On the Consumer side (where I sit) we have Brand Marketers and Product
Marketers. Product Marketers need to deeply understand the value prop,
positioning and user needs of the product. A big part of the PMM role is Inbound
- leveraging research and insights to influence product strategy. When a PMM has
Outbound work they need to do, we work very closely with our Brand counterparts
to ensure our campaigns are consistent with the overall Brand message, and don’t
conflict in terms of timing and channel.
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Stakeholder Management
Do you see value in having both roles, e.g. Integrated team works more closely with the creative team on seasonal/holiday/brand campaigns whereas Product Marketing works more closely with the Product team on product launches, user research/insights, positioning strategy, etc. I have found it challenging for Product Marketing to own all of this, and often see different skill sets from marketers who are great at creative brand campaigns vs. PMMs who are skilled at positioning a new product and bringing it to market.
7 answers
Senior Director, Product Marketing, LinkedIn • August 24
Head Of Marketing, Tailscale | Formerly Atlassian (Trello), HubSpot, Lyft • June 16
I think there is a ton of value in having these teams work closely but separated
into specific pods. As you noted, there are different skillsets here and they
can be even more effective when given the space to own their domain expertise.
That being said I think when PMM and Brand get too far from each other the end
results suffer. I often think of PMM & Brand like a zipper in that they are
stronger together and work in tandem. It's essential that brand messaging aligns
with the product experience and that launches are appropriately timed and
presented in the market. For all of these reasons, I am a fan of having these
teams ladder up to the same marketing leader but for they also to be split into
separate smaller teams/pods for ownership and skill alignment.
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Google • December 17
At my current company, these roles are different and lean on the different
skills that you mention! That said, at smaller organizations, or even smaller
marketing organizations, you may not have the luxury of having different
individuals occupy each role.
If you are in a spot where you aren't able to add dedicated headcount to partner
with product or creative separately, I'd suggest having a conversation about
priorities with your leadership and using that to guide not only the talent you
bring on, but the allocation of time on activities for those individuals. While
it may feel like too much to execute on both capabilities simultaneously, it's
also exciting and a benefit of being at a small company!
Director, Product Marketing, Amplitude • January 26
I see those as different skills sets and usually different teams but I don't
think there are strict lines in between them. Product Marketers should own the
story, the core positioning and messaging, the surrounding context / thought
leadership and GTM strategy. Ideally there are counterparts in integrated
marketing, campaigns or growth marketing to help make that come to life.
But I think there's also what is ideal on paper and what is practical in real
life. More often then not those integrated brand / campaign teams are swamped
and not only serving the needs of product marketing. As a result, PMMs will more
often then not need to stretch into what it specific assets and content needs to
be created - whether that's videos, ebooks, blog posts, etc. And quite frankly,
your partners in marketing will thank you if you come to them with ideas and
they you can brainstorm the best path forward.
When I am hiring PMMs the core positioning and messaging skills matter the most,
but I also want to know that they can stretch to think and how should this be
brough to market.
Head of Product Marketing, Ethos Life | Formerly Meta, Microsoft • February 17
Yes, great question! As a PMM, I've always worked closely with a separate
integrated/brand marketing function. The PMM sits closer to product/eng, is more
initimately familiar with the product, owns inbound product marketing (including
user insights, strategy, competitive benchmarking, roadmap prioritization etc.).
When it comes to outbound marketing, PMM sets GTM strategy and works with a
variety of GTM stakeholders, including comms and integrated marketing, to bring
a launch or campaign to life. The integrated marketing team usually works with a
group of PMMs covering an entire product area, which has the benefit of
upleveling how the brand shows up to consumers and ensuring you're telling the
right brand narrative, versus a product specific narrative. They also have more
specialized skillsets, such as working closely with creative teams (or being
creatives themselves), are accountable to brand/campaign goals rather than
product goals (e.g. driving Q4 sales vs. driving adoption of X feature) and are
great thought partners for how a product will show up to consumers.
It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at Momentive,
but here's how I'd envision this working:
Product marketing owns:
- Buyer persona research, development, and enablement
- Product messaging/positioning
- Go-to-market strategy (e.g. by persona, industry)
- Product/feature launches
- Bottom-of-the-funnel product content/collateral
- Competitive intelligence
- Analyst relations
Customer marketing owns:
- Customer advocacy: customer stories, customer participation in thought
leadership, review site management, communities, advisory boards
- Customer marketing: scaled customer onboarding & engagement programs,
cross-sell and up-sell customer campaigns - could include email nurtures,
customer webinars, etc.
Brand marketing owns:
- Brand messaging and narrative, as well as brand guidelines
- The visual manifestation of the brand (logo, colors, fonts, imagery/animation
style, iconography, etc.)
- Content strategy, and Top-of-the-funnel thought leadership content
- Creative production for full-funnel campaigns (ads,
- Brand health measurement & tracking
Once the company scales to where there is a) a full portfolio of products and/or
brands and b) there is significant investment in full-funnel campaigns across
those products/brands, then integrated marketing becomes a necessary function.
Integrated marketing owns:
- Full-funnel marketing strategy & execution management for large-scale
campaigns (these could be brand campaigns or Tier 1 launches).
VP, Product Marketing, DigitalOcean • February 6
I have seen this done differently in different organizations. There is no right
or wrong way. However, I firmly believe that the Product Marketer should own the
narrative for their product.
* If it is a customer story - what value prop are we trying to highlight?
