Product Marketing / Demand Gen Alignment

I think that depends on your company goals. At HoneyBook we've identified a specific segment that has the best product-market fit, so we're solely focusing on that segment. Therefore it makes more sense for us to split the work by feature (product line) and by user lifecycle stage. But I think that what's most important is to understand what are your company's priorities and organize your team in a way that supports those priorities. If you work for a startup, these may change year over year, so you have to stay flexible.

I've seen organizational structures of all types over the last 10 years and have grown to appreciate a function with clear roles and responsibilities. The most common configuration (and the one I've had the most success with) is where I can have a leader for Core Solutions (your revenue generating products and SKUs), a leader looking after the Portfolio (someone who thinks about how to bring the portfolio to different audiences), a leader looking after Pricing and Packaging (who can work with your finance, product, and revenue teams to maximize profitability), a leader looking after Compete...

Always an interesting question. 1. What's the leadership structure of the marketing team? 2. Is there a director of product marketing 3. and what does the demand gen team expect from the PMM team? To me, those sorts of things dictate the relationship between the two. Also, if a company is more transactional with its products, then it tends to lean more demand gen focused strategies, vs a company with a challenge in educating (e.g., for a more technical product or a longer sales cycle company). Basically, it matters what a company/marketing team thinks it's getting right and needs mo...

In my experience, product marketing is the nucleus of the marketing team - driving and informing strategy for demand generation, sales enablement, and other channel owners (field, content, etc).   Good Product Marketers first need to know what is coming down the pipeline (on the product side) and be able to translate that into why it matters (for the sales team). That’s why great relationships with the product and sales teams in this role are critical. Once the strategy is set from that alignment between sales and product, then bringing along the demand gen team is where marketing can act...

Hi everyone! Great to be here with you today! Thanks for sending me so many thoughtful questions...digging in now! This is a tricky one as I've seen 3 different models in my recent career history: * Mid-sized tech company where product marketing and demand gen were separate groups, yet connected at the hip * Small start up where I ran all marketing functions and thus we were one :) * Morningstar, where my team has both product marketing and demand generation responsibilities, although we do share pipeline goals with others across marketing and of course sales. Regardless ...

Love your above answer.  Even campaign plans have to be defined together because demand gen team will need guidance on  - who to target  - type of customers - segments, size, revenue, etc  - what type of campaign - lead gen, awareness, account-based marketing campaign, nurturing existing customer contacts in the database etc  - Messaging and positioning briefs so demand gen can creative derivative pieces of content (infographics, banners, social media teasers etc).  On the campaign front as well - PMMs can and should have a view on campaign strategy because a lot core content they...

As a PMM I’ve always had a close relationship with demand gen, from startups to public companies. Here’s what we do together and what we each own separately: Together we discuss themes and ideas but demand gen owns the tactics and PMM owns the strategy. We both own the results. Demand Gen: focuses on launching and driving campaigns, optimizing them to drive pipeline, working with SDRs and AE’s, managing large budgets for paid media, seo, organic. They own the tactics.   Product Marketing: we are the experts in our product, personas, competitors, solutions and verticals so we own messagi...

Great question! Demand Gen team tend to be bigger than PMM teams, and also have access to a lot more budget :) Modern PMM teams should consider pipeline (and ultimately revenue) to be their primary success metric. If PMM teams are led based on this approach, it drives perfect alignment with our DG partners since DGF is typically on the hook to generate sufficient pipeline for Sales every quarter. In my experience, the best way to work w/ DG is to consider them to be true partners. PMMs are experts on the “who” (i.e. target personas) and “why” (messaging for these personas) while DG is the ...

At Bill.com, we work extremely close to our growth marketing teams. They are a critical partner as we launch and scale-up our growth. Both groups have their strengths. For the PMM, we have the deep knowledge about the customer needs to clearly articulate the value prop that will resonate most with this segment. For the growth marketers, they have the expertise on how to reach this segment and what is the best way to do so. It is a 50/50 partnership with co-owned KPIs and regardless of who "owns" the campaign, it requires tight partnership to be successful. I'd suggest developing a plan toge...

At smaller companies, DG/Growth and Product Marketing are typically the same team (or person!), and the two functions should try to work just as closely together as companies grow. The hub of this collaboration is campaign ideation and design. As the teams formulate their GTM hypotheses ("campaigns"), both functions contribute their knowledge and information. Who brings what information is typically where the delineation happens: * In a past life as a Demand Marketer, we were experts on in-channel performance and pipeline metrics. We also added qualitative insight from our execution...

