Stakeholder Management

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 typically work with stakeholders in creating the messaging, thus once its done, all parties have put their own spin on the document, and there's very little room to change it. 

What this means is that I will create a baseline of a messaging based on customer feedback, and once that is done, I will take it to the appropriate stakeholders (pm, sales, customer success, and SMEs) for them to review and work on it. Once that is done, the document is complete and there's little room to change it. 

I measure the same regardless of the type of delivery. Customer Life Time Value, Close Rate, Pipeline Growth, and Average Length of a Buying Decision are example metrics. 

This is a tough one because every PMM at every company operates differently.
If there are things that you are personally responsible for delivering, then measure those things first. Blog post views and/or Sign-ups are two key ones. Some other ancillary ones you can measure are PR coverage, and pipeline generated.

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. 

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

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.

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.

Great question. Yes, been there & struggled there before. Think ultimately the more you can make product marketing a group of strategic thinkers and enablement gurus to marketing, the more clout your team will build. If demand gen wants to parnter with PMM to understand how to market features for a campaign, if content looks to product marketing for competitive intel or market insights to build content, those are all signs you've built a PMM with real value to the marketing org.

Interesting question. I'll say Demand Gen (a.k.a campaigns team) owns the offer and executive associated with the campaign the product marketing team owns the strategy and intel for that campaign. Depends on how the demand gen and product marketing team as staffed as well. Usually demand gen has more people to handle the execution and can own reporting too. 

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 marketer, they have the expertise on how to reach this segment and what is the best way to do so. It feels like a 50/50 partnership with co-owned KPIs and regardless of who "owns" the campaign, it requires tight partnership to be successful.

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.

As someone who does both, sales strategy is deciding the top level messaging, the actual market and persona that you're tackling, and the overall approach. Sales enablement is translating your positioning into actual assets like slides, one-pagers, and talking points as well as when to use said assets in the sales process. 

This is a big question, but my simple answer is they're part of an ongoing, mutually-informing cycle. As PMMs we need to inform sales strategy in terms of ICP, personas, motivations, positioning, competitive insights, etc—all the fundamentals. This work only matters if we're able to deeply enable the team by bringing those insights to life and reinforcing them regularly, and then gathering feedback to inform fine-tuning.