Industry Product Marketing

Data should always inform decisions, though it’s OK to supplement it with some qualitative insights driven by observations of market trends. It’s not good enough to simply let the most senior person define the segmentation. Segmentation is relatively easy if you are focused on one specific vertical but gets much more complex for companies that serve across horizontals. This is where the value of data comes in to drive your decision.

This is largely industry specific. Definitely research your market and listen to the data. An extremely important data point that should come your way is from your sales motions and how your plays work with each audience. It's important though to resist the tempation to over segment - that's a rabbit hole that is hard to get out of. In a vertical marketing strategy the most basic of segmentation comes from which audience in the ecosystem you're speaking to. The most basic example would be if you're marketing a Marketplace you'd segment based on Buyers and Sellers. However, segmentatio...

First, it's important to know why you need a segmentation. Is it about go-to-market and creating more effective messaging? Is it about changing your channel / sales strategy? Is it about product development? Media Targeting? Once you have an objective or objectives, a method for segmentation often becomes more obvious.  When thinking about messaging or product development, I often find it helpful to segment customers based on common needs. In B2B organizations figuring out what types of customers have common needs might mean talking to experts on your customers like sales people, doing d...

There are many ways you could segment your market for your marketing and sales motions: from industries to personas to company size to geographies (and for B2C companies, major demographics like age, gender, etc come into play). The questions you need to ask are "Do these groups of customers have fundamentally different needs for our product?" and "Would we acquire these groups of customers in different ways?". Wherever the differences are greatest, you'll want to start there. Another key consideration is resourcing: do you have enough people to create focus areas among your marketing/sa...

I believe the best way to segment your market is to do initial high-level qualitative interviews to get a broad understanding of the market, followed by a robust quantitative segmentation, and then follow up with in-depth qual with what you believe are your priority segments. A quantitative segmentation leverages a cluster analysis that considers: * company/customer demographics and technographics (size/industry/revenue/region etc.) * Attitudes - how they think/feel/pain points and perceptions of you and your competitor set * Behaviors - what they do, how they buy, purchase journ...

1. Ideally you would draw on both a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to shape your segmentation research. Start with a hypothesis of who your TAM (total addressable market) is. This will help you to identify new market segments you may not have thought to target. For example, for Glassdoor our TAM is comprised of all working age adults who are either currently employed or want to be employed. Segmentation can then be used to expand the sandbox (market) that you’re playing in by expanding your current definition of who your true audience is - so y...

Start first by understanding what problems your product or service solves and the personas who are willing to pay for the problem to be solved. Then look at the alternatives in the market for solving those problems (products, services and DIY/free offerings) and how your product or service differentiates (or could differentiate by understanding your core competencies) against those alternatives. For instance, one company I worked at entered a well known market by providing a low cost, easy-to-use product. The competitors at that time offered tools targeted to enterprises with all the bel...

I have taken the certification offered by Pragmatic institute foundations and launch certification. I found them to be good courses for PMMs in enterprise companies. They have used their generic framework for GTM. I got some clarity on a few concepts, but overall I was expecting to come back with many more actionable frameworks, learnings from instructors' experiences. I am looking to engage with an alternative program that may be focused on PLG and low touch sales programs where we can learn about how marketing has influenced growth more comprehensively.

I am aware of just a few 1. Pragmatic institute - I took it. However, I found that to be specific to B2B enterprise sales. 2. 280 Group: I recently found out about this institute, I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program. 3. AIPMM: Seems to offer courses similar to Pragmatic Institute. I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program to understand more. Outside of these, I am looking for more engaging courses, especially where we can learn how to influence PLG in low touch product environments, and contribute to strategy comprehensively.

I am not aware of any one key certification for product marketers. I work with PMMs that come from backgrounds in campaigns, sales, engineering, and product management. Each of those backgrounds lend themselves to a specific function in product marketing.  In my experience, there are three types of product marketers:  1. Technical PMM 2. Market Programs PMM 3. Go-to-Market PMM.  An aspiring product marketer should identify their entry point into one of the aforementioned functions. If there was one skill that unites each type of PMM, it is their ability to diagnose a market, create ...

