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

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 arm of our business. Here are several things that would indicate you may be ready to introduce an Enterprise sales motion: * A significant portion of your existing customer base works at medium to large size companies (indicator that there would be larger budgets) * There's a high prevalence of having multiple users at the same company (either used by an entire team or multiple departments). Or you notice there is a high prevalence of account sharing (which was the case at SurveyMonkey). * Self-service checkout is no longer sufficient for customers -- you're being asked for invoicing. Some companies have policies & limits for what employees can expense vs what requires going though a procurement process. * You're starting to notice that there is a difference between buyers and users of your product. A successful leap to enterprise requires a significant investment in the following: * Product: Building product differentiation between your enterprise and self-serve product. This could fall into several buckets including: * Organizational differentiation to meet the demands of larger organizations, like user administration or enhanced data privacy/security * Consumption-based differentiation to align value with high customer usage, like unlimited API calls or AI prompts * User-level differentiation that reserves advanced features/functionality typically needed at larger companies, like premium integrations * Go-to-market team headcount across sales, customer success, product marketing, and later introducing more operations & enablement teams as you scale * Tools & technology like your CRM & contracting tools * Data & research to inform your GTM strategy Things to consider when making the leap: * Start by mining your existing customer base vs trying to drive pipeline * Start with a narrow ideal customer profile (ICP), do a test pilot, learn/iterate, and only expand once you see success

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 library * Driving self-serve product/feature GTM launches * Producing bottom-of-funnel product content. This could mean owning the product section of your website, creating product videos, etc. * Contributing to self-serve pricing and packaging strategy + leading any pricing customer comms * Contributing to other self-serve growth projects: paid campaigns and landing pages, email series, in-product promotions, etc. * Leading internal product enablement (e.g. product boot camp for new hire onboarding)

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 * What they need: * Self-serve: ease of adoption, care most about features/functionality, self-serve product training & onboarding * Enterprise: time to value (ROI), cares about features/functionality in addition to privacy/security and administrative features to manage users and data, likely more complex use cases & require more premium integrations, may need higher touch onboarding and implementation services * How they buy: * Self-serve: 1-few people involved in the purchase, online research, online reviews, online checkout, users can purchase & expense the cost with simple manager approval * Enterprise: A few - several people involved, online research, online reviews, analyst recommendations, security/legal vendor reviews, involves procurement to negotiate and sign contracts, may require custom Master Service Agreements (MSA) Hypothetically, this is how some PMM projects may vary between self-serve and Enterprise: Messaging: * Self-serve: scope would include product messaging + user persona messaging with a focus on * Enterprise: scope would include buyer persona messaging and additional focus on data privacy/security, additional focus on messaging for sales pitches, discovery questions, objection handling Go-to-market launches: * Self-serve: focus on press, organic, web, in-product discoverability and scaled customer comms, with customer support enablement * Enterprise: includes the above plus sales and customer success enablement + materials to enable sales/CS customer comms, analyst briefings Content: * Self-serve: typically digital content on the website, blog, video, etc. * Enterprise: includes sales materials like pitch decks, collateral, demos, etc. In terms of how you balance your time, you'll want to understand the relative size of the businesses ($-wise) and roughly allocate your time that way.

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 evaluates those requests against several criteria, then reports back on what made the cut for the roadmap. * Visiting product team meetings on a regular basis to report on competitive and market intelligence. * Building great PM <> PMM relationships at the IC level, and coach PMMs to bring customer insights to the table in those 1:1 conversations. Over time, PMM will be looked to as an expert on the industry & customer and will be consulted earlier and more regularly in the product planning process.

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 successfully achieve that usage goal (and have a positive experience doing so!). For research like this, the targeting can be just as important as the questions you ask. You'll want to make sure the people you talk to fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). And I'd actually recommend talking to people who weren't successful in reaching that onboarding milestone AND to those who were successful, so you can get a good comparison. UX research best practices recommend avoiding yes/no questions. Here are some sample questions to ask to get your research participants to open up about their onboarding experience: * Think back to when you signed up for our product. What were you trying to accomplish that day? * What was your first impression when you logged into the product for the first time? * Did you encounter any moments of frustration? Moments of delight? * Was there anything about the product experience that felt counter-intuitive? or hard to find? * Did you encounter any of our welcome emails? If so, were they useful? Why/why not? * What would have improved your experience as a first-time user? * What is your preferred method for learning how to use a new product? Where would you expect to find that content? * What made it difficult or easy to achieve [onboarding milestone]? * If you were me, how would you help new users of our product achieve [onboarding milestone]?

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 * Customer feedback * Win/Loss Analysis * Sales Confidence When it comes to quantitative vs qualitative insights, I do want to make sure I'm including a balance of closed-ended (think: multiple choice) and open-ended (think comment box) questions. SurveyMonkey has advanced AI-powered analytics tools for surfacing insights and performing text analysis of open-ended questions. Examples of quantitative insights could be: * X% of customers say they have a particular challenge your product solves for * A stack rank of most important features customers look for in a product like yours * NPS trends & key driver analysis of what's impacting NPS Examples of qualitative insights could be: * Top reasons provided for why customers choose you vs a competitor * Thematic or sentiment analysis on open-ended answers