Can you share any lessons learned or best practices for improving the alignment between product marketing and demand generation?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that alignment doesn’t come from a quarterly kickoff or a big launch deck. Those help, but they fade quickly. Alignment improves when PMM and Demand Gen share a regular operating rhythm where they look at the same signals and make decisions together. Even a short weekly or biweekly check-in focused on funnel movement, message performance, and content gaps keeps teams oriented around the same outcomes. When the conversation is grounded in data and action ...Read More

A few things that are top of mind (and I expanded on in some other answers): Get into the campaign brief before tactics are set. Once channel mix and timeline are locked, changing the message strategy is an uphill battle. Show up at the strategy layer, not the copy review. Reconcile your ICP definitions. PMM has one from positioning, demand gen has one from conversion data, sales has one from what they've won. They're rarely the same. The gaps between them are where pipeline leaks. PMM has to ow ...Read More

Get the teams to recognize that they need each other to succeed. Sure, marketing has grown and become more specialized over the years where there are many teams within a marketing org or department (which at times cause internal competition), but at the end of the day, the north star KPI or OKR is to grow the business through leads, pipeline, and/or revenue. If team members culturally or structurally cannot collaborate and align, some tactics that have forced at least an understanding and empath ...Read More

As a PMM, you'll need to make many impactful, cross-functional relationships in your organization. Demand Generation (or Growth) is one of them. PMM relies on demand generation to provide data on how ads/messaging are performing, while demand generation relies on PMM to target messaging and personas. Being in constant communication with them is key. At a previous organization, the head of growth and I collaborated on almost everything. You may not always see eye-to-eye, and that's okay. Have an ...Read More