* If it is an ad campaign, what audience are we going after and what is the
right messaging and CTA?
* If it is an email campaign to existing customers, what outcome are we trying
to drive, and what messaging are we using?
PMM, as the person closest to product and audience knowledge, needs to own these
pieces. If that is in place, then whether PMM is directly working on the
campaign or simply enabling an integrated marketing team is just a matter of
logistics.
7 answers
At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core
product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This
positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many
other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these
other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro”
that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample
demo from a sales rep. This is just one example, but we typically carry this
across departments to ensure messaging stays consistent.
Vice President Product Marketing / GTM, Wrike • April 9
Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products,
features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the
messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals
including product management and other marketers like communications/brand,
demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a
final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of
individual reps and saleas managers) and finally with sales/revenue
leadership.
We then roll-out at one of our weekly or bi-weekly all sales meetings and/or
share at the team lead meetings for more in depth Q&A and objection handling.
Typically, the messaging guide comes with supporting customer facing slides,
talk tracks, etc. We re-inforce through an on-line learning tool to make sure
folks internalize the messaging.
Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Heap • June 9
I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for
messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I
work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our
differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source
messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see
these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our
story. Other marketing teams extend that messaging into demand gen campaigns,
and our Sales teams pick up our pitch decks and marketing collateral to present
to prospects. Ensuring commercial team alignment is tricky because it's
fundamentally about dissemination (Confluence, newsletters, G-Drive, etc),
training (both live and on-demand), and repetition (going on sales calls and
using it over and over again). Messaging guides are a critical product marketing
deliverable - they are foundational -- but a series of hands-on training and
reinforcement on a per-deal-level are required to get a larger organization
on-board.
Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • August 22
In my view, the whole point of messaging guides is that they are shared as
widely and as openly in your organization as possible. We actually keep a
"launch tracker" document (google sheets file) that has the latest on every
launch we're planning. This document is publicly available and very widely
distributed. We link to the positioning guide for the new product or set of
features there. In addition, we've built really strong relationships with
counterparts in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, so we are regularly
communicating across a wide number of forums (team trainings, slack channels, in
person meetings with leadership, etc) and share or point to key documents like
messaging guides in these meetings. Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no
'silver bullet' to communicating to large audiences - having lots of channels
and repetition is really key.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is having your messaging guide be a
format that is really easily digestible. We use a format that actually
summarizes the goal of the campaign or launch really nicely upfront, then gets
into the messaging, and towards the bottom goes into more of the nitty gritty
research on the market, trends, competition, etc. We've gotten good feedback
that the format is pretty easy to consume, and I think that goes a long way in
getting the message out there.
Vice President of Product Marketing, Workato • September 28
One thing I try not to do is share content or messaging without walking the
person I want to get feedback from through the context and purpose live on a
call/zoom. Sending something over for feedback without the right context can be
disastrous...especially if they share with others and expand any
confusion/dissent to others.
I will typically walk them through a google slide or doc with what we're trying
to move towards and then offer them the opportunity to provide feedback live or
in the doc once they've had some time to think about it.
Always try to prove why the messaging you're recommending is the right approach
with proof points...these can be based on surveys, customer/analyst feedback,
A/B or some testing framework, market movement, etc.
If your internal teams see the context for why you're moving in a specific
direction and the proof points that support what you're trying to do then it
will go a long way in getting their support/alignment.
What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to
gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have
shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really
starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opinions works
well. If you are adding value to something that already exists, have 1:few
meetings to get specific feedback on voice, tone, choice of words, etc. Then,
share it more broadly at a team meeting. Then share it with all leaders in Rev
org. Then share it with C-level, backing up how much consensus you’ve already
built and the alignment that’s been established.
Director of Product Marketing & Lifecycle Marketing, Loom • December 2
We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is
to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging
guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks
through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms
in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more
than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding
material. We have a system to ensure everyone consumes the content.
How does this inform your core messaging, how do you enable sales to understand what makes you different/better, how do you know if it's working with your target buyers?
11 answers
VP of Marketing, NetSpring • December 9
There are many stakeholders when it comes to competitive intelligence and
aligning messaging and product strategy with competitive differentiation. I have
found an effective model where PMM is the the driver, although any of the
contributors could also drive. Regardless, it is a joint effort across at least
PMM, PM, Presales and Sales Enablement (some larger enterprises like IBM have
dedicated, centralized competitive program offices).
As the driver, PMM can focus on arming the sales team with up-to-date tools
(e.g. battle cards) to win, ensuring marketing can land us in competitive
evaluations, and ensuring the roadmap continues to reinforce our competitive
differention.
Head of Product Marketing, Ramp | Formerly Zendesk, ThoughtSpot, Oracle • June 22
Ideally, your brand positioning pillars are unique enough individually or in
combination with each other that competitive positioning is baked in.
Effectively enabling sales is about educating them on the landscape and
competitive buckets (read answer above re: putting all your competitors into
distinct categories you can more generically position against).
Then when it comes to your Tier 1 competitors, it's all about training the sales
team and making battlecard content super easy to find. Bring the energy, show
them a side-by-side demo if you can to give them confidence, and personalize
your competitive differentiation for each sales role (e.g. SDRs need a
one-liner, Senior AEs may need you to explain product differentiators). That,
combined with compelling assets, is a winning strategy.