First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt. Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each demand gen person, asking how can we help them achieve their goals. Sign up for some activities to help them with some shared KPIs. Once you get some shared wins, other departments tend to start trusting you more. Then, they might allow you to weigh in on their strategy too. 

Addressed a similar question related to Campaign teams earlier. Please refer to that response.  In short, Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press. Demand generation consumes the outputs from product marketing and injects them into marketing machinery that delivers content to prospects at scale consistently.

This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you want both teams to be really proactive about sharing goals, priorities, and roadmaps in order to e...

A solid DACI will create the R+R boundaries you need for your organization. No matter what R+R you align on, a close relationship beween demand gen and PMM is essential for growth.  I recommend aligning around common goals. For example: are you both responsible for driving revenue? Traditionally as a PMM, you should be guiding the demand gen campaigns with the positioning & messaging and allowing Demand Gen to run the channel strategy,

  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 pro...

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 su...

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 dif...

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 ...

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 ...

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 tog...

I believe that the person ultimately responsible for the results, will most incentivized to succeed. So it comes down to ensuring incentives are aligned and expectations and responsibilities are clear.   For every product or feature launch, I create a go-to-market checklist that includes timelines, deliverables, dependencies, owner, and KPI. Some projects (like building out a message map) require input from both the PM and PMM, so I spell out specifically what pieces should come from which owner.   Same goes with demand gen and product marketing. I will work with the demand gen team in ...

My answer is predicated on product marketing owning the launch and deman gen having a component of the launch. Product marketing provides the target buyers, the target market segments, the value proposition, and translates launch goals into lead gen objectives. Lead gen has what they need to plan and execute.

We have partnered with our integrated campaigns team to formalize roles and responsibilites and then we actually aim to share KPIs. I think it makes us stronger to feel like we are succeeding and failing together vs being able to say Product Marketing "succeeded" in a quarter where we didn't hit our pipeline target if that makes sense.

Great question. I would first caveat that this is something we're always working on, so if you haven't figured it out yet, don't worry, goal setting, responsibilities, and KPIs are always a work in progress! I think it's rare that in larger organizations and with significant cross-functional work there's one person or one function who owns one clear KPI. I try to think of it as a Venn Diagram. On the left is Product goals or responsibilities - overly simplifying here, but defining the product, buiding the product, measuring the product impact on the business...then on the right side is d...

At Zuora (and at my last company at Hired) we have OKRs and each group creates their own and works with each other to define theirs. We can also view everyone's OKRs in our Workboard tool. Alignment begins before any project begins. Each quarter we all get better at aligning our OKRs. And, with each project we improve on how we report back on how we acheived our OKRs together. We also focus on shared frameworks and process we all agree and align on. During and after each project we keep iterating and improving our frameworks and share learnings with other members of our teams.   With OKR...

As the driver of the overall success of a launch, typically the PMM is responsible for the overall metrics around a launch. These can drill down into KPI categories like: Sales (ARR), Product (adoption or engagement), PR/Comms (coverage), Social (likes, new followers, engagement), Web (traffic, demo requests, form submits), Sales Enablement (asset views/downloads) and Demand Gen (will detail below) KPIs. At a more mature company where there are members of the marketing team specialized in these areas, those teams would be responsible for their respective KPIs. Of the above categories, PMM w...

A simple answer to this is that as a PMM, you are responsible for product launches and the GTM strategy around those launches. So, you will ultimately own all launch metrics. However, things like Pipegen, ACV/Revenue, Traffic, SOV etc are shared with your demand gen and content stakeholders.  In addition, some metrics you could focus on as a PMM are -  New product/feature mentions in sales calls: Tools like Gong help you search keywords and add filters. It's not hard to see how many times your sales team talked about your product launch. This is a good indicator of how well the sales ...

This is really two questions with very different answers: KPI's: Especially for KPI's, drawing a solid line between Product Marketing and Demand Gen is unnecessary; it could even cause harm to collaboration between the two functions. Both teams are working to drive new sign-ups, adoption, or revenue related to the product/feature being launched. Both teams should carry goals toward that outcome to make sure all incentives are aligned. Choosing the ones that makes the most sense will depend on your customer acquisition mechanism. Responsibilities: Responsibilities are a bit easier to sep...

