Enterprise Product Marketing

It's hard. Real hard.  Many PMMs make the mistake of starting with messaging. This is a no-no. Messaging comes last and just puts words behind what was already decided. You have to nail this in sequential order.  1. First comes strategy 2. Then comes positioning 3. And finally comes messaging Your CEO owns the strategy. Period. If they don't know where you are going, the positioning will be unclear or may work for a little while until the market or your product evolves. I recall a meeting in a prior company where I aligned with the positioning of our chatbot/customer service solution with my CMO and Founder, only to be rebuffed by my CEO who said we should be just like Salesforce, i.e. we were to compete with CRM.  We tried explaining that yes we could one day compete with CRM, but today we were something else, and that is what we needed to decide. This state of limbo around strategy and positioning persisted for well over a year, and the company's business performance also suffered.  What's the lesson? Nailing strategy and positioning are critical.  Your discussion then with your executive team needs to list out assumed strategy and based on that outline options for positioning. Do not bring messaging into this discussion. The best way to approach this discussion is to let them come to the right answer by laying out options and data.  Unless the CEO/Founders feel they came up with it, they will not buy into it.  Design thinking brainstorms are helpful. Repeated discussions will definitely be needed.  This alignment will time to seep in and be internalized but clears the path for messaging and countless other initiatives inside the company.

It's key to align around a high-level story that powers success—in sales, marketing, fundraising, product development and recruiting—by getting everyone on the same page about strategy and differentiation. Alignment is difficult. If you can start with your CEO, that is key. Ultimately, your CEO is yuor ultimate storyteller and if she is bought in, then its easier to get the rest of the executive team aligned. The story is the strategy and that should be your starting point. What’s driving your story in the market? New features and functionality … or a bigger promise to your customers? Do they align? Clarity in the minds of your customers can only exist if you tell a clear, cohesive and connected story. A corporate story that aligns with your business strategy and product roadmap.

I see three parts to driving alignment, both with execs and among all other stakeholders: 1. First, bring them along for the journey. Messaging cannot be done in a silo, and it’s difficult to properly adopt if not everybody feels bought in. Interview your execs and stakeholders to learn their perspective, where they feel the company or product is differentiated, what customer pain it solves, what benefits it delivers. The answers will vary and will be meaningful inputs as you craft and test your messaging. 2. Second, set regular check-ins and milestones with execs and key stakeholders so they know what to expect and when. Landing messaging correctly can take a while, but it has lots of incremental milestones. Make sure to communicate these expectations, along with what level of input you’d like from them at the various stages. 3. Third, bring data! While messaging can be creative and subjective, its resonance with your target market and customers can be quantified. Being able to quantify its impact will drive alignment. Here are channels I recommend testing your messaging in to get data to indicate what is resonating: * Qualitative interviews. Conduct these with your existing customers or your target market (you may have to pay some incentives). Run these one-on-one, or via focus groups. Listen not only to what they say but also to what words they use (e.g., do they say they want to work “faster” or “more efficiently”). You will detect patterns which will inform your quantitative research.  * Quantitative market research (via surveys). I used to work at SurveyMonkey which offers an incredible DIY market research panel called Audience. It lets you reach millions of people based on the targeting attributes you set, and it gets you answers quickly (in days). * Test the messaging in real life across channels.  * Website: A/B test messaging on paid landing pages or your company’s website. Just make sure you have enough traffic or can run it for long enough to get statistical significance on the test. Directional changes are not significant and thus due to chance. * SEM: Test variations of messaging in your ads. You can measure CTR to know what’s most eye-catching, which will get you very quick results (roughly 2 weeks, depending on your budget). You can measure CPL or another top-of-funnel conversion rate metric (may take a little longer), and you can measure down funnel quality (will take longer, depending on your sales cycle) to understand quality in the middle and bottom of the funnel (AOV, LTV, etc.). Email: Test marketing emails to prospects measuring similar metrics outline above in SEM, or test cold sales outreach emails to prospects. What messaging and positioning prompts recipients to engage, reply, convert? You can test subject lines, content, CTAs, length, or anything else. In-product: If your company has a logged-in web or app experience, test messaging in there. Social: You can test sets of paid social ads, or you can post on your own social media channels for free. Measure which variations get the most engagement and conversion. (Note: the audiences are often quite different for paid and organic social—often your followers are existing customers, and the people you show paid ads to are prospects.) * Sales, Account Management, and Support calls: Identify a select few counterparts on these teams and provide them with call scripts or different talk tracks to handle objections or promote new products. Ask them to note how the conversations differ or what messaging resonates most on their calls.

To drive alignment, make something that execs can respond to. Recently, I created an example “future state” pitch deck to articulate a future narrative for Glassdoor. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped drive discussion and alignment on overall company positioning and direction. But in general, make something for folks to respond to. I think it is so important for product marketing teams to establish credibility and expectations that PMM owns specific artifacts that ultimately help the company make smarter decisions. We have a toolkit of go-to templates that we try to work from for whatever business need we have. If we are talking about overall positioning, make a positioning statement. If it is messaging for a launch, create a messaging framework with clear product descriptions & value props, and show the brief or GTM plan, depending on the stage you are at. We build business canvases, products-on-a-page, research summaries, etc… And we add to the toolkit when new needs arise. Whatever you make to facilitate the alignment discussion, make sure it is backed by research. Data, even if from a few customers, should help take some subjectivity out of the discussion.

I feel fortunate that I’ve led positioning/messaging workshops since I graduated college because I worked for an agency that mandated them for every project we worked on for tech clients.  Getting an exec team to agree on a document outlining positioning and messaging isn't the hard part in my opinion. The difficult part is to get the messaging to stick once you put it out in the world: on a homepage, in a blog post, an ad, a slide deck for sales, etc. When positioning and messaging is put to use, execs start to realize what they signed up for. “Wait, we’re going after that job title in that small industry? I thought we were going to be all things to all people.” So, I generally recommend immediately following the positioning/messaging documents with some type of customer-facing project where you use the messaging. If you have success with it -- customer sales deals, signup conversions, etc. -- people tend to get onboard in a sustained fashion.

At the end of the day, Product Marketing owns messaging, and there should be general alignment around that. I think that's a really important place to start because literally everyone has an opinion or point of view on messaging, but someone ultimately gets to 'own' it. If in your organization, that's PMM, there should be and understanding across the organization that it's the responsibility of PMM/Marketing to come up with product positioning and messaging. If you're an exec / leader in Marketing, you should be building relationships with other execs to create alignment around that; if you're not an exec, make sure your leadership is advocating for you.  Now, that's not to say that other teams shouldn't have input or should significantly influence what the positioning ends up like - of course they should! Messaging should never be created in a vacuum. From the start, PMM should be gathering input from Sales, CS, and Product to come up with an initial point of view on positioning. In my experience, if my team is working with these folks closely from the start, it is way more likely that the execs in these orgs will be on board with the final positioning (usually execs just want to make sure you're getting input and feedback from their team).  We have regular meetings with Sales, Product, CS for all of our products / audiences, and we regularly share ideas on draft positioning/messaging. And when we've reached something we're ready to share in a more formal way, we share that with Sales/Product/CS exec leadership. 

