AMA: Unbounce Chief Strategy Officer, Tamara Grominsky on Growth Product Marketing

This is going to depend entirely on the growth stage of your business and the health of your customer base. If you're a startup, you'll need to focus on getting new customers in the door. But, if those prospects or trialers aren't converting into paying customers, or are churning out rapidly in the first few months, then there's no point in adding more into a leaky bucket. You'll need to patch up the bucket first. In reality, balancing customer lifecycle initiatives will be an evolving and fluid activity. In order to maintain the right balance, you'll need insight into your lifecyle metrics. This means everything from setup and activation rate to churn and retention rate. (I'm a huge fan of the Reforge lifecycle model that they teach in their Growth Series.) This data is even better if it's at a cohorted level. You might find that for one of your segments you need to focus on retention, but for another segment, the focus should be on acquisition.

In the beginning, you'll most likely have a smaller PMM team - maybe with just one PMM. That means you'll need a well-rounded PMM generalist. Someone who is comfortable taking on everything from product launch to sales enablement to segmentation. Prioritization will be key to make sure the team is working on the highest-impact projects. As you scale, I'd recommend that you start structuring the team in a way that enhances and amplifies the partnership between product marketing and product management. This will usually mean aligning product marketers with product portfolios or value streams. It won't always be a 1:1 match of PM to PMM though. For this type of role, you're looking for PMMs who can go deeper, rather than broader. As the "owner" of their portfolio, they'll need to deeply understand the customer problem and opportunity space, and then identify go-to-market strategies throughout the entire product development lifecycle, leading into launch. In addition to portfolio PMMs, I always invest in one really strong growth product marketer. This role should be portfolio agnostic (ie. they support all PMMs on the team, think of it a bit like a consultant), and usually drives market research, segmentation and pricing initiatives across all product lines.

It's a great time to get into Product Marketing - demand is high, and supply is low. In my experience, great PMMs and PMs come from a wide variety of backgrounds, so there is no "one perfect path". They key is to take your existing skills and knowledge and position it in a way that matches the demands of a PMM role (positioning is a key component to PMM, so this will be a good exercise for you to go through!). Also, Product Marketing really is a large umbrella term. Product marketing looks different everywhere, and the role takes different shapes company to company. I would recommend that you take the time to assess what type of go-to-market motion and PMM role would align best to your skillset and interests. If you have a solid background in sales, it might be easiest to get your start in PMM at a sales-led company. If you're more knowledgable in product, a PLG motion will probably be best! Once you've identified this criteria, make a list of the companies that would fit the bill. Even if they don't have roles open, reach out to folks on their PMM team to start building relationships and learning about the company. It's much easier to land a role in the future if you can get someone to refer you, and you'll be able to demonstrate your thoughtful interest in the opportunity.

I would argue that the definition of product marketing remains the same regardless of go-to-market motion. At it's core, product marketing is about identifying the right customer and markets that find your product valuable, positioning and packaging that value in a compelling way, and then driving go-to-market strategy to capture that market. What changes across go-to-market motions are channel strategies and areas of focus. For example, if you're at a company with a sales-led go-to-market motion - ie. you have an outbound sales team that drives the majority of purchases - then your role as a PMM team will be more focused on sales enablement. This will involve heavy focus on activities like competitive intelligence and sales collateral. One piece of feedback from a high value account may carry a lot of weight, and you'll focus a lot on qualitative research. But, if you're at a PLG company, you may not have a sales team at all. In this case, you'll be working closer with product and UX teams to ensure that you've optimized the customer journey and lifecycle and that you're building in growth loops. Your trialer, freemium or customer base will likely be larger than in a sales-led org, so you'll spend more time on quantitative research in addition to qualitative research.

I've seen this done successfully a number of different ways. Here are a few common ones: 1. Usage - What is the % of your sales team that is using the content and collateral you are creating. If you use a competitive enablement tool like Klue, you'll be able to track usage and adoption of things like battlecards and digests. 2. Win Rate - This one is simple. What is your win rate against competitors prior to your enablement initiatives. How much does it increase post enablement initiatives? My recommendation is to start by trying to move the needle on one or two competitors at a time, rather than taking a blanket approach. 3. Confidence - How confident is your sales team in selling your product today? How does this confidence score increase post sales training or other enablement initiatives? I find it particularly interesting to link Usage Rates back to Win Rate. If you can connect the dots to show that sales reps that use your enablement material have higher win rates, you'll not only be able to prove the success of your programs, but also use that information to encourage faster adoption amongst the rest of the sales team too!

Product Marketing and Customer Marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly! I just love to see the two teams working side by side, regardless of who they report into. Product Marketing should be the expert on the "target market" - by this I mean the core markets, customer segments and personas the company is focused on. In order to be effective at this, PMM will need to spend time looking inwards (at existing customers and users) and outwards (at prospects, competitors and new markets). I view Customer Marketing as the deep dive into that inward focus component. A strategic Customer Marketing team (or Lifecycle team, as it's sometimes called), should be the expert on the customer. Their focus is on deeply understanding the customer, driving product adoption, and influencing lifecycle behaviours. They can then surface their insights and learnings to the PMM team to use as they identify how to go to market to find more of their best customers. Additionally, Customer Marketing often acts as the conduit to the customer base for things like product launch. As the owners of customer channels (think email, community, etc), Customer Marketing will play a huge role in the PMM team's launch strategy.