I'm a little biased here, but I don't believe that there are courses or certifications that are a prerequisite or requirement to jumping into product marketing. If you haven't done any marketing before, or worked alongside a good marketing team, Pragmatic Marketing by the Pragmatic Institute is a solid framework for twisting your head around what marketing is really about.  But the best way to learn is on the job. If you have a PMM function at your current company, get to know them. Ask about what they're working on, why it's important. What are the biggest challenges they're trying to o...

Courses, certifications, and books can definitely help transition into product marketing, but the best way to learn is by doing. I would see if there are side projects you can take on with the PMM team, in addition to self-driven learning.  For courses and certifications: * I typically recommend the Product Marketing Alliance: https://www.productmarketingalliance.com. They have a variety of programs depending on how broad or narrow you want to go, and how much time you have.  * I've also had great experience with General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly); depending on your ...

At Salesforce I’ve worked for 7 different executives in just over 6 years. Each of these leaders had a different mixture of leadership characteristics, and what I try to always look for is their ‘killer app’ - the leadership behaviors, and skills that they brought with them that were differentiated. New tools I could add to my personal leadership “tool box”.  Here are a few that I strive to master: * A leader who builds a coalition of influential stakeholders around their vision, who proactively seeks high-impact projects or opportunities for growth for their team * A leader tha...

It depends on what the charter of the industry marketing team is at your company, but in my case I came up as a product marketer and went on to build and lead product marketing teams, which is a pretty good proxy for industry marketing. The traits are all fundamentally the same, starting with the ability to quickly and repeatedly synthesize lots of complex information into a simple, compelling message that people understand and remember. Being able to not only formulate that message and indentify who needs to hear it, but then also build a marketing machine that knows how effectively use al...

A firm grasp on the market, understanding sales, empathy, great copywriting, amazing storytelling, understanding of campaign operations, an entreprenurial spirit, and leading with solution marketing is key to being a succesful industry marketer.  In my opinion, a great marketer is an ex-salesman. Marketers should always be trying to sell and close, this allows them to create the best possible collateral and pitches for sales teams.  You must be keen on directing and developing target markets, segmenting & positionining, and eliciting customer feedback at all times. Leading product mar...

A "head of role" is a very different focus. Before we can talk about standing out in the interview, I think it's important to define what a leader in marketing can and should be.  Rule #1.#1. You are no longer a marketer. Not really. Your real focus is twofold: building the team, and strengthening the company. At this point in your career, you already know how to do the job. The pivot now is to build a team that can do the job better than you and at larger scale. And then you have to leverage your expertise to help guide the overall company to a better, more predictable, more exciting...

Measuring sales success is unique to your organization but you can gauge general effectiveness by understanding the volume of opportunities, conversion rates, and productivity.  Volume of Opportunity Cross-selling, renewals, and upselling are more effective ways of generating revenue than acquiring a net new customer. According to InsightSquared, the average cost of acquisition for a company to renew a product is $0.13, the average upsell costs a company $0.28. Both are dramatically more cost-effective moves than acquiring a net new customer—at $1.18 to earn $1.00.  These cost-effectiv...

My top 3 metrics to measure sales enablement success are : 1. Reduction in ramp time for new AEs coming into the company - defined as 'how many days does an AE spend at my company before they close their first New Business deal?' 2. Quarterly rep participation rate - defined as 'what % of my ramped sales team closed a deal this quarter?' - this number should increase every quarter if your sales enablement program is effective. If your sales cycles are close to a year long, then perhaps you evaluate participation on a bi-annual basis (2x/year). If your sales cycles are much shorter (less ...

I’m going to answer this question the same way I answered, “How do you measure ROI of sales enablement?” because ultimately success should be ROI in some form. Here’s my response again:  Ultimately you want everything to tie back to revenue (usually in the form of new versus growth versus retention), but you can never fully hold PMM accountable for those top-line numbers since there are so many other forces at play. This is why you need a set of secondary metrics you can use to measure your efforts a little more directly. For starters, measure the attendance rate of your sales enablement ...