This is an iterative process, and always better to over-communicate than under-communicate, so we can get everyone's feedback and input and people feel they have been heard and their input taken into consideration. Even if you do not end up going in a certain way, be able to explain why not and why that input was still helpful.

I start with personas. I develop a thesis about core personas based on sales and customer success feedback, and then conduct user interviews to validate or invalidate those ideas. That's probably the most important bit–my job isn't to just synthesize learnings from within our business, it's to continually test and validate those learnings externally. I then circulate research + personas with key executive leaders (CEO, Head of Product, Head of Sales), until we agree on the shape of each. Then I create a messaging house for the business, and each product line, according to the primary persona we agree is most worth pursing. From there, launching new features, new content, new playbooks, etc becomes much easier when we take it back to our core persona.

Start with data. Ground your messaging in first and third party data that illuminates what is important to your target customers, key pain points, aspirations, how they like to be messaged to, language they use, etc. Show your work -- don’t just include the suggested messaging in the doc; add an appendix or reference section that demonstrates a thoughtful approach that is grounded in the data. Next, see if you can get some quick feedback from target customers on your messaging to further validate the approach before showing it to your exec team. This can be a great use of a CAB (customer advisory board). This can arm you with answers to questions that may come up or resolve differences of opinions that may arise. Finally, send the doc as a pre-read, ask execs to add in comments at least 1 day before you host a meeting to go through the doc. Also include a RAPID so it is clear who the final decision maker is. Use the meeting to get resolution and alignment live - this is generally much faster than trying to manage async. You might not get alignment on every last detail, but this is where the decision maker comes in.

Ha! this skill is probably the hardest. When it comes to messaging, everyone will have an opinion. Before you drive alignment on the messaging, align on the problem and solution. That is 50% - 60% of the battle. The rest is just wordsmithing. Depending on the level of messaging, I would incorporate them into the messaging development process. 

We typically prepare and validate a strong Messaging and Positioning Framework (MPF) document first. Our template typically includes things like the market context, objectives of our messaging (i.e. what we hope to drive/influence), quick single-sentence description of the product etc. Once we have this document, we circulate it among the exec team (typically months in advance of a launch to give everyone enough time to reflect and comment). We also typically have multiple live discussions on the topic (depending on the complexity of the product/launch) and use the MPF document to drive alignment. Competitive context and narratives have helped resolve strong differing exec opinions!

Here's my process, I * Conduct customer and prospect research (exec team will be more likely to be bought in with data - especially from your key personas and customers)  * Consolidate findings and prepare a messaging brief using the framework we landed on.   * Present those findings to and get feedback from key stakeholders - including marketing leadership, sales, and product team - and (most importantly) customers  * Incorporate feedback into the final messaging brief  * Present messaging to leadership along with the data and the 'why' behind the messaging. Present rollout plan and get buy-in/alignment with cross-functional leadership and key stakeholders  * Assign responsible individuals within the team to help with the rollout.  Once you have buy-in now the real work starts to get everyone using it. Share the final output with teams, present it at an all-hands, update all of your customer-facing content and sales enablement accordingly, and repeat frequently. It’s like unlearning an old habit and learning a new one at the same time. Repetition is key. And since you got buy-in early from Marketing leadership (your biggest advocate and messaging police) along with members of the product and sales teams the rest of the company will slowly come around because it’ll be part of the culture.

Every executive team is different, so I would encourage you to think through the culture (and sometimes - quirks!) of the members of that team as you craft your own approach. That said, I've found a couple things particularly effective in my experience.  * Bring along key lieutenants for the ride - once you get to the exec team, a number of important leaders should have been part of the ideation and review process. Individual sales leaders, product owners, customer success leads should all be stops on your journey to craft the right message. That way - one of the first slides in your exec team meeting is the classic "how we got here" where you share who influenced this work product.  * Infuse the voice of the customer and market - messaging is both art and science. Surveying analysts, customers, prospects and even competitors ensures you're keeping everything relevant. But if you truly turn it into a science, you'll have some great quotes and stats to convince an exec team that there's validity to what you're recommending.  Good luck! If all else fails, make sure you remind them that messaging is iterative - always. You do want to get it right, but you also don't want to be so paralyzed that nothing sees the light of day. 

First, start with data-driven positioning. Who are you in the marketplace? Where are you heading or trying to become? How do you think your competitors are moving in the space? If you skip this step, you'll lack differentiation in your messaging, and you'll get a lot of resistance from executives who think in visionary terms. To build the most effective messaging, you need to start with a deep understanding of how your customers think about your company and why they are buying it in the first place. Draw on insights gleaned from customer blueprints, interviews, surveys, focus groups, lookalikes analysis. The goal is to distill what goes on in each purchase journey or acquisition funnel step…Then map that back into how you want people to feel through that process—ex.: empowered by competitive comparisons; engaged because they understand the value proposition; satisfied by user experience. Then you get to alignment building. Before you stand up in front of a room of executives and present the final answer, try to meet with about half of the group in 1x1 settings to bounce the idea off of them. This will get knee-jerk reactions out of the way, which can blow up a group meeting. The feedback will also be valuable. Last, the conversations may also prepare you for questions other executive team members may ask.

This is so important, and not focused on enough so I'm glad you asked! A few thoughts around this: * Get your CEO and CMO involved early. Ideally you can get early drafts to them, and also get them bought into the importance of the process and value of this effort which will make every aspect of this a lot smoother. * Have a consistent review process. Depending on your size and stage of company, it's unlikely that your executive team needs to see or review every piece of messaging. If you're working on a minor "enhancement" to your product and some lightweight messaging, that probably doesn't need to be approved. On the other hand, if it's significant launch, or you're working on company/brand-level messaging, it's crucial to have a review process. During my time at HubSpot this process started with the PMM and within the PMM team for feedback, and quickly went up to the CMO as a second-round of review, and then to the founders.  * Once the messaging has been decided, get leadership buy-in to help solidify this across every GTM-facing team. This is why having early buy-in from executives is critically important because they will naturally help push this to their respective teams. * Lastly, ensure you're equipping executives and teams with the resources to drive that alignment. In my experience, having one central place on your company wiki, and then dedicated enablement resources is clear path towards success.

This requires having a strong relationship built on trust with your executive team and, depending on the size of your company, the CEO. Get the executive team involved early and often, and be willing to disagree and commit. Come prepared to conversations with data, market insights, competitive intelligence, and anything else that will help them understand how critical the work you are doing is. Help them buy into "why this messaging" and "why now" by anticipating their questions, bringing a lens of customer-focus, and a broad understanding of the crossfunctional strategic impact. 

