AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing, Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann on Self-Serve Product Marketing

Here are several nuances (generalizations, not hard truths) to consider between self-serve and enterprise customers from a product marketing standpoint: Who they are: Self-serve: end-users, individuals or small teams, individual contributors to lower-level management Enterprise: could be users or buyers, larger teams or departments or even entire companies, director level+, you may also find that regulated industries like government or financial services can only buy through Enterprise sales Wha ...Read More

Typically the goal of user onboarding is to quickly realize value from your product and achieve some sort of usage goal associated with your product funnel. In the case of products like Zoom, it'd be scheduling and conducting your first X calls or meetings. For SurveyMonkey, it's deploying your first survey and collecting at least X responses. So to understand how to improve that from a business metrics + customer experience standpoint, you'll want to understand what blocks or enables users to s ...Read More

Ooooh I'd challenge that if you have a sales team, self-serve PMMs should still be thinking about sales enablement when it comes to education around the features you're taking to market. Ultimately, sales and customer success should be equipped with knowledge of the entire product. Other self-serve PMM responsibilities include: Doing customer, market, and competitive research to inform the product & GTM strategy Owning product messaging, including ongoing maintenance of a product claim libra ...Read More

My best advice for making sure the voice of the consumer is considered when product is developing their strategy and roadmap is to create forums for sharing consumer and market insights. This could look like: Establishing customer feedback loops between product and the customer-facing teams (customer success, customer support, client services, etc.). At SurveyMonkey, we have a quarterly cadence where frontline teams share the most requested features (with associated deal impact), product then ev ...Read More

Ok, well, I work at SurveyMonkey so I'm a bit biased here. :) And I feel especially lucky to be a product marketer with the ability to survey the market and our customers (and internal customer-facing teams) so easily using our own product! These are several of the types of surveys we own on the product marketing team (the list is much longer for the entire marketing department): Market and competitive intel Buyer persona research Message & claims testing Product value prop prioritization Cu ...Read More

At SurveyMonkey, we had several false starts when first introducing our Enterprise sales motion (thinking back to my earlier years at the company in 2015-16). The main challenges we ran into were around (1) feature differentiation between our self-serve and enterprise offering, and (2) ensuring the profitability of our sales business given we were introducing the new cost of a sales and customer success teams + all of the supporting cross-functional teams and software/tools needed to run that ar ...Read More