For a Product Marketer with mostly regional product experience, what are the best transferrable skills/experiences to stress when applying to a global Product Marketing team.
If you have global projects or have syndicated a regional product to the global level, I would think that experience is relevant. If you are a regional product marketing manager and do not have a project like that to speak of then work on getting one. This will help with your own visibility and help the company projects succeed. If you want this experience and you’re already in product marketing you can network in the company to try and make that happen for yourself. Then in the interview/vetting process you can speak to these projects and show that you do have global experience, despite not having the job title.
Otherwise, if you can show you influenced the product team from a regional perspective it would be HUGE. I have seen regional product marketing teams focusing on influencing their own markets versus rolling up the feedback and driving change at the global product level. The latter is more impressive to me, and shows me you could be a product leader.
- You must have crafted regional value props. Discuss how you approached building those. The same framework can be scaled to craft global value props
- You must have led a regional sales enablement program: This also scales well for global PMM teams. Your playbook will be similar just that the target audience will be larger
- Market Intel: You should highlight this as a strength. For a regional PMM, market intel (competitive landscape, customer insights, industry knowledge) is crucial for their success. Share how you gathered, used, and distributed those to your stakeholders. Global teams sometimes miss this and you can add tremendous value
- Partnership with regional PMs: This is another skill you can scale. As you join a global PMM team, the number of PMs you support won't increase significantly. So, this is s a transferrable skill.
Such a good question. Part of the reason that “global” experience is a stated requirement is because most regional marketing roles are tactical and execution oriented in nature. In fact, most SaaS companies don’t even have a concept of regional PMMs - marketers in regions are mostly either focused on campaigns, events, case studies, comms, PR or other adjacent marketing activities
If you are a regional marketer applying for a global PMM role, highlight skills and experience that demonstrate your strategy and messaging chops. Did you build an integrated marketing plan for the region ? Did you help improve an existing pitch deck that the ‘global’ teams sent you ?Did you lead a sales training ? Do you understand customer pain points, personas and segments well? Can you write effectively ? Can you demo the product ? Do you understand its use cases well ? Did you write a messaging brief for a campaign ?
There is no PMM who has skills in all of these - even the global ones. But figuring out what the role demands, and highlighting your experiences that matter for the role will help you stand out
Good luck!