Apply agile sprint thinking to launches. You can do this by creating themes just like agile has a sprint (my team is moving to quarterly message themes). These themes encapsulate at a high level the features that the product team is working on.   This approach has a couple of benefits. First, your product folks should appreciate agile, which will make them more likely to buy in and maybe meet a few more of those deadlines. Second, you get to execute a launch with some flexibility. Communicating the aggregate of features mitigates your risk in the event that some things don't make it out in time. And then when they do make it to production you can roll them into your existing theme.

I would bake in as much buffer time as you can in your marketing timelines. If they have a track record of not shipping on time, I'd start assuming that. If your product partners get upset about that, explain the marketing dependencies that you can't deliver results when timelines are always in flux.  This is super frustrating and I feel your pain. Perhaps you can also find other leaders who sympathize and don't want resources to go to waste to help you make your case and begin to shift the culture and expectations around timelines.

Your product team is not unique! I've never heard of a product team that sticks to deadlines exactly. The best lesson I've learned on how to mitigate this in enterprise software is that you can launch a product many times.  There are different ways to do this: pre-announce at your conference with a preview/waiting list, beta launch, general availability launch, internal re-launch with your sales team with new training and collateral, momentum launch with PR on usage and metrics...it goes on. If you're in a communication lapse because it's been awhile since a new product was launched, think about how you can get more juice out of the old products, customer stories, new blog posts, support offerings, or other angles.  There are lots of ways to communicate with customers and the market without relying on new product offerings. Stop thinking of product marketing as just launching new products, and start thinking about it as turning company strategy into revenue growth, and you will find many things to communicate.  At the same time, put some pressure on your product team to deliver the goods. In person events are a great forcing function for this. Conferences, sales kickoffs, roadshows, keynotes, etc.

This can be a huge challenge, and I certainly feel for you. Overall, I think it comes down to open and transparent communication between Product and Product Marketing, and the organization at large. Overall, I think there are a few things you can do to get ahead of this: 1. Transparent Roadmap - This will depend on the culture of your organization and how transparent you can be, but ideally the more the better. If you can keep a roadmap that everyone has access to and contains key timelines it will naturally help with the communication across the company.  2. Separate launch date, from the marketing "go live" date - Clearly there are some things that need to happen in unison with the actual launch, like internal enablement. But if the shifting of launch dates causes down stream challenges with the broader marketing team (i.e. a webinar was planned, and now has to be moved) then you can separate these two events. This gives you as a PMM some flexibility and also builds in some buffer for Product if timelines are a challenge. 3. Cross-Functional Teams - Internally at Iterable we have "Tiger Teams" for key launches and major initiatives. These teams have representatives from each functional area (Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, Product, Etc) and PMM will drive the meeting and transparently share launch updates. As a result, the representative from each team can help cascade information down across teams when a launch date changes. More so than just a launch date changing though, this cross-functional team helps increase communication and collaboration in the lead-up to a launch.

It's very common -- particularly in modern software companies -- for product teams to move timelines based on engineering constraints, customer feedback in the beta-testing process, and more. All product marketers wrestle with this situation. So, realize you're not alone! I recommend explaining what's in it for the product-engineering-design team. Do they want much-anticipated recognition for and usage of the product they've toiled for so many months on? Then, let's set a date. Do they want a lot of help -- not just mention in a monthly newsletter, but also a dedicated email campaign, media-relations support, an ad campaign, etc. -- from the greater marketing department? Then, let's set a date and work back 30 days with all of those stakeholders. Do they want the customer-success leaders to stop getting upset with them for moving dates all of the time? Let's set a date. 

Same! In my case, I was also dealing with phased launches--bits of the solution released every few weeks. And I understand why–when you're working with a developer audience there's less appetite for a big splashy release, and more interest in a phased roll-out of a given feature or product just to get hands on it ASAP and iterate as quickly as possible. That was tough to get used to. I would start by finding out a little more about what's causing those delays in product. If it's intentional, to phase releases in order to get beta feedback, I would consider setting up a power user group. Same group of 20-30 developers that agree to test most things that come down the pipe and provide feedback in a private Slack channel. That might provide more confidence in on-time releases. If this is something the product team ALSO wants to fix, and maybe it's just an engineering resourcing issue, I would have them commit to not releasing anything without your knowledge at least a week in advance. That will give you enough time for customer comms and enablement, which are your most important tick boxes. In a previous role, I realized that my product team thought that product marketing was just about blogs and social media posts, because they would say things like, "we don't really need marketing for this release," and then would launch without my knowledge. Ensure your product team knows that half of your job is awareness, and retention, and you can't accomplish either without being in the loop. Once the thing is out the door, don't feel like it's "too late" for a larger marketing campaign. Even a quarter or so later you can bundle a number of things that have already lanched and create a larger campaign.

The misalignment comes from what product GA means versus what marketing GA means and confidence level. And this alignment should come from the top—Head of Product and you, with the support of the entire GTM team and executive. Establish two definitions for GA, and align on confidence levels for each stage of product development. These two things should be agreed upon by the Head of Product to every leader in the org. She has to be accountable to you on this framework. 

This is pretty common. In my previous life as a PM and now as a PMM, I don’t try to manage the product team and the schedule. I try to get ahead of these challenges by announcing new capabilities while they’re in development and positioning it as “coming soon”, then continuing the drumbeat all the way from the beta release to general availability. This allows us plenty of flexibility when it comes to timelines shifting. It seems to be a common pattern across our industry too. You’ll see companies announce new features and products at their user conferences, but the products are not ready to use. However, you can sign up for the waitlist and get notified as soon as it is ready. And in the meantime, they will send you updates along the way to keep your interest piqued. I understand in some cases you’ll want to make a big splash where new capabilities are kept under wraps and press releases are shared under embargo. In this case, you might want to delay announcing anything for weeks till after the product is released internally and thoroughly tested. More and more companies are adopting feature flagging as a practice to hide functionality till it’s ready to be unveiled. It might be worth speaking with your PM and engineering leaders about similar practices.

Working from a place of positive intent, some R&D teams may not realize that launch activities are as much work at building a new product/feature. They don't see all the planing and activities that go into it.  Whether or not you have program managment function: build a clear project plan for gtm activities, circulate it and create rituals to ensure it's on track. If you break down any GTM delivery into talks, it'll naturally create trip wires.  ex/ team needs final UX to build help docs and marketing assets. If that's not delieverd by an agreed upon date, it sends red flags early on risk to the timelines.  One organization that I was in had seirous challenges with meeting goals, but also focusing on too many big bets vs tackling the smaller wins, being experimental. They implemented the 6-week cycle model (I'm a big fan). There are quarterly goals and in each quarter there are 3 cycles. The PMs are responsible for defining the deliverables for the cycle during week 5 (ideally collaborating with the rest of the R&D team). Ideally there is a meeting with R&D leadership and PMMs to review these goals for the upcoming cycle weeks and accomplishments from the previous cycle. We got really good at being realistic and transpartent. 