In my opinion the effectiveness of sales enablement should be measured by reducing the customer acquisition costs over time and reducing the time it takes to close a deal. Having these in-process KPIs that you can track month over month will help you demonstrate how your enablement activities are helping sellers meet their quotas. 

Sharing how I think about this as an industry marketer. My first step would be to huddle with my sales and product leaders and align common goals (where possible). If you are working within a larger organization, perhaps start by collaborating with your sales strategy, sales programs and sales enablement teams, then up the chain to sales/product leadership.  In addition to business outcomes (ARR, etc.) you'll want to leverage the collaboration with these teams to determine the enablement program strategy and design. What knowledge do we want each seller to have based on role? How do we w...

I think there's a similar question above on measuring KPIs. Please refer to it. But essentially I'll look at 2 parts  1. Whether sales has received the information * Attendance rates, Tests/Quizzes to capture main points, engagement rates during the training, feedback post the training and % of sales force trained 2. Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer * Adoption of product/recommendation  * Revenue growth attributed to the product  * No. of clients pitch to * Higher win-rates

* At a high-level the goal is likely to make sellers more productive in some sense. Probably by making them more effective or more efficient. Let’s just call this “go-to-market readiness” as this is typically a key pillar of any sales enablement team. * GTM readiness is likely the success metric that is going to be most inspected/cared about. So you’ll want to be tracking things like time to close, deal velocity, deal size, churn (if trial to close), or any other metrics that are standardized and easily reportable via your CRM. Other GTM readiness metrics that would b...

Sales enablement success should ultimately drive sales success, including the size & number of deals closed won and win rates. Leading sales enablement indicators of sales success include adoption of content, sales feedback, and feedback from prospects/customers as part of win/loss analysis. In particular, if messaging is done effectively and rolled out properly to the sales team, then the win/loss analysis should show that the messaging ultimately resonated with the prospect upon deal close. Before that even happens, product marketers should be able to see that the field has either downloa...

Create a quiz or set up role playing for your sales team on their understanding of the product features, capabilities and messaging. When you set aside time to observe how your sales teams are understanding and consuming your sales enablement, you create a better relationship with the team, and know which reps may need more help in what areas. By watching how well the reps could talk through the key messages in a role play, or through their quiz answers, I know what was working and what wasn’t.

It really depends on the type of enablement that you’re doing and the problems you’re looking to solve. But at the end of the day, there are two key metrics I’m always looking at, which is the average contract value (in conjunction with number of deals won) and the win rates. In addition to looking at whether there’s a measurable increase/decrease, there are other factors I assess: * Consumption of enablement materials: What % of the field has been trained? And how are the materials being used in prospect conversations or follow-ups? * Gong calls: Not everyone has Gong (software that ...

It's a bit of a white whale in a lot of organizations, but ideally you want to measure not just consumption or certification rates, but the percentage of closed/won opportunties in which the account team directly applied a specific enablement program or content. If the assumption is that sales people who are sufficiently enabled on customer needs, the market and your solution win deals at a higher rate, faster and for larger dollar values, then any sales enablement measure would ideally track those outcomes. Often sales enablement measures are very "top of the funnel" in that they track the...

There are a lot of ways to measure sales enablement: lead-to-conversion rates, win-rates, sales rep NPS, etc. HubSpot does a great overview of popular options in this post.  In my experience, there is no one-size-fits all and getting to the "right" answer requires a deep understanding about how marketing and sales contribute to your business. In the end, it's all about alignment (with sales) and impact (for the business). If you're starting from scratch (e.g. new business unit, early-stage startup), I recommend working with your head of sales to define success. In the short-term, it m...