You can measure effectiveness of competitive positioning at different stages of
the funnel. For example, if you have competitive landing pages you could A/B
test messaging changes to see if there's a lift in conversion. Further
down-funnel (this takes more time), you can do before-and-after analysis of
competitive win/loss rates.
I believe competitive research should always be part of the process when you
develop your core messaging, but it’s important to not get too hung up on your
competitors, you can easily lose sight of what your own customers care about.
(Also, who is to say that their messaging is better than others?)
I usually build a competitive positioning matrix where I will have at least 2
rows for each competitor: “We help you”, and “so you can” (But use what version
works best for you)--- and then go through competitor websites/content/materials
to gather what statements they use to answer each of those. This helps to look
at your competitors’ positioning in a more uniform way. Then add a column for
your company and your own statements - and in the simplest, easiest way this
should give you an idea of how you differentiate at a high level.
Enabling sales on competitive intel is a whole topic on its own, but here are a
few tips on how to do it effectively:
* Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point
people to.
* Share the links, and share it again, and again over time.
* Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep
detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into something more specific).
This can be in the form of battle cards or simple FAQs that you can publish
internally
* There are certain tools that allow you to publish information like this
within platforms like SFDC or slack - where people already look for
information
* Create short videos and see if people find it easier to listen than read
* It’s not always enough to just create these materials. It often helps to do
regular competitive readouts with the sales team so you can have a more
interactive conversation and help answer specific questions.
And here are few tips on how to test if it's resonating with your buyers
* Run test campaigns against your control messaging across different marketing
channels to see how it performs (Paid, Social, Email, website A/B tests,
Sales pitches, etc.)
* Talk to your sales team, run pilots, listen to gong calls, sit in on sales
calls, etc.
* Test in-product messaging
* Run quantitative studies, interviews, focus groups, etc
* Test it with analysts.
Director of Product Marketing, Culture Amp • September 21
Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and
value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and
customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be
clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive
differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research,
analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and
really hone in on determining 1) What pain points are you solving for your
buyers and 2) What makes you the "only" one? (see onlyness test here )
A couple ways to know if your messaging and value proposition is landing with
your buyers
1. Market research messaging testing
2. A/B Test is through marketing channels (paid, email, website)
3. A/B Test it with SDRS in their outreach sequences
4. Present it to your customer advisory board (or similar) to see if it
resonates
5. Test it with Analysts
Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Productboard • December 14
Competitive differentiation is what forms your positioning and what you build
your messaging around. With how crowded every market category is now its
essential to nail your differentiation and then communicate it through your
messaging and the rest of the go-to-market.
Enabling sales effectively requires making the competitive information
actionable and easily digestible. Whether you’re creating battlecards, sharing
competitive updates in Slack, or leading a competitive play sales training
distill it down to the key points and bring it to life with examples with what
worked in deals.
Finally to test if your messaging is resonating you can:
* Test copy across competitive campaigns and landing pages
* Look at competitive win rates before and after competitive enablement
* Sit in on sales call or listen to call recordings to see how competitive
messaging points are resonating
* Ask industry analysts for feedback
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco Meraki | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 13
The answer here is in the question. My approach to differentiation starts with
understanding why the product or service you're responsible is uniquely suited
to a specific customer. And then focus on what makes you great, not what makes
others less good.
Too many companies (including a few I've worked with) focus too much on the
question of "how do we compete against X competitor?" This creates a
backwards-looking mentality and you're always in reactive mode. I will say it's
my favorite thing to compete against someone who's more concerned about me than
I am about them... they can chase my message all day, and all I have to do is
worry about making customers wildly successful. Way more fun.
How do you know if it's working? If sales are up, win rates are strong, average
deal size is up, and the competition is starting to talk about you more? It's
working.
Vice President, Product Marketing, AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart • July 7
Competitive positioning is a key component of defining core messaging. If we sit
down and come up with copy on how to best describe our offerings, a key step is
to compare that against how competitors describe themselves. You’ll likely be
hit with an unpleasant surprise that about half your copy has already been used
directly or indirectly by competitors. Some words might be well-adapted lexicons
that prospects associate competitors with. Developing your positioning and
messaging without this key insight would lead to bad outcomes.
I always try to find words we can “own” in the prospect’s mind when associating
the value to our products and brand. These words should be unique from the
competitor’s identity and still be aligned with the prospect’s language. We try
to stay away from feature differentiators and focus on how we help customers
solve the problem in a better way.
The most effective forms of training for sales are role play sessions combined
with learning materials as everyone learns and retains information differently.
Salespeople in different segments (SMB, MM, Enterprise) may need different forms
of enablement to drive meaningful results.
Testing your messaging with potential target buyers from interviews or tools
like Wynter is the best way to confirm if your positioning is on-target.
Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this
topic I'd encourage you to read.
But to your question, most will try to differentiate off features. In most cases
this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is
really difficult to truly differentiate in this case.
There are some tactical things you can pursue to drive differentiation:
* Social Proof
* Lean-in to aspects of your solution that customers rave about! I've seen this
be everythign from the sales team/process, to customer support team,
implementation, education, and more. I call all those out just to say it's
important to think outside our product as well.
* Competitive content - while it's tactical, if you have a comparison page it
enables you to tell a story about how your different -- and not just about
features.
* Brand - This is the ultimate differentiation, but it's not an overnight fix.
Consider what's unique about the attributes of your company, and lean-in to
building your brand around that which will give prospects a clear view of
your company.
