Self-Serve Product Marketing

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates! 

We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing. 

So I am actually not sure this should be split, the best companies I have ever worked at Product Management and Product Marketing shared these numbers and it was our goal as a team to impact these. Now not every company looks at it this way, some just want to know the impact YOU as a single person or team are impacting. So I usually talk about owning registration numbers, second week retention numbers and have the product teams focused on the MAU and DAU numbers from there out and work with them to make sure they are retaining. 

The ideal scenario is that product and product marketing have shared adoption KPIs because this creates greater investment and accountability from both groups. If that’s not the case, product will tend to focus on post-login KPIs such as MAUs and DAUs. Marketing will focus on pre-login KPIs such as site visits, email engagement rates etc. Overall, it’s best if both teams focus on the NPS as that’s a clear indicator of how satisfied customers are with the product and if they will recommend it to others.

PMMs should be responsible for KPIs that bring users and customers to the product and through onboarding and activation. Are the materials provided to educate a user leading to activation? Is the onboarding experience good? Are experiments leading to intended results? Once the user has activated, PMs should be responsible for owning long-term adoption of specific feature areas. At some point, sending more emails to remind users that certain features exist just won't cut it. If the feature isn't solving a real business problem, that's a problem with the product.

I think the core definition is still the same but in pure B2B you’re going to have a much stronger emphasis on sales enablement and think of sales as one of your core channels for communicating with customers. In PLG or B2C, you’re going to have a stronger emphasis on communicating directly to users via marketing channels. In PLG, you’ll still have sales enablement as a core part of your responsibilities, but there’s more of a balance of your time spent on direct-to-user communication and sales enablement.

I think that list is correct and you should prioritize this list depending on your business. In addition to the above, I would advise getting a tool like Chorus.ai or Gong.io. Chorus or Gong will help you scale as your team scales in getting customer feedback both on the new business side as well as current business. In reality, you can't be on all the great calls as that is physically impossible.  

A few other things to consider:

• Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant) 
• Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts)
• Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed
• And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.  

• High growth mindset / hunger to continuously improve.
• Great negotiators. We sit at the intersection of a lot of teams and needs! PMMs need to be skilled not just at bringing value, but negotiating priorities.
• Great collaborators. PMMs can't drive impact if they can't collaborate.
• Can't emphasize enough the importance of empathy, especially when it comes to XFN work!

It starts with aligning on common goals - what I find people get lost is in the "how" we get there. In business, we can all agree on goals that are like motherhood and apple pie - like revenue or cost savings. Hard to argue with those. Once you get aligned on that, then start with understanding what the recommended path is to get there. It could be what you're pitching or it could be something else. As long as you stay grounded in the shared goal, the rest is a lot easier, in my opinion.