I've seen this done successfully a number of different ways. Here are a few common ones: 1. Usage - What is the % of your sales team that is using the content and collateral you are creating. If you use a competitive enablement tool like Klue, you'll be able to track usage and adoption of things like battlecards and digests. 2. Win Rate - This one is simple. What is your win rate against competitors prior to your enablement initiatives. How much does it increase post enablement initiatives? My recommendation is to start by trying to move the needle on one or two c...

As an industry marketer I am mostly concerned around the sales cycle, ASP, win rate, content performance, and rep productivity. Good enablement, marketing, and content, should shorten sales cycles and drive how things are leveraged ie case studies, whitepapers, solution briefs, and blogs.   Often times good enablement will measure these variables continuously on a rolling basis and will work closely with industry and product marketers in understanding training gaps.

My favorite way to measure sales enablement success is through a Sales Confidence Score. Start with a baseline survey to the sales team on their confidence across your products, personas, verticals, etc. Take pulse surveys after each enablement session and then make changes to your programming based on their confidence. 

A shorter answer here, but I think there's a pretty straightforward way to measure sales enablement overall. Ideally, this is driven by the sales enablement team, and you're fueling their succces: Key metrics to measure sales enablement: 1. Rep ramp - How long does it take new reps to onboard and reach full quota? What is the success rate in that period? 2. Annual quota attainment - What % of reps are at or above plan? Does it match the business needs? 3. Win rates - How effective is sales at qualifying, develping, and closing opportunities? Win rates is probaly the most...

There is an in-depth science to this that many sales or product strategy teams leverage, so with that caveat, I'm sharing a high-level approach. My recommendation is to break down the problem piece by piece and find each variable needed to set a revenue target (and a sales pipeline target and coverage ratio based on close rates to support attainment of that revenue target).   First get a sense of the addressable market. Talk with your sales leaders (or strategy team) to determine if you have a way of reporting on all of your target accounts within a focus industry (both existing customers...

Not sure I understand the question. If this is to set revenue targets for a new industry expansion where GTM resources have not yet been assigned, I'd do a top-down and bottom-up analysis of the total addressable market (TAM), then take a percentage of that TAM to set the revenue target. You'll need to have marketing-only activities ready to back up your assumptions if no other resources are available. * Top-down: Research the overall industry, audience size, propensity to spend, competitive pricing, geographical entry points, distribution, etc. and take a chunk of that market. * B...

This is really tricky to do well, and requires strong executive leadership and business operations support to pull off. Right now, at Procore, I work in an environment where our sales teams -- and thus revenue targets -- are set by our three primary segments, so I don't have this issue, but our Product teams do -- and I've talked to them a lot about it, and I have also had this experience back when I was at Salesforce.  A few recommendations: * Use modeling based on prior year attainment by industry, and model growth on top of that. * Look at your TAM/SAM/SOM by industry, and what ...

This is a tough one because it’s difficult to set any sort of revenue targets for your industry if sales is not fully aligned and compensated to sell to that industry. You could be setting yourself up for failure. Not sure who’s requiring you to set a target in this way, but I would first ensure that you have strong buy-in from your leadership / your executive team on what the expectations will be around accountability. Having said that, you could approach it in two ways: * Set target based on internal metrics: Look at your revenue, growth rate, average contract value and win rates ov...

Formally, sales and sales ops should be setting revenue targets and the associated pipeline coverage targets needed to drive marketing strategy. At least for enterprise software companies with direct, quota-carrying sales organizations, compensation structure drives the ship so you wouldn't want to construct revenue targets apart from the sales team - that's bound to cause all sorts of alignment issues. If, in a marketing role, you decide that an industry focus is the right driver for messaging and campaign investment, any allocation should be lined up to how marketing, sales and product/st...

Industry KPIs should encompass sales and marketing performance. Sales and marketing teams need alignment on pipeline, revenue goals, and rep productivity.   In many instances, when a proper solution marketing team is created, KPIs should encompass market penetration and sales performance. Even if quota isn't tied to the industry, benchmark figures must be baselined to grow off of: * New Logo ARR * Cross Sell ARR * Rep Productivity  * Upsell ARR * Close Rates  * Cycle Times * Pipeline All of this then translates to:  * Drive pipeline and top-line revenue growth, inclusive of ne...