Beyond the above, it's really about storytelling and messaging. Instead of just
thinking about how your product is different from compeition, think about the
changes your prospects are experecing in their day-to-day and tell a compelling
story around that -- and then educate them on how to win, with your product.
Market Intelligence Lead, Airtable • September 19
Our competitive differentiation is central to our overall company/product
positioning. They're almost the same thing. We have a high-level view of our
position in the market vs other categories of tools, and a deeper view of the
specific capabilities that make us unique.
Enabling sales is a constant function of updating self-serve resources,
delivering training, and sharing major intel. good luck!
VP Global Head of Product Marketing, Shopify • November 15
With messaging, the one thing that I always push my team to think about is
what’s unique to Shopify that no one else can own. Can someone slap their brand
on top and say the same things? If so, the messaging and positioning is not good
enough. We want to ensure that we are sharing what is most valuable to our
business and that no one else can claim.
Vice President of Product Marketing, GitLab • January 31
I have a few lenses that I look through for competitive differentiation:
1. The Positioning Canvas -- I mentioned this in an earlier question, but it's
worth repeating the effectiveness of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome
positioning canvas (must reading for any Product Marketer). With this
methodology, you and your team will go through an exercise of defining
'competitive alternative' -- the task here is to identify what customers would
use if you did not exist AND to look inwards at what unique attributes you have
that your competitors do not. Highly recommend using this as part of your
competitive differentiation exercise.
2. Company Strategy -- Many people think competitive differentiation is limited
to product. It's not. I like to look at competitive differentiation through a
combination of (1) product strategy, (2) GTM strategy, and (3) operational
strategy. Often, you can find -- or create -- differentiation in one or multiple
of these areas. One way I've put it all together is to develop a 'Buyer
Consideration Attribute' map and workshop strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis
competition on the most important attributes. <-- Informed by Blue Ocean
Strategy (another must read)
Once you have a good thesis on competitive differentiation, it's time to
document it and enable as many relevant teams as possible. Not just sales.
Product management and engineering needs these insights to inform their roadmap.
Marketing needs these insights both for messaging strategy and in determining
other GTM elements like channel, audiences, and more. And then, yes, Sales and
customer success needs easy-to-understand and easy-to-take action enablement so
they have 20/20 vision of who they will be up against in deals and so they know
how to navigate conversations....and win deals.
I suppose with executive level comms, it's more obvious, but how do you manage work that's in-flight that requires as many as 5 PMs, in addition to analysts, designers, marketers, and more? How do you keep people "in the loop" at the right level of fidelity without opening up a can of worms and adding complexity? A DACI model is great, but has its limits.
2 answers
Head of Product Marketing - Security, Integrations, Mobile, Salesforce • December 10
Not necessarily. The goal is to ensure that for whatever initiative (launch,
pricing, campaign etc) youre leading, the north star is clear, expectations from
each member (or group) are clear, and the communication is very clear. The only
group that usually 'needs' their own reskinned decks and docs are senior
leadership. They usally get packaged updates that are much more streamlined with
a focus on updates, risks and asks.
If you have other stakeholders that are asking for their own format, Id
encourage you sit down with them ask why. Its a huge burden on you to make
multiple documents, so the best approach is to figure out a middle ground.
A few tips:
* Before starting the project, get everyone's buy in on their role in the
project. Use a RACI if that's the culture, or at least a simple document
saying if someone is in the 'working team', 'approval team',
informed/consulted team etc. This will ensure expectation management up
front. If someone comes up later saying 'why wasnt I involved' you can show
them the paper trail to explain no malintent
* Drive home this divison of responsibility in your kickoff call (as in HAVE a
kickoff call for sure)
* Ensure that everyone involved is on the recurring meeting invite, Slack
channel, Teams group, whatever you use for comms and accountability
* If you have a top down culture, explicitly build in meeting cadences for
review, approval, stakeholder feedback and call it what it is. Dont assume
that people will know things, or pay attention 'offline'
* Over communicate -- pre-meeting, agendas, status boards, recapss. Call out
what's stakeholder relevant, whats not
No easy way to do this, but its a lot of cat herding that if done well can drive
massive organizational alignment.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Part of our jobs as PMMs is to drive alignment across teams of diverse
stakeholders, all of which speak different languages, care about different
things, and want to be approached in a specific way. When it comes to key
strategic projects, I believe that tailoring your approach to meet the needs of
your stakeholders is critical to achieve maximum success and collaboration!
This could be as simple as reframing certain elements of a master deck/doc
you’ve created for a key strategic project. Depending on who you’re
communicating with, identify how you can adjust your project updates to ensure
those particular stakeholders find your work important and valuable. For
example, marketing may care more about how you helped them generate more high
quality leads vs product may care more about product/feature adoption. No matter
who it is you're communicating with, identify their key measures of success and
think about how you can align your outcomes to their objectives.
4 answers
Director of Product Marketing & Demand Generation, ESO | Formerly Fortive • August 18
Building a launch process from scratch is a big lift, but early work like
identifying all stakeholders will set you up for success once things get
rolling. I frame product launches as "commercialization" to anchor my thinking.
To expand beyond a single word, this means we're making a new product or
component available for people to buy. To identify the stakeholders required to
accomplish that goal, rely on your customer's process as they go from problem
awareness to activation and support. This approach gets bonus from me for
creating a customer-centric mindset early in the launch process. Some high-level
questions to start thinking about this:
* How will customers and prospects become aware of the new offering?
* How will customers and prospects express interest in the new offering?
* How will customers buy the new offering?
