How do you build product marketing for a company that doesn’t understand the function?

Product marketing is a relatively new function so this is a question I get a lot. 

A great way to help companies undestand the PMM function is by helping them understand the value of product marketing. There are all sorts of way to establish value. One place to start is by clearly defining what you and your team's contribution will be (which should map to the overarching business goals) and then delivering against those goals.

Socializing your team's stated goals and objectives with internal roadshows could be your first step in helping the organization understand the PMM role, responsibilties, and objectives. Once you've established and socialized your goals, check back in with your organization (frequently!) when you have results and achievements to share. These results should show how your team delievered against the objectives you laid out in your intial plan and how your team has positively and measurably impacted the business.  

To build a product marketing team or strategy for a company that doesn't understand the function, can be challenging, especially if this is the first time you are taking this journey. Here a some tips that could help navigate this process:

1. Identify and Educate your main stakeholders: It might sound silly, but you will need to do some teaching if you want anyone to buy into your idea. Explain preferably with business cases and examples how product marketing teams had successfully created value for other companies in the past. The good news is that usually the main stakeholders are reduced to 2-4 people at most. Make sure you get the right ones though. 
   

2. Align with overall business goals and strategy: The easiest way to get your project rejected is to show that you are not connected to the organization’s objective. Make sure you show how a product marketing team can help close the company’s gaps or pain points and how it can  help to achieve x results. Any top executive from any company will most likely ask for measurable goals for your product marketing efforts.

3. Start small:  Getting resources for a new area is always a challenge especially if you haven’t proven its value. So make sure to create a MVP that can help you scale once you proven the value to the company and focus on a few key initiatives that will have the biggest impact.

4. Get the right people involved: You are going to need to work with different areas of the company to make it happen, So it could be a good idea to create a cross functional team structure that can ease the whole process.

Such a good question and there's lots of ways I could answer. But I'll stick with my tried and true, find the executive stakeholders that need it most, and solve for their pain points fast. In my experience, here they are:

-Sales leader - AEs do well 1:1 but they don't scale. The question to answer here is how good product marketing helps drive more quality pipeline and how good product marketing can help them scale their team up with a consistent narrative.

-Product leader - Know the product super well and the space but are almost always underwhelmed with how much coverage their product gets in the market. The question to answer here is how you can amplify what they're doing in news, campaigns, sales pitch decks, etc.

-CMO - There are so many things going on across a marketing org, it's really hard to calibrate what's working and how to have more impact. The question to answer here is how you could have more impact as an org with consistent and integration marketing programs.

And the great thing is over time, you can start to scale your team out to support these different stakeholders. For instance, alignment to sales leadership is often called GTM PMM and alignment to product leadership is often called core PMM. Get wins with these stakeholders and then ask for more people to support it as you grow.

Vulnerable moment: I have never built a product marketing function from scratch! But I love this question, and as an experienced PMM who believes deeply in the value we add, I have thoughts on how I'd approach this. Bottom line: even if you don't have a PMM function, somebody in the company is probably doing Product Marketing (in tech, it’s often Product). The trick is structuring your internal pitch around the tangible benefits of centralizing those activities under a PMM function, and the tangible ROI gains (of having dedicated go-to-market experts, as well as refocusing the bandwidth of other teams who are picking up the slack today).

Here’s how you might structure a pitch for a dedicated PMM function:

1. Educate decision-makers on what PMM does, and how we add value. If you need resources to help define or articulate this, the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) have some excellent content.

2. Identify who is handling that PMM scope for your organization today (examples might include gathering market & competitive intelligence, creating messaging, leading launches, and creating Sales training and materials). Are there any gaps (things you’re not doing at all today)? How could these activities be more efficient or coordinated with a centralized PMM function? What additional ROI could others be driving if they didn’t have to do this work themselves?

3. Illustrate how an experienced PMM could up-level these activities, in line with your business priorities. Examples might include knowing that your organization is focused on solving the right pain points, improving conversion with better messaging and targeting, or increasing speed-to-market. Consider metrics like win rates and feature adoption that PMM can influence: point out any that are problem areas today and which PMM might be tasked with addressing.

4. Look for case studies of similar businesses who saw results after adding a Product Marketing function (PMA may be a good resource here too). Ideally you can find a success story or two featuring a company with a similar business stage, struggle, or problem space to support your cause.