How do you communicate product marketing achievements upwards and build visibility?

We match internal promotion based on the level of the product announcement. Small updates are little features that mostly existing customers are excited about. Medium updates are larger changes that potentially open up a small new audience or unlock new revenue potential. Large updates are major product changes or brand new products that require significantly adjusting our go to market strategy. 

Small updates: Monthly email to sales, slack message to success
Medium updates: ^ + dedicated email to sales/success + all company slack channel + join sales all hands recurring meeting to train
Large updates: ^ + dedicated trainings per Account Executives, Sales/Success Engineers, CSMs, Marketing Team, present at the company all hands, create certification for sales, retrain after launch

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.

Internal comms is sometimes undervalued, but in my opinion, it is one of the most important parts of a PMM's role, especially because product marketing is one of the very few roles that are extremely cross-functional and sits between multiple teams. Here are few ways I've seen it work best:

• For major XF projects, have regular update emails so that you can make sure you are bringing everyone along the journey and it does not feel like you are working in a black box.
• Internal newsletters (whatever cadence works for your org). We partner with the product team on a monthly newsletter where we talk about updates from both teams, but also talk about what's coming next. This goes to the entire company because we are still a small team but for bigger orgs you want to select your audience.
• Whether you use Slack or Teams or something else, make sure you have communication channels where you are regularly posting updates on key projects.
• At the beginning of every quarter, I draft a plan and share it with all cross-functional teams to make sure they are aware of our goals and priorities - but also give them a chance to give you feedback so that you can make sure you are prioritizing the most important initiatives. 

Internal newsletters, revenue org all-hands, relevant slack channels, and team-specific meetings.

Of course, not every activity is shared through every channel. Depending on the "size" of the project or deliverable, we choose which channels to broadcast through. Thankfully we have a well-organized enablement team that manages these channel logistics, so we're able to efficiently streamline internal comms.

On a personal level, it's critical that I provide key executives and other team leads with visibility of what's coming, so that they get their teams' attention and start a network effect for PMMs. Frankly, communicating across & up is something that I (and any leader) can be better about. Ultimately, you can broadcast every which way, but ensuring that recipients are attentively listening is the bigger challenge.

I think this depends largely on the size of an update - and the audience. 

For our largest releases, they are communicated early and often - to drum up excitement. Through company all hands, sales trainings, slack channels, etc. 

For mid-sized and smaller updates, we'll leverage the internal channels that make the most sense for the internal audience. If its sales, we'll update via our bi-weekly newsletter, slack channels, internal knoweldgebase docs on what to know, as one example. Each internal audience has their own channels and communication styles they prefer - and usually we work within their preferences. 

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.

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates! 

We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing. 

Why do you want to communicate updates and activities?

If the goal is to communicate just the work the team has been doing, then I don't think that you should be communicating this to a large audience. This may be a good weekly summary email to your manager (Also, why would your manager need it?, the manager should already know it and it should be in your 1:1 doc), anyway, my point is communicating just WHAT you or your team is working on is waste of time for you and the reader.

I would rather communicate the impact and how other teams could leverage the work your team has done. This can be done in different forums. For sales, that could be training. For product teams, that could a roadmap review meeting, for gtm teams, that can be launch messaging and GTM meeting. For demand gen and the rest of the marketing team, you can help them by sharing how they could roll out your work in the market to drive more demand. 

We use different forums - sometimes it's 1:1 with other functional leaders, sometimes we plug our work into existing enablement programs, sometimes we create a new training, we participate in campaigns planning process, we join team meetings for other teams to share how they can leverage our work.

The key here is consistency. Find a channel that works and stick to it. Else it becomes to fractured and fragmented. You can use a slack channel, you can have a dedicated section in your sales enablement platform, you can issue regular emails with links to content. Just make sure you stick to an appraoch so your GTM teams get conditioned to the process.

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.

One of the key challenges with communicating product marketing achievements is often times there are less concrete KPIs. For example, demand gen is looking at MQLs and sales is looking at quota attainment. For that reason, communicating PMM success can sometimes come off as "fluffy".

I believe there are some organic ways to drive transparency and visibility into your team for example presenting at All Hands on recent releases, in sales team meetings on new collateral created or sales plays, and in training to your internal teams on recent product releases. This naturally builds visibility into your team and the impact they are having across the organization.

I also like to do a monthly recap or roundup of all the progress made against your quarterly PMM plans. What I touched on in a prior question on building plans, you should be reporting on the progress made against these plans. For example, if it's to increase your demo pipeline - what are we doing to accomplish this on a monthly basis and how are we tracking against these key metrics?

The great news is that PMM is a high-impact and visible role across the organization so naturally your team will be involved in a lot of large cross-functional initiatives.

Communicating product marketing updates and activities effectively to the rest of the company is crucial for ensuring alignment and support across different departments. There are a few different ways:

• Slack, obviously! We have a channel for everything, so once we wrap up a project/launch/event - we share updates on the right channels.

• We also do a monthly recap of all marketing activities to all the key stakeholders. The key here is being concise and metrics-centric. You lose the audience quickly, so focus mainly on the big-impact activities.

• We also do a quarterly business review with key stakeholders. This is a great opportunity to look back and see what we've done and can do better next quarter.

Your first step is to identify the key stakeholders for your business — marketing, product, sales, UX, etc. Once you have that, establish a rhythm that works for you — weekly, monthly, quarterly — but be extremely consistent about it.

Internal comms are so key given the highly xfn role of PMM. I’ve also found them crucial given that some of the outcomes PMMs drive are less tangible than some functions like Demand Gen. 

The best channels to communicate updates depend on size of company, tier of update, and goal of the comms. For a moderately scaled org and tier 2 update, here is an example by stage of product dev.

• Kickoff. Host a kick off call for everyone that will be involved in the GTM (e.g. channel partners, product, sales leads, etc). Communicate goals, get everyone excited and aligned upfront. 

• Development.

  • Slack/Email newsletters. Regular updates to share info and keep the core team engaged and on track.  

  • Quarterly updates. Utilize annual and quarterly planning cadences to socialize team prios and status updates for projects in flight.

• Launch (or right before).

  • Slack/email. Big post when the feature launches to a channel with a broad audience. Detail the target audience, problem to solve, solution, GTM plan, links to assets, etc.

  • Sales + CS training. Get them prepped and ready to serve and sell!

  • All hands. Paint the picture for how this product/feature and GTM ladder up to company prios. Showcase and early adopter to make the impact real for the team.

Retro. Host a retro to extract and capitalize on key learnings.

It depends on the size of your company. This will become more challenging as the size of the company scales. At a company with less than 200 employees it is pretty easy to maintain relationships with executive leadership to keep them in the loop via regular meetings, Slack, and internal newsletters. No matter what the size of your company is, make sure you are spending enough time educating others on your value, contributions, and successes. Don't try to hide your failures, though. Nobody is perfect. Be honest about your lessons learned and help others learn from them as well. 

I'm a huge fan of slack messages. I usually create a public slack channel and add key stakeholders to it. I'll bookmark resources to the top for easy self-serve access. Then, I'll post an update once a week to inform others of progress, wins, blockers, etc. 

In launch retros I've done in the past, this has been the #1 thing everyone points out as being a huge contribution to the success of the launch. It's so simple but I can't recommend it enough! 

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.