The strategic marketing team could provide direction on where the business has the greatest growth potential: where there is a strong product-market fit and room to capture a greater share of demand. They may already have target growth numbers in place. Next, you’ll need to determine whether you can identify the industry for each customer segment in the customer relationship management (CRM) system (e.g. Salesforce) and track their progress through the pipeline. With this information, your marketing operations or analytics team can build dashboards to track progress over time.

As a PMM, revenue is a trailing metric and the one you have the least control over. If there aren't existing quotas set by industry (and this is rare), this is likely to be unsuccessful. Instead, go back to the core KPIs for PMM: Opportunity creation (count), Qualified pipeline ($), and win rate (or pipe coverage). These are more direct to measure, and if you create opportunity for sales, they'll follow those dollars.  Establishing these can flow directly from past results and the next few quarters' plan. If you know, for example, that you tend to deliver 18% of business from a given ...

In the early stages, as teams are starting to get built - trust and dividing responsibilites is the biggest factor in ensuring alignment, especially between PMM's and PM's.  How do you build trust and clearly divide responsibilities? Communicate and clarify your end goals.  Align on goals - Ownership from both teams is necessary. Product Marketers are customer and market facing, while PM is developer and product facing. PMM's must ensure product adoption is critical and their highest priority. Marketers must align product packaging and messaging with market demands and PMs must align ...

This is a really tough one. First and foremost, it's important to separate PM and PMM. They need to be parallel, not dependent, organizations to effectively function. You need them to have the freedom to call BS on each other, work through differing opinions, and emerge with a stronger view of the market.  I'd recommend starting with the problem to be solved. Is it improving overall GTM effectiveness (opportunity creation, pipeline, win rates), or accessing a new market or vertical? What are the overall priorities of the business that demand gen or product are unable to address on their ...

As industry marketers, our hope is to get a message that we author deeply embedded into the minds of as many target buyers across as many accounts as possible. Some measurements of this ‘influence’ are quantifiable (measurable) and some are not.   When we are trying to reach a new audience of target buyers, we may look at our investments on channels where those audiences congregate and ask questions about our content’s reach (SEO, how many unique page views, impressions?). We may want to measure how engaging the content is through scroll depth, time on page, duration, social shares, comm...

I love this question -- and it's actually one I ask candidates during my interview process as well, because the way that Product Marketing is measured overall varies widely across organizations.  Right now, I think of it across these five areas: 1. Stakeholder alignment. This sounds "soft", but in industry marketing, your stakeholders are often even more broad than product marketing, and each group -- this includes Sales, P&T / R&D, Demand Gen / Campaigns, Enablement, Customer Success, and Partners. 2. Command of Message. This is can be measured in a varient of ways -- but...

There are multiple key metrics I look at to see how our industry programs are performing and positively influencing the right outcomes, sliced by industry: * Company-level metrics: growth, profitability and retention * Marketing metrics: pipeline, campaign/content performance, brand perception * Sales metrics: average deal size, average win rate, pipeline conversion At the end of the day, it all comes back to revenue, but it’s hard to directly quantify impact to revenue without seeing how you’ve influenced the other areas.

Metrics around awareness and demand in a given industry. For awareness, web traffic and enagement, press coverage and customer reference stories are key. If there are industry associations and trade publications, there are no shortage of lists and awards that tend to lay out the landscape. If your company is in the mix there, you're doing the right things. For demand, marketing-driven and marketing-influenced pipeline from programs targeting an industry whether the products or verticalized or horizontal. What's your penetration in the top 10 commercial banks or top 10 online retailers etc? ...

In a proper program, Industry Marketing & Campaigns have joint ownership of communicating the right messages, in the right channels, at the right time, in order to build pipeline and win NARR. I say this as a preface because Industry and Campaign leadership should work together to:  * Establish business objectives * Set targets, goals, and key intiiatives * Help with cross-industry efforts This should then yield to:  * Pipeline generation * Open Pipe * NARR As such, they should hold each other accountable for the primary areas of responsibility, be able & willing to step up and he...

