AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Solutions Marketing, Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann on Industry Product Marketing

Knowing when to introduce an industry product marketing motion depends on several factors: * Do you have product-industry fit? Or put another way, are you free of any product-industry fit barriers like compliance or regulatory needs? E.g.: HIPAA compliance for Healthcare * Are there early signs of success in that industry? E.g.: consistent stream of pipeline, significant contributor to revenue, decent win rates or deal sizes. * Is there buy-in from other dependent functions to support an industry GTM motion? Web/content resources to support the additional content needs; Budget to test into industry-specific campaigns, etc. * Do you have industry expertise on your sales/success team? For example, at SurveyMonkey, we had a dedicated team selling into financial services that was hired from that industry, spoke the lingo, etc. * And probably the most important: Is the messaging needed to attract your target customer in that industry significantly different than your current persona or use case based messaging? E.g.: for SurveyMonkey, we talk about patient feedback instead of customer feedback when marketing to Healthcare. When we first introduced industry product marketing at SurveyMonkey, we did an analysis across the above factors to make the case for a dedicated PMM hire. We already had experts on our sales team, and a significant portion of revenue from a couple key industries. It’s important to note that introducing an industry PMM function or motion doesn’t mean tackling ALL industries at once. You can start with just one, learn, and build a playbook for expanding to more industries later if you see success. You don’t want to overdo it, especially when you’re resource constrained.

I answered the "when to introduce industry marketing" question here: https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/q/product-marketing?answer=peBxUG2DnB&utm_source=questionanswer&utm_medium=share Let's talk about how to get it off the ground. Here are a few things to consider: * Get executive alignement. After a couple starts and stops trying to get industry marketing off the ground myself, make sure there is executive alignment on the industry strategy. Do your homework, create a presentation (or memo if that's your company's style), get buy-in individually with the necessary stakeholders, then get an audience at the executive level. * Your first pass at any new GTM motion should be treated like a pilot. Give the team space to test and learn. You may be trying new vendors, new channels, events, etc. They won't all work immediately and the strategy will need refinement over time. * Provide sufficient resources (and time) to see success. Many years ago at SurveyMonkey, we piloted a new healthcare solution and it was sunset within a year. But in hindsight, we didn't consider seasonal buying cycles, give our campaigns and nurture programs time to take root, or fund it enough to drive meaningful product awareness. * Start at the bottom of the funnel, and work your way up. You can be more nimble when piloting new pitch materials and talk tracks with sales. Once you see what's working, formalize it into content on your website and then move to campaigns with spend behind them.

I answered the "when to introduce industry marketing" question here: https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/q/when-does-it-make-sense-to-lean-into-a-dedicated-vertical-or-industry-marketing-function-and-once-you-decide-how-do-you-get-it-off-the-ground?answer=EVjqUpy0nk&utm_source=questionanswer&utm_medium=share But let's focus on when it should be its own full-time role vs embedded in existing PMM responsibilities. Early on, it is probably fine to have product marketing do a little industry marketing. Your existing team can probably handle things like writing your first batch of industry solution pages (like this: https://www.surveymonkey.com/industries/financial-services/) or creating a few high level industry one-pagers for your sales team. Here are some signs you may want to consider hiring an extra person dedicated to industry marketing: * As soon as you have a dedicated industry GTM effort, especially when there are multiple industries in that focus * As soon as industries that need tailored messaging become a significant part of your revenue (>15-25%) * As soon as your current product marketing team is spending a significant amount of time on industry-specific activities (>25%) AND feel like it's not enough or other core product marketing duties are being de-prioritized. * When the industry you want to focus on requires technical subject matter expertise that doesn't currently exist on the team.

Typically, when you get to the point of hiring Industry PMMs, I think of their role as sitting on top of the work your core PMMs are doing. In most cases, they're adapting and adding to the work already in motion. Here's how I'd split out the responsibility across product & industry marketers across various disciplines that PMM teams drive: Product Marketers: * Messaging focused on product functionality and benefits, covering horizontal industry-agnostic use cases * Lead all product & feature GTM launches, unless the feature was purpose-built for a specific industry * Sales collateral and enablement for anything not industry-specific * Drive thought leadership & content strategy for your core audience Industry Marketers: * Messaging focused on the use cases and benefits for a particular industry. * Involved in adapting GTM launch materials to an industry, lead product launches purpose-built for a specific industry * Sales collateral & enablement that are industry-specific * Drive thought leadership & content strategy for specific industries (e.g. webinars, white papers, etc) Note that you may also have Solution Marketing that carves out full-time roles to own use cases and personas that span your product offerings. All 3 roles can operate in harmony! :)

In short, however you're measuring success of your marketing programs today, cut by industry and trended over time. A couple things are critical to setting yourself up for success in measuring the impact of industry marketing: * Alignment on how you track industries & getting the data coverage you need so you can segment your user & sales data. You're likely not explicitly asking for "industry" in lead or signup forms, so you probably need to enrich your dataset with sources like Hoovers, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Clearbit, DataFox or others that pull in account-level data based on the contact's email address domain. The gold standard would be to leverage SIC or NAICS industry codes and map those to sub-category and category. * Deciding on the key metrics you want to influence and establish a baseline. In many cases, you already have a revenue stream from the industries you're focusing on, so pull the historical data to use as your baseline for benchmarking. Here's a summary of some metrics you may want to consider tracking over time for the industries you're targeting: * Top of funnel, early indicators * Campaign metrics like clicks & conversions could help you see if your new industry messaging is resonating. In-market AB tests are great for this too if you're just starting out. * Web metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic and engagement rates are also great for seeing if new content you're publishing is gaining traction. * Product metrics * Signups * Product usage * Paid conversions * Sales metrics * Opportunity & pipeline volume * Funnel conversion rates like MQL->SQL, SQL->Opp, and Win Rates * Average deal size * Length of the sales cycle

When I read the first part of your question, my first thought was to tie it to sales team quotas ;) In more mature industry GTM motions, having sales teams segmented by industry is best practice. For example, we had sales teams at SurveyMonkey fully dedicated to B2C, B2B, Financial Services and the public sector - they have different lingo, regulatory/compliance needs, use cases, product needs, etc. Ok, but what if you can't tie it to sales quotas? In my opinion, revenue may not be the right goal. You may want to focus on the metrics you can control and influence. Early on, focus on MQLs, qualified opportunities, and pipeline. As you continue to enable the reps and they gain confidence, you'll start to see AOVs and Win Rates improve. Early on, focus on those improvements. When a new motion is introduced, it will take time for reps to gain that confidence. They default to their comfort zones. Gamifying it can help: running competitions or spiffs. Showing momentum by celebrating big deals won in your target industry & sharing how the rep closed it. Once you see enough traction, your revenue forecasts will also start to become more accurate. Then you can make the case to structure territories by industry.