Product Marketing

It certainly depends on the launch tier along with other market factors/customer dimensions, but typically I am looking at the data to inform next steps. Did we hit our product usage target? Is the narrative landing in sales calls (listening to gong recordings)? Is the pitch deck working (checking deal velocity in SFDC)? I am continually tweaking to ensure we are landing in a place of impact and not stagnation. Aside from this, the mission critical post-launch activity should be - the RETROSPECTIVE! Get your GTM teams together to chat about what you should "start, stop, continue" so you're even better next time. It's important to look in the rearview to inform where you're headed. 

I really like the story brand framework by Donald Miller. The narrative structure puts the customer as the hero of the story and your solution as the guide to their problem. The book also talks about picking a fight for your product with a focus on vilifying the issues your customers are having. This framework can be applied across stakeholders and performs very well from pitch decks to landing page copy. 

The first step is defining the customer journey and making sure your key functiona teams understand that journey. Then, recognizing that there may be stop gaps that need to be implemented to ensure customers can take advantage of the feature. What needs to happen on the delivery side of the house so CS and technical teams are enabled? How can we over communicate and document docs and materials for our teams and customers? What kinds of enablement efforts do we need to account for to make sure customers understand the benefits?

Welcome to the fun world of Enablement! And there are internal + external aspects of this. * External * Message x Value & benefits: What's in it for your users? Migration is a pain in the ass. Before you get to the logistics, you have to sell them on the why * Transition plan: What's the step-by-step guide? Is it one size fits all, or does it require different approaches for different types of users? These need to be documented and clearly laid out.  * Timing & cadence: Give your customers enough time to make the changes. I'll leave the communications format, channels, and cadence up to you (but this is never a one-and-done exercise). For example, don't expect one email to the entire database to yield good results or high customer satisfaction. * Internal * Is an Enablement team in place at your company? If so, great! Loop them in early on customer enablement plans and they'll be able to position that for your internal folks. If not... * Message x Value & benefits: Why is this change important to communicate and will it help your team sell more & better? Sell the change internally. * Transition plan: Leverage what's built for customers and share it widely internally so that every customer-facing team is aware. Roadshow it in team meetings, mention it at all hands, set up office hours to give your colleagues the opportunity to ask questions and poke holes. * Timing & cadenece: Keep internal teams updated on the customer comms plan. In B2B sales, give your CSM team the opportunity to send 1:1 messages while marking takes care of the 1:many.

Getting everyone on board after you're done is a lot harder if they haven't been involved from the start. Give the GTM plan an iterative process treatment. Start with a rough draft and shop it around. Get people to buy in on it. Ask for feedback and ask questions so they feel involved. Make suggested changes if it makes sense—and if it doesn't, work to reach a consensus.  Once you've gone through a couple of rounds with the primary stakeholders, the GTM plan should be fairly polished. Everyone will believe they had a hand in it and it's easier to work out minor kinks before implementation. 

This question is essentially "how to lead effectively without authority" - or in other words, how to lead your peers and others who aren't necessarily in your organization and/or who don't report to you directly.  Start early - before you plan on rolling out your new launch approach.  Talk with leaders and get their buy-in and then set up recurring meetings with different stakeholders on the Marketing teams, and come prepared to present your plans as well as to ask questions that spark contributions & brainstorming. Share the goals of your new strategy in advance so that stakeholders can come prepared with notes they might have on the different subjects and so forth. And then, for each actual launch also make sure to prepare teams in advance and get their opinions about the strategy you've built.  Remember these points:  * Develop long-term relationships and maintain regular and continuous communications with all stakeholders. * Do the same with senior leadership across the organization. * Know the team leads; know their challenges; know their plans and programs. * Remember that they have more than just product launch on their plates - make sure you're there to help them with their other projects so far as you can. * Communicate early and frequently for every planned launch.