* How do customers get set up and trained on the new offering?
* How will customers get help with the new offering once they are using it?
Pro Tip: When you land on your initial stakeholder group, ask the team "Who else
needs to know". This simple question helped me resolve a few gaps in the past
that would have caused major issues downstream.
Regarding changing stakeholders, the level of effort from different teams and
functions will naturally shift over the course of a launch. Letting people
check-in and check-out has led to dropped balls and miscommunications more times
than I can count. Stakeholders should have enough invested in the entire
commercialization effort that they want to be aware of the work going on. You
can have information radiators for update communications to leaders, but silent
observers don't add much value to launch project meetings.
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Google • December 20
The best way to identify the stakeholders is to identify the success metric for
the launch, and then figure out who is directly responsible for hitting that
metric. Typically your product manager is a stakeholder, but often you'll have a
customer success/sales organization involved and also engineering. Stakeholders
are also up and down the leadership chain so be sure to include the leaders of
those who are directly responsible.
Stakeholder changes are inevitable so I tend to learn on documentation to help
smooth over the transitions when they happen. Do you have your messaging and
positioning documents ready? Your marketing strategy? If so, anyone new coming
into the launch will immediately be able to understand your plan and you won't
need to spend lots of time ramping them up.
Vice President Product and Customer Marketing, Highspot • August 9
Product Launch is where all the magic happens. So many stakeholders have both
vested interests and points of view of how the launch should be executed, but
only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the product, go-to-market team,
and the external market, so is best positioned to champion the process.
We've broken our launch into four phases where the first and last stages have
the most stakeholders present, and the middle two have the fewest.
What we've had success with understand that some roles just need to be informed
when the launch kicks off. This can be a wide range of stakeholders who just
need to be informed on just the facts - what are we launching, when are we
launching it, what are the goals of the launch and what behaviors do we need to
change to achieve our goals. The Phase 1 work here is about strategizing - where
you need the business goals and objectives understood to really land your
launch. Here is a great time to confirm who needs/wants to be a part of the
execution "crew" through the next 2 phases.
With the kickoff in the rearview mirror, we narrow the audience to the people
who have to go do the majority of the work to drive the launch, and we rely on
our partners in Product Management, Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Sales
Enablement, and Customer Success - teams that need to make sure the go-to-market
team is ready to market, sell and support the change. A lot of the Phase 2 work
here is about planning what to do and when to do it, and creating the content
and context to equip, train and coach your teams.
Finally, there's the launch, when you can "push the button" on getting all the
things you created to market. There it's effective to bring the same
stakeholders you informed in Phase 1 back to the table to share learnings and
close the loop.
We continue to iterate our launch motion, but it's becoming a strength for us as
we've earned the trust of partner teams over the last 18 months.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Product launches take a village to execute successfully! Start by defining your
launch goals and plan. This will make it easier to identify your stakeholders,
which can include individuals or groups that will be involved in the launch
execution and/or impacted by the outcome of the launch.
At Zendesk, we use a tiering system to determine the level of effort required to
support a product launch and the stakeholders that will need to be involved. For
example:
* A tier 1 launch is typically reserved for brand new product offerings that
will have a major impact on our customers or the business. A tier 1 launch
would span many different stakeholders across product (e.g. product managers,
engineering, pricing, etc), core marketing (campaigns, events, PR, SEO,
brand, etc.) and GTM (enablement, pre/post solutions consultants, partners,
etc.).
* A tier 3 launch may be a smaller update to an existing product with minimal
impact. As opposed to a tier 1 launch, a tier 3 launch would require less
stakeholder involvement. We may pull in the web team for website updates,
docs team for release note updates, email marketing, etc.
As with most product launches, things are constantly changing! Involve your
stakeholders early and often, and make sure to get their buy-in on the launch
goals and the role they will play. Proactively and constantly communicating with
your stakeholders makes it much easier to pivot if necessary as things change or
challenges arise.
5 answers
Product Marketing SME, AWS, Amazon • February 9
Great question! This is a common scenario for growing organizations. As a
smaller PMM team, you'll have to work to set project priorities. This is not an
easy tasks, but what helps is being transparent and communicative with your
teams across Product, Sales, Marketing and others.
For growing organizations, work with your Sales Department to understand their
biggest pain points and align on where you as a PMM can best support. Prioritize
the feedback and the work you're able to take on vs what you might have to
revist or commit to later. This conversation seems obvious, but keep having it.
Set up recurring touchpoints (even if for 15min) to hold each party accountable
to what was committed.
Finally - Be consistent and meet your deadlines. This is important when building
a fostering trust across the organization. Trust is fundamental to establishing
strong relationships. When working with your stakeholders be clear about
expectations, deadlines, roadblocks, and deliverables.
Director of Product Marketing, Ironclad • June 29
Anchor on the highest priority for the company, versus any one team. One of the
hardest but also most liberating things about product marketing is that we are
an inherently flexible function. Our skillsets are diverse, so we can quickly
get into formation behind whatever is most important and strategic to the
company at any given point in time. This is our greatest strength (and, if
handled poorly, our greatest weakness), so don't let it go to waste! If the most
important initiative at the company is revenue, make yourself indispensable to
sales by holding your team to sales targets. If it is building a revolutionary
product, prioritize product. Whatever you do, do not try to be everything to
everyone. That just results in a lot of "RAM" (random acts of marketing) that
don't make clear to anyone what you're actually good for.