While I don't want to discount the personal thrash this puts on you, I’d suggest you quantify the impact in a manner that is around the health of the business. Showcase that there is an opportunity cost to the inability to stick to timelines. Example: When you have a regular cadence in communication, do you see list sizes growing and can you maintain a standard conversion rate? Compared to when you have lapses in communication are you seeing adoption suffer?  How you’ve described this seems to me like your product team isn't aware of the unintended consequences that are happening by missing deadlines. If you can showcase how this behavior is negatively impacting the company, you can help to showcase the value of not only sticking to timelines but also of the PMM function and of your deliverables. 

To start I'd say thorough competitive research is the foundation of great product marketing, so it's great that your company is investing in it. It's really important for the PMM that owns a product to be an expert on both direct and indirect competitors. Competitive research shouldn't happen in a vaccuum — it needs to be informed by persona research and the long term vision and product strategy. Especially at the early stages of a new product, the competitive landscape can seem vast and intimidating. Knowing what your core personas care about and where your product and engineering team is investing helps narrow it down significantly.  At Modern Treasury, the PMM team maintains a list of jobs-to-be-done for our target personas that guides everything from how we look at competitors to our product positioning framework. Our approach to extensive competitive research involves producing a Competitive Deep Dive, a 4-5 page document designed to uncover everything product, sales and customer success teams need to know about the company. These documents typically include a list of the company's products, an analysis of their positioning, screenshots or screengrabs of their product experience (if self-service), their media presence (if any), pricing (if available) and customer reviews (both andecdotal and from review sites if available). Since we're an API product company, we also break down API documentation and devex if available. These deep dives serve as the foundation for battle cards, objection handling and other sales enablement content, in addition to being used by product teams for product strategy. Hope this was helpful! I'm also happy to chat about it 1:1 any time. 

Sales and customers will be your most vital partners for this task. They will have likely have had multiple run-ins with your competitors. As a result, they will give you an excellent high-level understanding of competitive pitches, pricing, what attracted customers to them, and how the market, in general, perceives them. When you want to go deeper on a technical level, SEs, TMEs, and other PMs will be able to assist you with a feature-to-feature comparison, but keep in mind to approach the problem from multiple angles to get a better picture. 

The definition of "Extensive competitive product research" may be different for different people. I suggest asking the CEO and Product / Engineering teams the kind of questions they are looking to answer. Sometimes the high level market research you can get from a 3rd party will not be enough, and you will need to get creative to get the information needed via surveys, primary research or other methods. My best advise here is to define the task in more detail to undertand what people are expecting.

The industry sector you deal with may lead to different suggestions. In general, however, “product research” may suggest you are working on a new product launch or re-staging. In such cases, begin with the framework, consider the research tools, and then move to the operating part of the research. The framework may be the: - Product Strategy, for products bought for what they do (like pharmaceuticals, chemicals, engineering, and others) and/or the - Copy Strategy, for products characterized by how they look, work, taste, or smell (like most consumer goods, washing products, cosmetics, etc.) The framework influences the tools used to conduct the study. The king research tool of business decision-makers is marketing research. Marketing research, however, is expensive and poses technical challenges in order to deliver sound information. My suggestion is, in both cases, to begin with dissecting the Product Strategy, which describes three brands elements: - Technical performance. What the product does. - Product design. How the product looks and works. - Customer acceptance. How strongly customers (eventually both buyers and users) prefer the product. The latter element requires sampling customers and gathering information with marketing research, which implies substantial investments of knowledge, time, and money. If you are not knowledgeable of this tool, ask for expert help. Do not improvise. And, do not rely on salespeople, they are biased (although they could supply useful ideas to state research hypotheses). The former two elements are less knowledge-intensive and can be approached in a pragmatic way. Collect pieces of communication material used by your competitors, like advertisements, promotional material, product packages, product samples, and the like. If it is a technological product begin with the Technical performance. Compare the major claims of each competing brand, and you will begin noticing differences. For instance, one brand may claim to remove tough spots, another cleans cleaner, another is price convenient, one is delicate, and so on. If it is a hardly differentiated product begin with the Product design: How the product looks and works. Some are fast, others are safe, smaller, colored, smelling better, healthier, and so on. At this point, add sales data to your analysis (if unavailable, replace it with customer preference data from marketing research by brand), and you’ll begin to see clusters of consumption preference, which brings you closer to answer the part of your question concerning how your tech stacks up in the market. For more, connect with me on LinkedIn. Good luck with your endeavors, Mirio E.D. de Rosa

We all miss the mark here. I'm not even sure I would trust a PMM that says they don't struggle with this! You can stack the deck though, to show that you're exploring every possible avenue:  1. Consider a competitive monitoring solution like Crayon. I've used them in the past and even if they can't dig up things like exact product pricing, they will aggregate signals in market like a executive job posting in EMEA that shows they're about to expand internationally, or a change to their pricing page where they've dropped a freemium trial, or removed a feature, or a shift in homepage messaging or tone that signals a change in target audience. You could probably do that on your own if you know what to look for but something that monitors 24/7 and surfaces little indicators like these I've found to be really valuable. 2. If you have a slack community, ask frankly to interview folks that have made a switch. Create a case study out of it, but also use the insights to inform competitive positioning 3. Talk to a Gartner rep. Even if you don't have a subscription, you can set up a convo with a rep and tell them what research you're interested in exploring. They'll send it to you as a pre-read. In return, you can agree to start doing more regular briefings with them so they stay abreast of your technology as you grow. 4. Don't discount the audience. We often take for granted that our competitors are aiming for the same persona we are. If you can show that you're going after slightly different use cases, or slightly different audiences, the exact details of their offering shouldn't cloud what your product roadmap looks like 5. Get in those other products, or recruit someone on the product or eng team to give you a tour. Bring someone from the product design or UX team along (they may have already done this work, or be in the process of conducting this research).  6. Check out the forums for people comparing your solution to another. Check Hackernoon, StackShare, and even Reddit for posts.

My first recommendation would be to make sure you understand exactly what exactly your stakeholders are wanting to know (and why). Are they looking at making product decisions based on this information? Adjusting the pricing? Refining the messaging? Knowing the strategic goals behind the request will help you know what types of information to search for.  Next, frame your search by putting together a template for a product comparison matrix comparing your product with each of your top competitors' products (I recommend doing this in a spreadsheet where you can add additional information and notes). This exercise will help you discover which features are the most important to evaluate. Read industry reports and any other third-party research you can find to try to understand what customers are looking for. Once you've compiled the list of features to evaluate, it's now time to get detailed on what your product offers vs. what competitive products offer. This can be challenging, and you may have to get creative. Scour competitors' websites, read product reviews, download free trials (if available), talk to your sales team, etc. This is grunt work, but if you do it right these insights will be indespensible not only to product/engineering teams and the CEO but also to the sales team, core marketing team, and to your own product marketing efforts.

