the product itself can act as a channel for delivering our message, conv ...Read More