Director, Product Marketing, Amplitude • January 26
You have to align on what priorities you are working on and when. I even suggest
having a sort of PMM roadmap. If you can get that agreed to at the leadership
level then it will be a lot easier to have conversations with your stakeholders
across teams.
There are always going to be firedrills you have to jump on, but by driving
alignment and visibility at the leadership level you can make sure those are the
exception not the rule.
Vice President Product and Customer Marketing, Highspot • August 9
While it might be easy to find industry standards on the number of PMMs per
stakeholder team, I find the better marker to be the number of products in the
portfolio, segments served, geographies, or even industries. Small teams can
pack a mighty punch if swim lanes are clear and roles and responsibilities are
understood. For example, a PMM team of 3 with respective focuses on core product
marketing (use cases, value props, enablement, release/launch, pricing, etc.)
audience/portfolio marketing (segment, geo, new biz/customer, etc.), and
competitive (differentiation, dispositioning, strategy) can serve a growing set
of stakeholders effectively, and as the team proves value, will scale with the
rest of the organization.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
PMM sits at the intersection of these various stakeholder teams and keeps them
aligned. No matter how big or small your company is, you likely have similar
stakeholders that you need to manage and communicate with. To be effective,
product marketing needs to have a voice across the company.
I’ve always found it valuable to forge trusting relationships with someone in
sales leadership, product leadership, etc. Make sure you’re communicating with
them on a regular basis. With product, catch up regularly on upcoming releases,
voice of customer, strategic launches, etc. With sales, review performance, key
customer wins, strategic campaigns, etc. Having a regular cadence with these
teams while bringing them valuable insights and a unique POV will ensure PMM has
a seat at the table.
4 answers
VP, Product, Barracuda Networks • August 8
This is going to vary widely by organization, and you'll find Jr. PMMs doing the
same work in one organization that a director or even VP would in another.
That said, as a general rule, the more junior PMMs typically take on more
tactical work. This can take many forms, but content creation, ghostwriting,
babysitting the demand gen team and refreshing existing collateral are all at
the top of the list.
At the other end of the spectrum, more senior folks are likely to be out of the
office - evangelizing the company, meeting customers, influencing analysts and
training senior sales people. They will spend more time interfacing with the
executive team, both on portfolio messaging and corporate messaging and brand.
Your head of PMM will also spend a lot of time hiring, mentoring and training
the PMM team. I've spent as much as 75-80% of my time doing that at various
points in my career.
Product Lead (fmr Head of Product Marketing), Square • November 16
This very much depends on the company and individual team lead vision so I will
just chime in with what it is like at Square.
In general, PMMs at Square cover a wide range of responsibilities regardless of
level. These responsibilities include:
1. Develop product or feature launch/ GTM strategy and plans, including
positioning and messaging
2. Quarterback marketing and sales partners (e.g., paid marketing, SEO, content
marketing, lead generation) to execute GTM and growth plans
3. Lead customer research and collaborate with PMs on product strategy and
roadmap
4. Lead pricing and packaging recommendations
Square is a multi-product company, so our junior PMMs tend to focus on one
product to learn how to excel at the role. Senior PMMs start to cover more
products. Additionally, junior PMMs are empowered on tactical executions, but
important, strategic decisions like tent pole product launch strategies and
pricing decisions are led by senior PMMs. As a team lead, I focus more of my
time building and coaching my team, elevating the reputation of the function
within our company, and weighing in heavily on product and business unit
strategies.
Another avenue that some companies take, is the TYPE of PMM you are. So you can
be a product marketer, a solution marketing, a segment marketer, a vertical
marketer - these all still fall under the role of Product Marketing, but rather
than focusing specifically on tacitical to strategy, they're also segmented more
granularly on their individual focus. So a vertical PMM, may focus on everything
across the portfolio, that relates to the banking industry, and tailors
messaging, GTM motions, and enablement for that specific vertical.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
This can certainly vary depending on the company! Here are some examples of
areas that would be owned by different product marketing levels based on my
experience:
Messaging & Positioning
* PMM: Crafts messaging and positioning at capability/feature level with some
coaching
* Sr. PMM: Drives messaging and positioning at the product/feature level and
coaches others on product/feature level positioning
* Director: Drives messaging and positioning at the category level and ensures
alignment across teams
Sales enablement
* PMM: Creates materials and conducts enablement sessions on sales fundamentals
(e.g. first call deck, demos)
* Sr. PMM: Orchestrates enablement initiatives and programs at the product
level or across multiple features. Identifies opportunities to increase
pipeline by collaborating directly with reps and sales leadership.
* Director: A mix of strategic/tactical partner to sales leadership for their
functional area. Ensures execution of sales-facing content and training.
GTM strategy & execution
* PMM: Plays a specific role in building GTM strategy and execution for area of
focus (e.g. buyer, competitors)
* Sr. PMM: Drives GTM strategy work across multiple products, features, or
initiatives (e.g. pricing, narrative). Makes recommendations to optimize
methodologies and processes.
* Director: Ensures the success of the development of GTM strategy and
responsible for their teams’ execution of GTM programs. Considers the
portfolio strategy (e.g. where a particular launch strategy fits in amongst
other launches). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and
processes.
It can sometimes be a struggle for those on the executive team, or in higher leadership roles, to see the value that product marketing is bringing to the business - especially if they do not have regular interaction. How do you build visibility for you and/or your team, and clearly communicate the achievements and activities throughout the year?