This is definitely tricky since getting in-depth product intel requires intimate knowledge about your competitors products. One technique some companies employ is mystery shopping research where you hire a researcher to pose as a buyer, but your organization may have a stance against this type of research. You can always look through review sites like G2 to see how your products are compared against top competitors products. But what I've found to be most effective is actually spending time talking to your sales, account management, and customer success teams. Prospects and existing customers are constantly sharing competitive intel with reps and CS teams and will often even send through a competitor's pitch decks, sales collateral, demos and sometimes even product roadmap which can give you really granular insight. 

I’d clarify upfront what they are hoping to achieve with the exercise. Is it for internal knowledge? To publish competitive checklists on your website? What will it mean for them to know how your tech stacks up in the market? Clarifying and getting alignment on how the information will be used and what constitutes success upfront will help you hit the mark. I find it helpful to remind stakeholders that we should be evaluating the product and competitors through the lens of value, not feature checklists. Do you have data on what features your target market cares about most that you can layer on top to get at value? Once you’ve defined some of those foundational pieces, I’d build out the template (likely in a sheet format) and get buy-in from stakeholders that this will answer their key questions. You can also pair this with other forms of research to make it even more powerful -- secret shopping, win/loss, surveying users of competitors’ products to understand their perceptions of offerings, strengths, weaknesses, what matters most, etc.

Not sure what mark you're missing. But your CEO and product/eng team are probably looking for (1) an overview of the space, where everyone is going (2) highlighting a few players and going deep dive into why they're building it and who they are building for. [I would hire a secret shopper for the second part] 

If your'e missing the mark, take a step back. Make sure you have a clear understanding of the business challenge you're trying to solve (why do we need this research, what decisions will it help drive). I will share a tangable example of how we approached "how does our tech stack up" At a previous company we were evaluating the decsion to build or acquire to fill a gap in our offering. The first step we took was to be clear on who our target audience was (if we invest in this, who will care and does this align to our business goals). We then outlined various jobs to be done partnering closely with our UXR team shadow a few customers in our target audience to build this POV. We also scored how critical these jobs were for the customers business (emotional and tangible). We then did an assessment of the features and capabilities of competitors (including paper/pen). There is so much content online, so much of this can be pulled from desk research if you know what you're looking for (don't forget to talk to your sales team!). We also coupled this with a survey to prospects using competitive solutions to get a pulse on how well the competitors serve those jobs to be done. The artifact we created was a spreadsheet with a scoring model and a few slides for insights and recommendations. Was it 100% perfect, no. But it gave the team the directional input they need to make some really big decisions.  You don't have to have all the features your competitor does, you just need to solve the most impactful problems better than they do. 

The best competitive research I've seen goes beyond the competitor's website, press releases and YouTube videos. They might include competitor customer interviews and tailored sales demos. I've personally worked with great small businesses and consultants who are experts in doing this analysis and research. If you have a little budget, I'd recommend that path. 

Here are some tips based on my eperience: 1. Keeping up with competitive product research, especially in tech, is hard: The tech space evolves at a rapid pace and your research can become absolute/stale within few weeks. Provide competitive intelligence back to your CEO/Product teams at an agreed upon cadence.  2. Try to templatize your findings. You will likely find your data on various product pages, press announcements and internet in general. Following a common template where it's easier for your audience to see this data consolidate at once place is very valuable. 3. Include your PoV/Inference. #1 and #2 above are relative easy but involves lot of work, but what is most important is what you infer from this information. Think - where the trends are leading, potential risk, benefits for your product. 4. Be the Voice of customer: In many tech orgs, especially orgs where the technology is very sophisticasted e.g. hardware, AI etc it is more likely that the product/engineering team will have a deeper understanding of competitive products. As a PMM bring in the voice of customer into your research.

I think this one just dropped in. Let's do it live! My gut reaction is: If you're being asked to do "extensive competitive research," something is broken. And you should say no, gracefully. It's very difficult, if not impossible to learn how to win in a market by looking at a competitive product from your (biased) POV.  If your CEO/founder/prouct team doesn't understand what problem they're solving for a customer and where they have a unique differentiator, you're not going to get that answer from a teardown.  If you want, hit me up with a DM here or on Linkedin. Would be happy to dig in deeper. Why are you "missing the mark?" My guess is they don't know what they're looking for either. Reframe the problem internally and offer another approach: - Use sales to identify and discover current users of the product in question. What are their real problems? - Reassess the customers who are buying -> are you targeting the wrong ICP or use case?

There's no silver bullet for this. You want to bake competitive research into everything you do and have your antennae out. The cool thing about product marketing is that done right, you have a unique vantage point. You are the closest members of your team to customer conversastions, product conversations as well as what analysts and influencers think of you. So you have to synthesize those inputs. Take and share notes on an ongoing basis and then summarize findings in battlecards, competitive dashboards, win/loss analysis. Bottom line: Competitive Intelligence is a full time job.  Competitive intelligence is always one of the first things I tried to build in my PMM organizations, having benefitted from great competitive intel early in my career as a PMM too, I know how valuable having the right facts at your fingertips can be so that any time a competitor comes in a conversation is an opportunity to deposition them or, frankly, to deposition yourself if this is not a conversation you can carry based on requirements. Saves everyone time.  To gather competitive intel, a quick shortcut can be scanning prior customer conversations, look at deal entries in salesforce/your CRM to the extent competitive info was captured there, and prioritize the research based on who appears on deals. You can also carve that work out to an agency who will create battlecards based on independent research and customer interviews. Talking to analysts via an inquiry, especially if you're a larger organization, is also a healthy practice. But again, don't take this on by yourself, unless it's the #1 prioritiy. Either hire for it or outsource it to begin with.  Finally, you can also look into implementing a CI tool/dashboard. Once you have the data, I've found tools like Crayon super useful to disseminate competitive intel as well as gather new inputs as it allows anyone to add to them. That makes competitive intel more of a team sport, which depending on your company stage, is not a bad thing!

30 days: Balance being an absolute sponge and learning by doing. Be a sponge by reading every doc you can get your hands on (enablement materials, case studies, team quarterly/annual plans, research studies, etc.), talking to as many prospects and customers as possible, and scheduling 1:1s with both stakeholders and company leadership. Learn by doing by getting involved in low-risk, low-hanging fruit activities where a PMM touch is needed but perhaps don’t require a ton of context. 60 days: Hopefully you’ve gained enough context by 30 days to start to get an idea of what the big challenges and opportunities are at the company. My goal is to have identified a couple of “base hits” that I can deliver by days 60-90 that can demonstrate tangible results against things that a key stakeholder cares about like the CMO, a Sales VP, or a product manager/leader who is a respected influencer within the product org. Identifying and delivering these base hits gives you an early platform within the organization of visible results and relationships that can open doors and give you the room you need to set an ambitious vision and plan for the function. 90 days: Delivering a POV on both the role you want to carve out for the PMM function (see my answer on surprises about moving to a smaller organization) and the initiatives you hope to tackle in the coming quarter. If you’ve done the homework of gaining context as a sponge, delivering one or two meaningful base hits, and winning the trust and endorsement of a couple influential stakeholders, you’re much more likely to get buy-in on your plan/POV and the latitude to actually start getting to work on building the PMM function as opposed to just executing on stuff people throw your way.