I recommend holding shared KPIs across PMM - the classics: Qualified Pipeline, Win Rates, Opportunity Velocity/Duration. Looking at how your industry marketing investments are improving your sales effectiveness overall.  Secondary metrics could be growth of bookings and sales in a target or priority vertical, but those are sometimes too trailing. Good to look at over multiple quarters. 

With my industry product marketers, I nurture the development of a set of skills that I feel differentiate them. These are the skills I feel an industry product marketer should be exceptional at: 1.) Know your industry buyer personas. 2.) An industry product marketer should be able to speak in the native language of that industry. They should know the industry jargon, abbreviations, and the way their business functions. 3.) They should hold themselves accountable to ensuring their messaging is relevant to the industry’s specific situation and challenges, and they should always strive to pos...

All product marketers, no matter their focus area, need to understand both their product and their buyer -- but industry marketers tend to overindex on understanding the industry market, ICP, and Personas and the key messages that will resonate with them. In contract, more product-focused product marketers may need to be deeper into the product roadmap and release cadance, and how it impacts the overall go-to-market. 

PMMs and Industry PMMs are very similar in terms of the core skill sets needed to be successful in their roles. The biggest difference is that they need to intimately understand the industry or set of industries that they are responsible for and the unique needs of the personas that they’re targeting in those industries. With this lens, there are 3 foundational areas an Industry PMM needs to be exceptional at (all of which are powered by deep knowledge of their industry, customers and competitors): * Driving market success of the targeted industry with a strong GTM strategy, compelling...

Generally, I'd say two things: 1) having enough familiarity and understanding of an industry to know how to craft a message that lands with a given audience and avoid missing the mark by either being vaguely horizontal or not speaking an industry's language. Every industry has their own tone, lexicon and tribal knowledge that need to be understood to connect with that audience. A great PMM can have the use cases, feature set, benefits and competitive landscape down cold and still not sould like they "get" a given industry, lessening the effect your story has on customers. 2) Unlike PMM, ind...

Storytelling, bringing the customer vision to life, and having a wide variety of skillsets (I always love ex-entrepreneurs) is vital for an industry marketer to be exceptional.  The industry marketers job is to bring the buyers vision front and center. A key difference here is that product marketers are more focused on ensuring the product is the centerpiece; Its features and benefits are all around the product, not the customer. Solution marketing, which ties into industry product marketing, brings value driven messaging to life and the product is the support for the message. Messaging ...

Industry product marketers need to have a solid knowledge of the pain points and needs for the audience they serve and be able to translate product benefits into customer outcomes. They partner with product-focused solution marketers and campaign teams on go-to-market plans. However, their quarterly and annual plans are not as tightly coupled with product release cycles, but rather with industry events and outreaches targeting user personas and buying segments.

Internal evangelism and industry expertise.  Yes, you need all the core PMM skills. You might even need to be a stronger writer and positioner than the core PMM. But if your sole goal is to help grow your share in a specific industry or set of industries, you're going to have to: * Sell hard on behalf of your customers. Industry features are niche features. Functionality, file support, integrations, compliance, partnerships. Industries are specialized and niche, and each of these will never be "above the line" when it comes to traditional product prioritization. But you have ...

Certainly Sharebird, which is always good for a wander around Q&A's and other content. There are a few podcasts I really like, like Product Marketing Insider, the Product Marketing Experts and Product Marketing Life. There's some good stuff in Forrester's Sirius Decisions about Industry Marketing but it's also helpful to follow certain influential folks in an industry, even if they're not marketers, to soak in the language and topics that matter. Especially at senior levels, industries are smaller than we think they are from a people perspective - all the IT architects in the big banks know...