I know this isn't tactical, but I would make sure to include them in the product launch kick off meeting (which happens ever before you have your entire plan built) because it helps them understand WHY you are launching what you are launching and enables them to feel part of the journey - part of the team - that will make this launch a success. Because ultimately, it is a team that makes launches happen. It can't be done alone. I know this isn't a tactic (quite yet) but I mention this step because it will help you get buy-in so you don't have to 'convince' anyone in marketing to launch this. They will be excited about the opportunity and feel empowered to share their POV on what acitivities/content they can create to support the launch (respsective to their function. So demand gen team comes up with their strategy and shares it with you to discuss, same ad content etc). Tactics -Set goals for the launch tied to quantitatve KPIs that impact the entire business and every function -Create a gantt chart (or Asana board) to track the key milestones (and every deliverable / to-do) of the launch -Schedule your weekly/biweekly meeting cadence -Hold each member accountable to getting their work done. And make sure you've empowered them to 'own' their workstream for the launch so they feel (and are) bought in.  -Celebrate their success! And celebrate little wins along the way. Make the launch process fun - and make sure to give credit to your teammates (at the exec and peer level) along the way. 

You need to get buy-in to the GTM strategy before you build it that includes: * involving the team in the strategy development process, as this can increase their ownership and commitment to the GTM plan * providing clear goals and objectives to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals for the launch  Involving stakeholders early on can help to ensure that the GTM strategy aligns with the overall goals and objectives of the company and that it takes into account the needs and perspectives of all relevant parties. Once you have developed a go-to-market strategy, it is important to effectively communicate it to the marketing team the process of GTM execution via go-to-market project management, kick-off meetings, alignment docs (project briefs), etc.

Here are a few considerations and actions you can take to build support across the team: 1. Tie your launch goals to the greater Marketing team goals. It’s important to connect the dots on how your launch can help your marketing teammates accomplish their goals as well. For major initiatives, make sure your marketing leadership team is bought in and understand the potential impact. You have to PMM your product internally first :) 2. Make folks feel like thought partners. I love holding brainstorm sessions and pre-kick offs with content and channel owners. Not only does this get them bought in, but you get a bunch of creative ideas out of it. People are much more compelled to execute a plan if they've been brought in throughout the process.  3. Be organized and make folks feel recognized. As PMMs we often quarterback huge multi-channel launches, but we rely on others to execute much of the plan. Come to your kick off prepared with a clear GTM strategy, workback schedule, and customer journey & bill of materials (that you’ve already co-created with folks ahead of the meeting!). Create a great culture around launches, and folks will be more excited to work with you in the future.

Get buy in EARLY, and share "excitement" around WHY the strategy was decided on and the potential value/opportunity it brings for the company and that specific marketing team! Once I have my messaging, positioning, and overall vision, I like doing a "kickoff call" with the marketing team to go through the "Why, What, and How"--I find that explaining how each person plays a critical role in the success of the strategy is key to getting buy in. When I deliver a market strategy to the marketing team, I think about it through the lens of "What's In It For Me" (WIIFM)--speak their language and personalize the market strategy to what they care about and how it will improve their area of marketing. For example, if you are working with the Demand Gen team, how is this new market strategy going to improve their MQLs? For the content team, what might be some topics they can think about writing for related to this new strategy? And to continue driving success of the market strategy, I follow these steps: 1. Listen--reguarly check in with your marketing team. What do they feel like is working/what working? Set up regular check ins! I really enjoy using Slido as a way to collect feedback live during a meeting and even after. The questions in Slido can be upvoted and asked anonymously, so it's a great way to do effective and productive Q&A. 2. Stay organized--I use Asana to keep track of what initiatives are being done to support the market strategy and results. If you are looking to do a GTM plan, you can get more tactical for roles and responsibilties.  3. Course correct as needed--determine goals and KPIs up front (that are realistic and achievable), and make adjustments as needed. Do you need to add campaigns, or a webinar? Does messaging need to be tweaked? Do you need to find a customer story? For me, win rates is a massive focus for Product Marketing, so I keep a Salesforce dashboard that looks at win rates by sales teams, regions, and verticals. 4. Share wins--what new logos have been obtained as a result of the market strategy? What are website visitors looking like? How is the industry responding? I like doing QBRs focused on what market strategy, as well as sharing weekly/monthly wins in our Marketing All Hands Meeting related to that market strategy. I also like to share Gong calls to marketing and sales team for where that market strategy is working well.  Using a consistent and standiardized process and templates can really help teams stay streamlined, focused, and empowered to all move to the beat of the same drum!