I'll "yes and" Gregg's answer and say that this will really vary by company size and complexity. I was at a startup where my 30-day goals included creating buyer personas and enabling the sales team to talk to the decision-makers. So it was more like a 10-20-30 day goals as described below.   At SAP, the organization is so sprawling and complex that the my goals were actually 60-120-180. I've been with the company for almost a year and I'm still getting introduced to some of the far-flung enablement teams spread across the globe.   The key is to set some measurable goals against appropriate milestones.

Now this is a fun challenge. Assuming you did your homework during the interview process, you should have a good idea of what you're getting into. That doesn't mean you won't find some skeletons lurking behind close doors. Rather you should understand how the team views product marketing, what kind of executive support you can expect, and their expectations of you.  With that mind, here are a few key things I would want to accomplish after 90 days. * Everyone knows what product marketing does and what we're responsible for. That means internal evangelism and roadshows. You will need to educate internal teams on product marketing and get everyone on the same page. Don't assume they have the same definition. You define and evangelism it with executive support. * Get product marketing added to the cross-functional agenda specifically product and sales teams. It's crucial that you're seen as a leader within these teams. * Find and knock out any quick wins. This will make you look like good and earn respect among other teams. People want to work with A-players and people that can count on to get shit done.  * At the end of 90 days, you should be prepared to present a long-term strategy of how why we're gonna win. Depending on the company, long-term could be a year, 6 months, or a quarter. Whatever that timeframe is I would want to see a presentation outlining our go-to-market strategy. Lastly, be sure to check out a new Sharebird podcast launching in late January 2021 called Thrills & Chills where I interview first product marketers and those who have established product marketing in company. 

One of the best pieces of advice I got before joining Hopin, was to take the necessary time I needed to be a "sponge" and let things soak in, before going straight into "solve-mode". Of course, that's easier said than done :)  When joining any startup as the first product marketer, you'll be getting requests from every angle from week 1(and sometimes before you even start!) - and that's especially true with PMM, because it is such a cross-functional role. This is what I've found to be helpful:  30 days: understand both the tangible and intangible working cultures of the company. How are decision made? Who are your main stakeholders? What is top of mind for each of them, and where is there overlap? Also use this time to develop your own "Product Marketing Charter" to do a bit of a roadshow and help others understand your mission and responsibilities (remember, PMM is still a fairly new concept for many!)  60 days: identify some quick win projects to start building your brand and help the company start to understand the value of PMM (develop sales one-pagers, put in a better release process, start tiering your feature releases, etc...) Also take this time to identify the tools and resources you need in order to do your job successfully.  90 days: by the 90 day mark at most startups, you're on OG! Embrace that feeling and remember that more likely than not, no one at the company knows more about product marketing than you do. Present your big ideas and long-term plans to your stakeholders, and see what resonates to help you prioritize where to execute first. This is also a great time to ask for any additional resources or headcount you need in order to do your job successfully. 

Product Marketing’s superpower is being the “Voice of the Product to Customers and the Voice of Customers to Product.” When establishing PMM as a new function, the best place to start is listening. First 30 days: Listen and truly get to know your Customers and the Product.  On the Customer side, what this looks like practically is spending as much time in the early days reviewing Help/Support tickets, reading through research reports, sitting in on focus groups/interviews -- anything you can to get close to the Customer. Even if you’re a Customer yourself, you’ve got to fully understand the range of customers your product attracts and why. Who are the power users? Who are the churned users? What experiences are the most delightful? The most painful?  Engage with Product to understand what’s most top-of-mind for your team. How is the product best used today? Are there unexpected ways customers have learned to use your product? What aspects of the customer experience are the most challenging to solve?  First 60-90 days: Build the shared plan (see previous question) that addresses the company’s short-term, most pressing, PMM needs while building a PMM team that will drive longer term success for the business.

30 days: Prioritize understanding your customers, your product, and your company:  * Shadow customer calls (or listen to recordings if they exist). * Get to know your cross-functional partners - schedule time with people from product, sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc. This will help you understand areas of opportunity as you establish relationships internally.  * Learn about your product - get access to a sandbox account, read the documentation, read case studies, etc. * Educate your company on what product marketing is and how other teams can work with you.  * Ask a lot of questions!  60 days: Plan and validate * Based on what you've learned, start creating a plan for what you and your team should prioritize over the next quarter and year. * Share your plan and priorities broadly to get feedback and adjust your plan based on that feedback. * Develop a hiring plan and start recruiting.  * Continue meeting with customers, teammates, etc.  * By the end of 60 days, try to get a quick win out: revamp the pitch deck, launch a new product/feature, etc.  90 days: Execute and refine  * Focus on hiring and recruiting - the PMM market is really competitive and recruiting takes time.  * Continue meeting with customers, teammates, etc. Product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles - your cross-functional relationships are really important.  * Continue to share your plan, progress, and accomplishments. 

PMM wears so many hats it's important to recognize what is needed at any stage of a company. When first coming into an organization as the first PMM I think the most important thing to do is establish what does and doesn't exist - and where the biggest holes that can be plugged are. This can be accomplished by interviewing the top stakeholders at your company: Sales, Product, Support to understand what is working and where the pain points are. From that, you can build a list and prioritize it accordingly. Using something like an Eisenhower Matrix exercise can be a great way to knock out things that have to happen - maybe you also pick a few "easy wins" to support the team right away. That being said, I think when starting at a company as an initial PMM you have to square away certain areas before beginning others - the #1 thing you have to do first is to talk to users, active, churned, big, small - this will inform a lot of your next steps - I think next comes positioning, which entails competitive analyses as well, then some level of sales enablement, which is a part of a larger GTM initiative.

Oy! First, good luck! I have done the "first" before. I don't think you have the luxury of 30/60/90. I think it's more like 30 days to identify the problem and tackle easy wins. Sixty days build out a basic launch framework, then a GTM strategy, align both with leadership. Then 90 days to test and what you build and revise based on market feedback. My advice is to prioritize like crazy. 