4 answers
Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • August 12
I love this question. I’ll step away from PMM for a minute and say - regardless
of what function you’re in at a company, you should be championing yourself and
your team constantly. People who ‘get ahead’ in business not only create value,
they make sure others know that they create value.
What makes PMM hard is that you don’t own a number -- there’s no clear
attribution. You can’t say “at the end of Q2 we grew revenue by X% YoY” in the
way a sales or DG team can. So you need to constantly be talking about what you
are delivering and how you are partnering with teams who do own numbers.
What are the channels for communication in your business? At Gainsight, Slack is
a major channel. I post often to our Sales channel about projects we’re working
on, things we’ve delivered, and I give kudos to others. I do so in a very clear
and consistent way.
Another idea is asking for your team to be a part of regular weekly business
reviews with the Exec team (or asking to be featured one week) if they exist.
There’s always some kind of exec alignment session that happens every week or
month - find it at figure out who owns it and how to get on it.
Also - this is part of your manager’s job (to both trumpet your work and figure
out the right forums to do so) so ask them directly how you can get more
visibility for you or your team’s work.
Director of Product Marketing, Twilio • March 13
Marketing your accomplishments is critical! It is epecially important to align
leadership expectations with reality since product marketing roles and
responsiblities can vary greatly from business to business or even across
products/BUs.
My team and I address this in a few ways. First, we share quarterly email
updates with a broad distribution list. These emails include our topline
priorities, related initiatives, shoutouts to our key stakeholders (since most
of what we do is collaborative), learnings and pivots, as well as a link to an
archive doc with all of our previous updates for easy reference. I also ensure
my direct leadership is aware of our goals and accomplishments so they can know
what we're focused on and can speak up when given the opportunity in higher
level meetings. Finally, not leadership specific, but we are active on team
slack channels sharing key activities across sales, marketing, and product teams
in real time.
VP, Marketing, Observable | Formerly Figma, Abstract • January 11
Tying your work to tangible outcomes, specifically those related to product
growth and revenue, and socializing it has worked well for me. Here's my
approach:
Have a revenue-first mindset. Businesses exist to make money. One of the first
questions I ask myself about any launch is "how can we leverage this to drive
revenue?" Before getting strategic or tactical, I explore the different angles
we could position or message the launch to drive revenue. Releases small,
medium, and large have the potential for revenue impact.
Work backwards. When setting launch goals, I work backwards from the company
goals, and map the connection so I know where tactical efforts and outcomes
ladder up. This trail is helpful when communicating the value of your work,
especially at the executive level.
Map your tactics to the growth framework of choice (flywheel, funnel...). This
has worked really for me when presenting GTM plans and running reviews.
Organizing your tactics into a strategic framework helps folks see all of the
areas Product Marketing touches, understand what areas your work is contributing
to and how it all works together.
Socialize wins and learnings. Beating your own drum brings visibility to your
work while also increasing morale (wins) and knowledge (learnings) across the
company.
Celebrate others. Spread the love and it will come back around to you. Word of
mouth is a great internal marketing tool. I've found that when you celebrate and
champion the work of others, they are more inclined to do it for you — which
increases your visbility throughout the organization.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Great question. At Zendesk, we do a lot of monthly/quarterly syncs with product
leadership, sales leadership, marketing leadership, etc to discuss top programs
and communicate achievements. Quarterly business reviews are another great way
to share top wins and learnings. We also leverage supplemental channels like
Slack, company/team all hands and our GTM newsletter.
This can vary by company. To determine what works best for you and your team,
you’ll need to figure out a way to speak the same language of the people that
you’re trying to communicate with. Take the time to understand the priorities of
your key stakeholders and executives so you can align your outcomes to their
measures of success. Identify their communication preferences so you can
establish a communication approach that best meets their needs. When you’ve
taken these steps, it’s much easier to build visibility and communicate
achievements in a way that resonates with your audience.
3 answers
VP Product Marketing, AppFolio • April 4
Influence comes from repeatedly bringing fresh insights and a distinct point of
view to the table. To influence product strategy and the roadmap you need to
take a broader view of your market and the customers than your friends on the
product management team. Invest in a deep understanding of your customers, your
competitors, and the market at large. Map out mid- to long-term threats and
opportunities. Validate those threats and opportunities with customers, industry
experts, and your internal experts across product, user experience, customer
experience, sales, sales engineering, and client services. Summarize the
insights, provide the market context, and lay out strategic options together
with your product partners. Get buy-in from the executive team. Partner with the
product team to deliver solutions that solve real customer problems. Rinse and
repeat :-)
Head of Product Marketing - Security, Integrations, Mobile, Salesforce • December 9
* Demonstrate the basics: messaging, positioning, ability to make an
impactful/relevant/meaningful presentation that conveys the value prop +
differentiators of your product or portfolio. Cant be influential if your
house is on fire.
* Learn the business REALLY well. How is money made, who do we sell to, how is
the sales team structured, what are their main sales motions, is it
self-serve/direct/partner driven? Learn it ALL. Then figure out where are
opporutnities to add unique value: better targeting, better messaging, more
customer interaction, roadmap changes. Dont try to change things you don't
understand
* Do what you say, fast. Dont make excuses, just get it done. Then your
credibility will go up.
* Have a POV. Why are things the way they are? Test out your POV with sales,
product, CSM, other stakeholders and refine it. But have a POV, and when the
time is right, you will get your shot to make that POV into reality
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Product marketers have to work and communicate with a wide variety of
stakeholders to push ideas and initiatives forward. Influence is critical for
PMMs to be effective, and that comes with building trust.