I typically back up departmental asks with customer sentiment (qual) and data (quant). This makes it easier to rally team members around our why and cultivate influence towards a new GTM initiative. For example, recently we decided to issue a new survey that required cross-functional and leadership support. We created a charter for the initiative and documented why the program was necessary, then built a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) to clearly outline responsibilities among stakeholders. The RACI framework helped to build trust, buy-in and accountability across teams while the charter rallied the group around one clear north star.

I've found in my career that when I create the strategy on my own, it's much harder to convince everyone else to buy into it. However, suppose I include those other marketing teams much earlier in the strategy, getting their input and setting goals/strategy/plans together. In that case, they're much more vested in the plan's success, and it takes little convincing.  In the absence of being able to do that, the next best option is to understand the goals of everyone else on the marketing team and how your market strategy helps them achieve their goals. When other people can picture executing your strategy and achieving their team's goals, it's easier to "convince" them. 

If you don't have the opportunity to manage an entire new product launch, you'll have to get creative. See if there is an opportunity to own a specific piece of a launch someone else is managing or even manage a smaller feature launch. I'd also look for opportunities work with the product team, even if it's not on a specific launch. Big bonus points if you work with the product team on research or roadmap prioritization elements.  Let's say none of those opportunities are available - you can still focus your time on cultivating the skills that make a great product launch PMM. Beyond the tactics, the skills and experience I look for when hiring product launch PMMs include the following and I think you can work on these in a variety of different projects: * Someone that really knows how to work with product teams and understands how they work * Can manage a broad range of stakeholders * Strong and bold storyteller  * Project management skills

The biggest thing for newer PMMs is to learn and understand what strong PMM looks like, even if you haven't experienced it yet. Meaning, being able to answer an interview question with: "While I haven't had experience in this particular area, the way I might approach this situation in the future is... x, y, z."  In addition for interviewing, not only articulating what you've worked on specifically but how it fit into the larger PMM strategy (even if you didn't contribute to creating the plan, that's okay). When I help with interviewing, I'm much more interested in whether the person in front of me has that type of growth mindset. It's really easy to teach PMM skills; it's really hard to teach someone how to learn on their own. 

These are typically small launches with functionality that maintains market position, parity, and performance. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - cs/sales outreach template, targeted email announcement, newsletter, help docs update.  For small piel updates, you can think of these as your soft/quiet launches that don’t require broad messaging/awareness. (Pixel changes). Communicaiton channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, cs outreach comm if relevant, help doc update.

I've partnered with PM to assign a launch level to a release based on a grade (is it new/innovative, is it going to match the market, impact to customers, impact to the market, etc.). If something doesn't fall into the launch level threshold, it's an opportunity to release it, collect data, and see if it makes sense to package the feature announcement with future releases to help tell a bigger story.

Persona! If you're able to research your persona and develop their user cases, value drivers, motivations and goals - the rest (positioning, messaging and sales enablement) will follow. Customers are the ultimate aligner, prioritize actively listening to them, join insight sessions and fuel their voice within your programs.

When you are starting up a product marketing organization (even if it's an organization of one!), it's easy to get pulled in a lot of directions. It's hard to add the most value, though, without tackling the fundamentals: buyer personas, positioning and messaging, and understanding the buyer journey. The trick is to get this strategic work done in a way that it appears to be addressing your company's burning tactical needs.  Example: In Week 2 of one crazy job, I was tasked with building a sales kit for the financial services industry. The product's horizontal messaging was not very compelling. However, the financial services project gave me the opportunity to work with some of the most successful sellers, interview big customers, and get quick input from key company stakeholders. All of that work went into the horizontal product messaging work not long afterward. Some steps you could take to get started: 1. Engage with your sales team to learn about your buyers and buyer journeys. If you discover gaps in their sales tools, find 1-2 that you can fill quickly. 2. Offer to interview customers for case studies (and write them if no one else in the org is tasked with doing so). You'll get a lot of great messaging input and a valuable deliverable along the way. 3. Update web copy instead of writing messaging documents. Use the new copy to write the messaging documents later on.  4. Use your internal interactions to educate people about what PMM should and should not do, to guide future work. Good luck - I hope this sparks some inspiration!!