Upfront, I just want to call out something that you all likely already know - PMM’s strategic and interconnected role makes it difficult to pinpoint and measure impact. Strategic, foundational work is hard to measure. And being so interconnected means that there are heaps of dependencies and variables. Shared goals and metrics are part of the job, so get comfortable with that. Build communicative, productive partnerships with the teams that have shared goals and align on the approach. Celebrate successes and failures together, do post-mortems, and learn and improve hand-in-hand. Now, onto ...

This depends on the company and what it needs the role of product marketing to be. This boils down to: what gap is the company trying to fill? I'll use my role as an example, and for context, Full Circle Insights is a six year old startup with a sort of technical product aimed at enterprises/businesses. I sit in Marketing (and I would be reluctant to join a PMM team that sits under Product due to my desire to drive growth and demand gen activities). My company's main objective is to drive growth and more leads, though that's not to say that product feedback loops aren't crucial. There is ju...

Thoughtful answers, Feng! In my experience, resource-wise its best to be with the marketing team & budget. Tech-wise, product. If you want to pull your hair out all the time, sales :)

This reminds me of the classic "SDR team in sales or marketing" debate. The answer is that it can work in either place and really doesn't matter as long as PMM and the rest of marketing are communicating and working together effectively. If that's not happening, you have a much bigger issue that no org chart can fix. 

While there are benefits to both, judging from my experience, I believe PMM reporting into Marketing is more effective. * Reporting into makreting creates stronger ties between PMM and the revenue organziation (marketing, sales, operations, etc.) and can therefore lead to more buy-in from those stakeholders during launch. * Reporting into marketing positions you as a core partner in the revenue org. You have greater flexibility to "lead" the revenue org through launches and strategy shifts, while the PM can then focus more of their time on R&D (product, design, engineering...

It can work in many places, but I find it to be the most effective if it is either within Marketing or on its own entirely so that marketing is properly on message. I often draw a venn diagram of product marketing. Product marketing has changed dramatically since the days when the Pragmatic framework was the be-all and end-all of a product organization. At the end of the day, product marketing inspires marketing, enables sales and influences product. 

I’ve not personally sat on a product team (so I’m admittedly biased.) But I would vote for it to live in marketing. Here’s why - the essential functions of these teams are different: * Product Team - exists to build great products  * Marketing Team - exists to communicate the value of the product to market and drive adoption   Narvar is a smaller (sub 200 employees) B2B SaaS company. This division of responsibility has been organic and feels pretty obvious.   With larger companies, it can get more nuanced. I’m intimately familiar with a large (13,000+ employees) B2C company here i...

I have been in marketing and product org -- both places and see pros and cons for both. It all depends on the strength of the PM team and their skills.  > If PM team is strong enough to own end-to-end product responsibilities including how to build for new verticals etc, -- then PMM under marketing would well. This gives lots of advantages as highlight above by others - budget, go-to-market, campaign alignment. The normal human behavior of "being in the same tribe" :-). also because most marketing organizations are dominated by women.....  > If PM team is however not strong especially...

Based on some research we did (admittendly small sample size), we found that 2/3 report to CMO / VP Marketing and only ~10% to Product. undefined [https://i.imgur.com/XDXlgbJ.png] Source: A New Definition of Product Marketing At this stage unfortunately there isn't enough executive ownership of the Product Marketing function, but in future I hope it reports to either VP of Product Marketing or VP Product. This is because Product is now becoming about growth and needs to have a cross-functional team which includes marketing.  Our folks at Reforge (that run growth courses) lay out t...

Product Management and Product Marketing are two sides of the same coin. Organizationally there are benefits to both approaches. As a product manager, I have had product marketers on my team, and as a product marketer, I have reported into the Head of Marketing as well.  This decision is dependent on what is a bigger problem - product marketer not having a deep understand of the product due to product complexity, lack of documentation or exposure OR is it around go-to-market where product marketers aren't able to influence the brand, campaigns and sales enablement carried out by the mark...

This is related to the question above with regards to marketing's ability to influence the roadmap. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's a matter of the role a CEO wants marketing to play within the organization. When a product is nascent or acting as a challenger within the market, I firmly believe marketing should have a big seat at the table and really shape the vision, voice, and brand at a company. 

There are good arguments for either. My team is in the marketing org so I have a bias towards that structure :) Ultimately it comes down to people and where you think PMM can have the most impact and benefit from a resourcing and influence standpoint. I don't think there's a dogmatic answer or a simple framework to decide though.