Invest time in understanding your stakeholders’ needs and pain points to help
you determine how you can best work with them. By speaking the same language as
your stakeholders and proactively providing the insights and information they
need, the more they will lean on you and trust you to get the job done.
Immerse yourself in your product, the market and your customers. Use those
insights to identify opportunities where you can add value: influencing product
roadmap, helping your sales team close more deals, ensuring your messaging is
compelling, etc. Bringing valuable insights and a unique point of view to your
stakeholders will improve your credibility and make you a more influential PMM.
2 answers
VP, Marketing, Observable | Formerly Figma, Abstract • January 10
One of the most important outcomes of stakeholder management is getting buy-in,
and that comes easiest when there's trust. Getting buy-in is absolutely critical
to moving projects forward, and the first 90 days is a great time to lay strong
foundations.
Here are the three actions I take very intentionally to build trust with my
peers and cross-functional partners:
1. Ask questions and listen intently. The same way I approach different
audiences with different positioning or messaging is the same way I approach
building trust internally. It starts with showing a genuine interest in other
people — putting them at the center of the interaction — and listening intently.
This allows me to understand the lens through which they see the world, the
company, and our product. I can meet them where they are.
Example: It's my first 90 days and I am making my rounds in getting to know the
Sales team. I ask questions about our audience and how what they're hearing on
their calls aligns to the slide decks and collateral. Are they using that
collateral? Do they feel like it works? Why or why not? I demonstrate a genuine
interest in how they show up to work and their day-to-day, so I can best put
myself in their shoes.
I may learn from my conversations that they don't feel like they have input on
the collateral created for them, it's not really useful, and they just build
things on their own as a result. This gives me insight into them feeling unheard
and a desire for closer collaboration on the things that directly impact how
they do their job.
Let's say we start working on a new sales deck. I create a small consulting
group of high-performing and influential sales folks to collaborate with (true
story). Together, we come up with the idea for the deck to live within the new
product we launched, passively demoing that new product while speaking to the
broader platform. This approach satisfies the closer collaboration the team is
seeking, produces a fantastic idea that supports our new narrative, and results
in greater buy-in across the broader Sales team.
2. Create clear documentation. Don't expect people to read your mind. When I was
at a previous employer, one of the things we would say is "clarity is kindess."
I really believe that when you have the best interest of a stakeholder in mind,
clarity is best. It sets expectations and empowers people with the knowlege and
understanding to make decisions.
Example: I was running a big launch at a previous employer. There were lots of
moving parts, and lots of stakeholders — including executives. It was really
important that the folks executing on deliverables understood why they were
creating what, and that the executives understood why we were making certain
decisions around timelines and tradeoffs. This required very clear communication
across documentation, Slack channels, etc. My approach was to create a
comprehensive GTM plan that included the strategy and tactics (single source of
truth) and separate project plans to manage the plethora of deliverables. The
GTM plan included the thinking and why behind what we were doing, our goals, and
how we would collectively achieve them. The projects plans included that
thinking at the project level.
For executives, I ran GTM reviews. There I gave them insight into the strategy
and where our efforts fell within the GTM funnel, so they could see the
complementary relationships between each tactic. I also communicated go/no-go
criteria for moving forward from a product readiness perspective, including what
we were and were not optimizing for, and why we were or were not making certain
tradeoffs. That clarity (and the confidence it exudes) helped me get their
buy-in and move the launch forward as I saw best for the customer (even when it
meant pushing back on their sense of urgency to fix bugs and conduct more beta
testing).
3. Overcommunicate. This is especially essential in a virtual environment. It's
definitely something I don't think I've mastered and continue to work on.
Overcommunicating means communiting clearly, early, and often — which also
requires a level of vulnerability. It means erring on the side of too much
information. It's asking for help as soon as you need it, or sharing an idea
when it's not quite buttoned up.
Example: Within my first 90 days in my current role I laid out my plans through
the end of the year. Part of that plan was cleaning house — creating structure,
getting organized, and identifying missing parts. I knew it was important in
positoning us to optimize for speed and execution. The challenge was, at a
company level, people want to see marketing doing stuff — producing content,
running experiments, etc. And, at the team level, people are wondering what (if
anything) is going to change about their roles and responsibilities.
At both the leadership and team levels, I communicated my thinking, goals, and
foresight as I was refining my plan — answering questions and implementing
helpful feedback along the way. Overcommunicating brought them into the journey
and being part of the story I was building with the plan also gave them greater
understanding. Ultimately, resulting in buy-in.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Great question! With a bit of extra effort, there are many things that can be
done to forge relationships that build trust in a virtual environment. To do
this successfully, invest time in getting to know your stakeholders and identify
opportunities where you can add value and share your knowledge.
Whether it’s a 1:1 or a team happy hour, dedicate time every week to get to know
your team members on a personal level and build rapport. I have found that
establishing common ground and better understanding the people I frequently
interact with creates a much easier and more productive working environment. Our
team at Zendesk uses the Donut app for Slack to connect teammates on a regular
basis. I would highly recommend this if your team is using Slack.
If you see a report or customer insight that is relevant to your product area -
share it with your product manager. If you have a special skill (e.g. making
great product demo videos), host a lunch and learn session with your product
marketing team. Sharing your insights and expertise can make others more likely
to consult you and demonstrate that you are credible.