For me, the first focus would be understanding the buyer and building the personas; everything else will cascade from there. I'd start spending time with the sales to understand the deals we've won, what problems they were experiencing, why they needed a solution, and how we provided value. Work with the CS team to understand who the happy customers are and why they are still with us (how we continue to deliver value)--a bonus if you can work in a customer interview. Finally, work with the product to understand the product and how it solves the customer's problem.  From those interactions, you can start identifying trends to help you build out personas (you'll need other information sources). Once personas are created, you can take that info to influence the Messaging/Positioning and update content as needed. Finally, take the personas and messaging and use them for training your sales team.

Great question! I have seen customer marketing both within PMM and outside of it. Depending on the organization, it could work either way as long as product and customer marketing work very closely together.  To ensure success, I would suggest that customer marketing be part of product marketing for many reasons. PMMs are expected to be experts on customers and are usually the ones that either lead or highly influence customer-related activities such as:  * Increasing product adoption * Content for customer events * Win-loss analysis * Customer stories/case studies * Customer communications, specifically about best practices and feature launches * Advisory boards * Etc. When customer marketing and PMM work together and there are no silos, then the customer experience improves. A win-win situation.

I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge specifically is around balance. A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND What you can control? This requires leadership buy-in from multiple groups — ideally they would understand Marketing and Product Marketing (this is not always the case!) Based on Your Goals, I would then identify metrics. Some examples below: * GTM / Revenue Initiatives —> Before and After Analysis (ideally based on something specific) * Content —> Content Metrics  * Support —> NPS 

Hopefully I don't make this answer overly complex.  I think the more important question here is what are you actively working on? Because product marketing can cover such a wide variety of activities and tactics, we can't exactly tell you which metrics would be important.  Greg Hollander and Derek Pando both had great insights to share when they spoke on a panel about the topic of prioritization in product marketing. The key takeaway there is to know what the greater organizational goals are, and align yourself where it makes the most sense for the impact you can have.  Example: Your company has great awareness and lots of leads, but isn't closing enough deals. In this case, there are lots of different factors that could be contributing to the funnel leak (people entering but falling out). As a product marketer it may fall to you to understand why this is happening and address the problem.  For the sake of simplicity, let's say that you have great demo show rates but don't convert these into customers at the rate that you think you should be. Assuming that the prospect knows your pricing and terms ahead of time, this likely points to your demos being bad. Bad could mean a lot of things so it will require further analysis. Are your sales people doing enough discovery? Are they talking about things that actually matter to the prospect or are they just reciting from a script? In this fantasy scenario, with the information that you've been given, it's probably fair to assume that a good metric for you to track would be increase in conversion rate. 

Definitely echo the fact that Product marketing KPIs need to keep evolving with the focus that the organization currently has.  At Amplitude, we have come up with some strong *impact* metrics that the PMM function owns. Each metric is shared with a different team in the org: * Product Launches: # of deals closed where we had atleast 1 newly launched product add ons/packages purchased by customers. Our stretch goal for Q1 this year is 50% of all deals. Sidenote: this is a shared metric with the Product team and incentivizes them to work very closely with PMMs * Thought Leadership: # of opportunities influenced by original (often gated) content from the Product Marketing team. Shared metric with Marketing * Enablement: ACV and Win Rate - this is shared with the Sales & team and is a longer term, strategic metric. But in the near term, we track strategic deals with specific account-based interventions that the PMM function is making and their win rate  Would love to hear reactions to our frameworks from PMMs out there!

Agreed with the other answers about aligning impact with focus areas for the business as a whole. Though I also like to have some consistent metrics to be able to see some longer term trends. There's a separate thread here that dives into PMM metrics: https://sharebird.com/are-there-any-broad-metrics-you-guys-track-as-pmms Some good points there about the combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics, and even quantifying some of that qualitative feedback.

Full disclosure - I work for Highspot - but we do use our own platforrm and one of the benefits of it is that we can see usage and buyer enagement analytics for all of the content we create. It's a quick and easy way for us to determine what's working, what is being used (or valued) the most and also connect content performance with CRM data to understand how content is driving sales velocity, conversion, and quota performance.