Please see my phases of success for a PMM in your first 100 days here . A KEY THING to know at the onset is, does everyone know what a PMM does and what value they bring? Ask all leaders and cross functional partners. Product Marketers are the marketing strategists, the brains of marketing, the connective glue between cross-functional partners, the ones who support a company's internal teams, the market, and target customers to achieve competitive advantage, increase users, adoption, find a path towards monetization and build customer lifetime value, we are a strategic function that aligns stakeholders to drive business growth, product usage and customer lifetime value -- you pick your definition. If they do not know this, then you become the product and you need to product market yourself ASAP. You need to have a strategy, narrative and deck to gain a position in the mind of all your co-workers (personas) so they know what value you bring and the power of having a PMM on board to collaborate with them. Then, identify your quick wins and crush them. This is the scenario I've seen too many times when the above doesn't play out right...the startup is struggling with hitting their numbers and layoffs begin. PMM's can be first or last on the chopping block. I've seen PMM's be the first to get laid off. OR I've also seen, PMMs be the first executives will call upon to be the strategists to help steer the ship back: I.e. redefine our persona and target customers, relook at our TAM/SAM, roll out a new position and message to win market share, identify where in the customer journey we are falling short, figure out a new pricing strategy to stop the bleed on churn, help enable the field better to understand complex problems and identify sales signals better etc...

The first 90 days are crucial to any job, but especially for new product marketing leaders. This is the time to establish your credibility, build relationships, and layout team roles that will set your function up for success for the months to come. Here’s how I break down my priorities by month: First 30 days – Assess the current state and product roadmap Look at my response below regarding the 3 prior deliverables that I review when joining a new company. But, in general, here the goal is to understand what the immediate internal pain points are. Start with looking at what audience research exists, reviewing existing customer messaging and landing pages, and understanding the acquisition funnel. You should also use this time to become intimately familiar with the product roadmap. From here, you should be able to identify some quick wins as well as some areas for strategic, step-change impact. Lastly, use your newness to inquire about current roles and responsibilities of product marketing and stakeholders’ thoughts on how that could evolve. This provides important intel for influencing RACIs down the line and identifying which people or functions may be aligned with your vision. 30-60 Days – Begin Establishing Processes and Adding Value From your first 30 days, you should already have a sense of where some acute pain points from an external positioning and internal operations perspective. This period is now focused on showing value by getting in some quick wins. This could entail a quick messaging refresh, establishing a GTM tiering framework for different product releases, and/or some sales enablement collateral. This will be critical for gaining credibility and winning partnerships with other teams. 60-90 Days By this time, you should be ready to roll out your team charter and RACI. Results come first from the quick wins, but you don’t want to wait too long to get your working model and flows aligned. This is the time to start to communicate your larger vision for product marketing. This step should likely come in 30-60 days if you are at a larger organization. But at a startup focusing on delivery in less controversial areas wholly owned by PMM first will set the right tone. Additionally, here’s where I would kick off a larger strategic initiative or big bet for your team, such as a revamp of the customer segmentation or a new market entry strategy.

This is an interesting one. In my last company, I joined as the first PMM. In my first meeting with the product team, I spent a fair bit of time explaining the role of PMMs and what we do — how we connect the market to the goals of the organization, and the product back to the market. That helped PMs understand when and how to engage with PMM. In that instance, the company was also undertaking a shift from selling to developers -- an audience PMs knew well -- to business buyers. It was definitely a journey over a period of time to bring back market insight, customer questions and requirements, analyst feedback, competitive intelligence, and so on. And, as with any human relationship, you have to nurture it -- get to know people, try to spend time with them, break bread with them (hard in a virtual world today). If they like you and feel listened to, they will open up.

Start with discovery and a series of questions that you can consistently ask your stakeholders.  1. Understand them as humans: what motivates people, how they communicate, what they're passionate about, what parts of their job they feel best at. 2. Understand how they work: how they form strategy, how they build products, what data they trust, what data and strategy they lack and would love.  3. Understand how they position your product, what the value prop is, who your best-fit customers are.   Select 3 quick wins you can do that, depending on your organization, build trust through relationship building, data sourcing, or clarification of strategy, then lean into defining your role. 

First, this is so hard! I have been through a few turns of this and candidly I’d say not every company is ready. There are companies that are just not ready to have a strategic pmm org. Maybe their product org is still maturing, or not on secure footing for some reason. It is especially hard to have a strong product marketing team without well led and secure, collaborative product orgs. Second thing I’d suggest is to build trust, get closer to the customer. Product orgs always need more time with their customer. At Glassdoor, product marketing owns the market research and insight function, so we initiate a lot of the market opportunity analysis and qual and quant research our product team utilizes. This gives us an opportunity to speak with product not just with opinions, but with data and insight. Our head of market insights is in many ways our secret weapon, and we try to put data-backed insights at the center of everything we deliver.

Building trust is the key component here and I think you get there by taking the time to listen and learn. With the product team specifically, it’s educating them on your role and how you’re ultimately aligned to the same thing --> amplifying the value of the product they’re building and to grow revenue and adoption. That said, there are many cross-functional teams product marketing works with and the best way to build trust is to know your products, your market, and your customers. If you can come to the table with that knowledge and expertise the value of what you have to offer will clearly be seen through the quality of work you produce and how you can parter and work together moving forward.

This happens a lot, and a lot of times it’s because PMM wasn’t established when the company started shipping products and became successful without the help of a PMM function.  The key is to really help the PM’s understand the true value of PMM and that we are able to take a lot of the work they actually don’t enjoy doing (writing documentation, building sales enablement and project managing a launch). PMs have enough on their hands working with their engineers and trying to meet tight deadlines and responding to customer calls. Start to identify work on their plate that should actually belong to PMM and start taking ownership of it.  This will help build trust as you work with them to help divide up the work and demonstrate this is where PMM starts stepping in to own, so it’s no longer extra work that Product teams need to work on. Once this begins to happen more and more, PMM and PM will be able to fully understand what each other works on and it becomes just a pass over of work as it gets completed, and you become each other's friends, not foe.

Show up! In my last role, I was on a team where it wasn’t usual for PMM to play a significant role in the PM planning or organization. I showed up, spent time with the leaders, shared what PMM could do (by doing it!), and was consistent and available. I ended up being BFF with the PM lead. Together, we had a massive impact on the product and customer adoption. It was also a lot of fun.

  To put it simply, ABM is a more targeted approach to storytelling and demand generation. Instead of telling 1 or 2 broad stories to large groups of prospects and/or leads, ABM forces the PMM team to narrow in on our top target accounts (both customers and prospects) and identify what story will resonate with that account… and sometimes more specifically, that department, or that person. While sales and marketing alignment is always important, ABM requires even stronger ties with sales or account management in order to be effective. One thing that has really stood out to me during the process of building out ABM playbooks is that marketers have to think of these leads as people… even more so than before. It requires personalization to be effective.

Building on Jennifer's reply above, we have 4 tiers. We aim to do proactive work (meaning working with BDRs, sales, account managers, success team) to identify a way to engage, grow, or expand an account within the top 10 accounts. This hits all points in the funnel and often involved multiple teams and units. This could include sponsoring a company event and creating custom content to get in front of a big portion of their employee base. In the second tier (100 accounts), we have a request field in Salesforce for "Customized Marketing Request" and will work on materials or collateral to support an ongoing effort (generally more MOFU). The rest of our work across the next two years we focus on scalabliity. Our dream state (and it works sometimes) is to think about this as a feedback loop. We can identify holes in our material and update the more general materials with this highly targeted work and narrative. 