I personally think Product Marketing should report into Marketing with the head of the whole product marketing function reporting directly to the CMO. This is exactly how we’re organized at Zendesk and I’ve found this reporting structure seems to work well for our team. I believe it’s because even though our work sits in the middle of Marketing, Product and Sales, our greatest number of direct stakeholders and partner teams are in Marketing. At least in my experience, I find there are so many other functions in Marketing as well, like Campaigns, Performance, Content, Events, Web, Engagement...

I firmly believe that Product Marketing should report into the Marketing org for one central reason: PMM is a communications-driven role requiring the ability to effectively craft and convey messages across all mediums. While we need to have a strong understanding of our customers, what problems they're trying to solve and how our products (and our competitors' products) attempt to solve those problems down to considerable technical depth, our job isn't to prioritize backlog, create user stories - the core stuff PMs do. We have to effectively transform our technical understanding into clear...

The more technical your product and complex your use cases, i.e. selling to enterprise customers, then PMM can report into Product. This is what we do at Zuora and other companies I’ve worked at. The less technical the product and the less complex your use cases, i.e. selling to SMB/MM customers, then PMM can report into Marketing. This is what we did at my prior companies too. When PMMs need to understand complex use cases and technical products they have more air to cover and it’s better to have alignment with PM's to make sure knowledge transfer happens properly and nuances are picked ...

I've reported into both in my career and the best I can come up with is "it depends". As an overall philosophy, I would generally prefer to report into marketing, because it creates the right level of healthy conflict between the CMO and CPO (Chief Product Officer or SVP Product) that you need in order to develop a good product strategy and go-to-market in tandem. Reporting into product often means you end up just as a support function to product managers and cannot influence strategy. PMs throw items over the wall and see PMMs primarily as launch managers and wonder why they're not "making...

A Product Marketing Manager’s position varies depending on the company. However, you will find yourself from time to time working very closely together with the PM and count yourselves as part of the team. So depending on the situation, company organization, and phase you are at it will be advisable to report to the PM, the CMO, or Head of Marketing.

I would recommend try to apply the common rule "80% of the business comes from 20% of the customers". We have our customers divided into 3 segments:   New-New: Completely new to the organization Existing-New: existing customer but buys new product  Existing-buying more: Existing customers buy the same product but buys additional plan    For each product we see % revenue for each customer segment. Depending on that we prioritize if we want to focus on demand gen vs engagement vs sales.    Say if new-new is your core performing segment, you should invest your time heavily on demand ge...

Every PMM should answer this question based on 2 factors -- the needs of the business and the strength of the funnel.   (1) Org & Biz Needs - If you have a strong sales team established with sky-high close rates, the strongest need might be in widening the funnel (demand gen). If you have a green sales team that is drowning in leads, but not effectively closing, then focusing your efforts on sales enablement or nurturing might make more sense.   (2) Funnel Strength - It’s like running a relay race… if you don't have anyone to pass the baton to, that baton is going to drop. So it’s impor...

I agree with the great points made by Jennifer and Ruturaj, but want to add that the stage of the company matters quite a bit as well.  For young companies, it is often beneficial to get engagement and retention right before trying to optimize demand gen and sales. Marketing and sales are going to be very expensive if you can't deliver value for customers and in turn make them valuable for you. If you've got a 90% churn rate and spend $1M on demand gen, you're going to get a terrible return compared with first spending 6-12 months bringing that churn rate down to, say 70% and only then s...

There are lots of ways to build a list depending on your product release state, targeted audience, list purpose (sales vs. marketing), goals and how much money you have. Sign Ups If you have not launched your product yet, on your homepage or a landing page that provides teasers into what you are doing, you can place a simple sign up for notifications of the release or for requests to be a beta customer. If your company has a blog, have a place for to people sign up for notifications of blog releases. Make sure they understand that they are also opting-in to marketing emails. If you colle...

At Narvar, demand generation is under the product marketing umbrella. It helps us closely align on priorities, collaborate on campaign plans, establish goals, and measure revenue impact. This alignment is critical because we want to enact campaigns to generate demand where the business needs it most.   That said, make every effort to treat channel initiatives like campaigns. For example, if we have an event coming up, we want to ensure it fits into a broader campaign strategy. For example, have we have identified the audience for this event? Do we want to engage customers or prospects? Se...