Curious to know if there are any metrics that the Product Marketing function is accountable for any metrics? I know there is such a wide variety of jobs that Product Marketers do, but for example, if trial conversion or adoption purely owned by the Product Marketing function, or are all the metrics shared with other teams? 

That's a great question. It depends a lot on the product of course. There are some products that lend itself to a soft launch before we put any marketing effort behind it in which case quantifying marketing impact is pretty straightforward. More generally, I'm a fan of PMM and PM co-owning several metrics. You can't parse which side drove what share of the metric but if you have a good partnership that shouldn't matter. And having that lens means a PMM should care deeply about whether we're bringing the right product to market (or what could we do to make it more successful). And conversely that means the PM should care if we're positioning the product in a way they feel like can make the product long term successful. The end goal is the product generally speaking hits its OKR which should be the north star anyhow.

Recently PMM has been very involved with top-of-funnel marketing and campaigns, so a lot of the typical metrics you might suspect in a campaign are ways we measure success for these (Leads, MQLs, MQL>Opp conversion, Opportunities generated). For more middle & bottom of funnel content - we use a tool called Pathfactory (content tracks of content) that allow for visibility into what content is being sent out by sales, what is getting viewed, how much time spent on assets, and having this link in with opportunities influenced in Salesforce, which gives us a sense of revenue impact. Separately, this quarter, we're focused heavily on partnering with Sales Enablement to impact a very particular layer of the sales funnel where we were seeing the highest levels of drop-off (early discovery/pain). In focusing on this, we're working on additional tooling in SFDC to capture what is impactable vs non-impactable reasons (impactable by SE/PMM training). Once breaking out the impactable %, we're focusing our efforts this quarter on activities/trainings/content that supports for early "Why Change" opening perspective messaging (via slides or whiteboard), additional discovery training/questions refinement, and a revised First Call Deck that provides more wide-angle messaging beyond product features (cliche, but check out Andy Raskin on Medium). The goal here is to zoom in on an early-stage in the Sales cycle where we're experiencing dropoff and seeing opportunity and measure the imporvement we're able to have here through a quantifiable metric.  

While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing, my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen, or product depending on what you're working on. Ideally, you'll have explicitly shared goals with one or more of the cross-functional teams you're working with. This ensures everybody is optimizing for the same outcome. For a new product launch, I'll typically have a shared adoption goal with product and/or an attach rate goal (percentage of customers using the product/feature) with sales.  I'd also caution against only prioritizing work that can easily be attributed to ROI. Product marketing is responsible for driving a lot of initiatives (naming products, customer research, market research, etc.) that don't have an immediately measurable impact on leads or pipeline - but that work is still important. 

The question comes up a lot in product marketing. It is particularly challenging when you are in a product marketing role or on projects that lean heavy into influence or when your organization is stacked with channel owners. Simply put- there is no one metric that suits all product marketing.  That said, at the outset of any project, it is critical to discuss what the hypothesis or goal of the work is and how you intend to measure the success of the outcome. Since product marketing is cross functional, I'd look to align goals and outcomes around known or proxy metrics and I'd urge communication- consistently + often around them.  

1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with competitive content is driving you win rates up.  2. Influenced deals Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are influencing revenue.  3. Sales confidence Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging. 4. New product revenue If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch.  A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that your team is killing it. 

There are a lot of great existing competitive positioning frameworks out there. I think GTM maturity of the company and primary audience & execution priorities should be considered in designing your framework. I don't always stick to a proprietary framework, I tend to stay agile to my stakeholders. Some best practices: 1. Competitive enablement for sales should be a GTM priority. If the sales team is already adhering to a specific selling framework, I recommend aligning with their common methodology as much as possible to increase adoption. 2. For a more in-depth competitive analysis, aligning competitive comparisons to phases of the workflow of a product helps to articulate clear differentiation based on user needs. 3. Overall commercial competitive positioning should stay high-level and succinct. The more internal, forward-looking product strategy positioning is best staying separate as it is often complex and not the right message for all levels of the sales team to combat competitive concerns in the field. This divide is most common in scaling orgs with an evolving product-market fit.