With traditional marketing we have a wider audience and are doing a marketing volume play and casting a wider net. With an ABM strategy we know exactly who we want to go after and it’s a targeted, smaller audience. More time is spent sizing the accounts, looking at the data and deciding which to go after. It’s also a larger cross-functional lift. I have to include more cross-functional stakeholders to understand the account and map out our touch points so they are personalized or targeted for these select accounts. We are also reaching out to more stakeholders at the account and have a different message, position and tactic for each of the personas. This is not a volume play but a high quality, high touch play that brings focus to your efforts.   * Example: a ABM/targeted webinar invite will go out to 80 accounts and we hope to get 20 people to sign up and 7-10 to attend. Tactics leading up to the webinar may be more high-touch i.e. a direct mail campaign, a sequence of outreach emails that are highly tailored. The content will also be very targeted to that audience. A traditional webinar with a wide audience will go out to hundreds or thousands accounts and we’ll have 400+ sign up and 100+ attend and the content will be geared to cover a broader audience.

ABM is near and dear to my heart as I was in the middle of the tornado that spun up the term ABM during my time at Demandbase. As the PMM there at the time, we not only defined what ABM was, but also had to execute on it as well. Based on what we preached, when building out an ABM based strategy, I started by aligning with our sales team to identify the key accounts we are trying to target. From there, start building specific feature related messages to fit that ABM campaign, and also change the marketing language to align to that specific campaign.  For example, I once worked on an ABM campaign that focused on the financial vertical, and landing new financial accounts to build up our reputation amongst those companies. The PMM team researched the key value props that were important to financial services teams (At that time it was digital transformation, keeping ahead of their competitions, etc, rather than cost savings, increased productivity, etc). So we changed our messaging from our general messaging that we used to target our core target audience to emphasize more to these points.

ABM is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, as we just announced 7 new ABM integrations and hosted a webinar about ABM strategies. Data-driven marketing has extended beyond analytics, social, SEO/SEM, and A/B testing into insights and 3rd party data on customers’ wants and needs to tailor and target more relevant messaging and content to the recipients. How does this impact what product marketing focuses on? It has made targeting and segmentation a greater focus for the team. In the past, I had to convince B2B leaders to run deeper segmentation beyond firmographics because the only segments they wanted to use were small business, mid-market, and large enterprise. But not all organizations based on size have similar tech adoption maturity, motivations and challenges. I prefer to use 2x2s to determine the target sweet spot, greenfield opportunities, and secondary audiences. This has made product marketing more influential and collaborative with demand gen, growth and campaign teams because of the retargeting opportunities and MarTech solutions available. Gone are the days when leaders say “We offer our products and services for everyone. We are one size fits all”. Now it is “what is your size and preference and we will find the perfect fit for you”.

Traditional B2B marketing is often done through broad-reaching campaigns. Most marketers try to get their word out—as far and as wide as possible—by leveraging different marketing channels: owned, earned, and paid. The objective is to cast a wide net and put out as much content as possible, in order to act as a marketing magnet and draw a large number of leads into your funnel. On the other hand, account-based marketing (ABM) is in many ways the exact opposite. It’s about getting all your resources— your program dollars AND your people (including your sales and marketing teams)—working together in a coordinated way to pursue and convert very specific accounts. PMM works with Demand to devise the ABM strategy which includes identifying the ICP (ideal customer profile, personas, key market segments, right content, integrate into multi-channel strategy, and measure/optimize). While this is fairly obvious, you can’t do full-blown account-based marketing if you don’t even know what accounts you’re targeting. To get this right, you need to work in close conjunction with sales. ABM will not work if sales isn’t on board, since it requires both marketing and sales to focus their resources on the defined set of target accounts.

Currently, I am working with someone that I highly respect: John Hurley. But others like Grant Shirk, who is really thoughtful PMM leader at Cisco Meraki. Mary Sheehan who is at Adobe in campaigns, but has spent years in PMM before she switched over to campaigns.  This question is hard to answer because it really depends on stages of careers and what you are looking for. 

The main difference is around change management. When SMB and mid-market companies buy software, there isn't a huge change management aspect because of their size. "Enterprise," defined as more established companies like (P&G, etc.), would like to know how you will help them succeed with your software.   So this means services, solution partnerships, and etc. The other two differences are pricing and packaging and multiple persona messaging. Enterprise like to buy with scale and with value, so the right pricing and packaging is important. The last is around multiple persona, I haven't been in a situation where the enterprise was just one main buyer and no other stakeholders, so its important to message to the buying committee. The last advice I would give is define what enterprise means for your company. The definition should go beyond just company size, but including vertical, persona, and etc. The detailed definition will help you define your GTM strategy and messaging. Most growth companies fail at the above and most large companies rely too heavily on their size as a differentiator.

Learn from the best in the industry. I love the customer marketing from the following companies:  1. Salesforce - unbelievable focus on customers! Look at the trailhead, attend Dreamforce if you can 2. Gong - I like how they call out specific outcomes and challenges 3. Adobe Experience Maker Awards: https://www.adobeexperienceawards.com/ 

The best customer testimonials are those where you let the customers talk about their own personal pain points at work, and not have them try to focus on what the company pain points. Their personal pain is generally the overall company pain, especially in an enterprise setting. When it becomes personal, and your software is what helped make their lives better, then the true passion comes out. This personal touch is what resonates to other customers and buyers. When your software helped promote their career, make their overall work easier or helped them solve headaches so they can focus on other things, it’ll come out in their testimonials. These become the best stories you can get out of a customer, and resonate the most with other potential customers and buyer.

(1) problem (2) solution (3) benefit and value.  Remember there is a difference between benefit vs. value. For example, if something is automated, the benefit is you don't have to do it manually, the value might be you get to spend more time on more important tasks. Most prospects just want to see if (a) your company helped someone like them (b) was it a similar problem (c) what are the immediate benefits and (d) what are the long term value. 

Generally a great product marketer is built on three knowledge pillars:  1. Market Knowledge 2. Product Knowledge 3. Marketing Knowledge In the case of somebody brand new to product marketing, having just one of these would be fantastic. For junior roles, I'm selecting candidates based on their likelihood to develop these three areas of expertise. My go-to case assignment is asking the candidate to identify a market and segment, approximate its size, then craft a positioning statement and message for an offering to that audience. The instructions include a "time limit" and our positioning statement structure. The real insight comes in the review of the prepared materials. I focus on "how" questions so I can better understand the candidates approach to each component. From a high-level I'm looking for indications of empathy for the market segment and their problem along with a reasoned approach to approximating the market size.

1. writing skill: the messaging side of the marketing house, so you need to learn how to write.  2. presentation skill: you're not just enabling sales, but also marketing so can you present your ideas succintly  3. intellectual curiousity: you're task with taking new products to market or going into new segments.  I would look at those three as the initial pillars to gage someone who is ready to be in PMM.