Unfortunately, I really haven't. Find people who've worked places where you see great industry expertise. Talk to them. Talk to customers.  Read Crossing the Chasm. Again.  Ooh, fun one. Alex and the Sharebird team are telling me that there's a 300-character minimum answer. Now we get to pick on them a bit. "Alex, I thought that one of the greatest strenghts of PMM was synthesis and simplification! Why can't I be super concise and pithy here? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!?" Okay, let's see if that's 300 chars yet... ... 

In establishing segments, it is critical to get cross-org alignment so that all functions are working off of the same definitions. Methodologies for defining segments can vary depending on how you plan to use them, so I would recommend investing heavily in the upfront phase of gathering requirements from all internal customers, establishing a shared understanding of how your segmentation will be used and getting buy-in on the methodology.   From there, research on the needs of those segments can take various forms depending on the type of question you are seeking to answer. I always start...

One thing worth adding to Laura's great reply is that "systematically influencing the product roadmap" can be viewed as an ongoing process. Once you have a set of segments and persona needs per Laura's playbook above, it's important to regularly reinforce this as the "single source of truth." As a critical internal product evangelizer and voice of the customer, it'll be on you to keep beating the drum. Two specific examples of what this can look like in action: * During quarterly/annual roadmap planning sessions, point out where the group's thinking does/doesn't align well to the ne...

There are a variety of low touch and high touch research methods we've used over time. Most recently what's been on my mind has been the value of Closed Won/Lost interviews for earlier stage products.  As companies scale they're likely to have existing products that have been in the market for a while (I think of these as graduate students or grown ups depending on how mature they are) and others that are new kids on the block (I think of these as toddlers or preschool children). Each of these requires a different degree and type of attention to make it successful. We've recently laun...

Research has to be an ongoing, continual process -- if you aren't continually talking to market experts, customers, and prospects, you lose credibility both with your sales organization and with your product organization.  True standardization is less critical than repetition and at-bats, and building the muscles to produce high quality results quickly. If you can do that well, you'll have earned a seat that the product leadership table to influence roadmap because it won't be "so-and-so the product marketer said so", but "this specific market research said so, and here's five quotes ...

During roadmapping, each product team articulates the "understand needs" for their product area and what we will do with the information to improve the product. This process is often led by the PMM.  From there, we work with the product team to document hypothesis to test based on information we need to know and detail the best approach to prove of disprove those hypothesis.  At that point, it's all about execution and pulling together what we learn in a compelling way.   With regard to systematically influencing roadmaps, I feel like this is an "always on" job. First, I try to bring the...

We establish multiple listening channels ranging from our field to direct customer conversations to engagements with analysts. The insights we receive from these channels allow us to then identify the general areas of opportunity which we then partner with engineering on researching further through qualitative and quantitative research. This allows us to priortize the highest areas of opportunity which get added to the product roadmap.  

It first starts with identifying who your target buyers are, and building a set of “persona packs” that establish a baseline of key information in understanding buyer needs and evaluation criteria. This is critical to have so that you can properly educate your sales teams to have more effective conversations with prospects. At a high level, they include: * Distinct buying roles that exist within an organization * Desired business outcomes driven by each role * Sample org charts within each function * Your products/solutions related to their business goals and objectives * Key customer...

You must first:  * Identify overall approach for alignment with brand and company priorities * Identify primary target segments for programs * Determine program-specific messaging * Communicate plans to stakeholders From there an Industry marketer must then define: * New market opportunities  * Define overall messaging & positioning & personas * Win / Loss analysis * Market segmentation and sizing * Competitive intel gathering + analysis From there you then execute on the measurement and reporting:  *  Training: Messaging by solution and sub-audience *  Messaging: Messaging ...

This one depends on company stage and maturity of the market.  At Cisco, we're incredibly mature, and I'm very fortunate to work alongside Sophia Danvers and her amazing Audience Marketing team. They eat industry intel for breakfast and turn it into not just persona insights, but messaging, content, and campaign ideas that keep our top industries growing, even 15 years later.  In earlier stages, this process is a lot more ad hoc, and really depends on how much time you can spend with customers and sales. When you're building, it's less a formal process than it is a habit or a practice...