How do you figure out how to spend your time between doing product marketing as demand gen, engagement, retention, and sales?

Anchor on where the data shows pipeline or revenue is actually at risk, not where the loudest stakeholder is. E.g.: If sales is losing deals at a specific stage of the buyer journey, that's where time goes. If retention is suffering because customers aren't taking the next step with the product, that's a different kind of urgent. You triage by business impact, not by request volume. The question I ask myself: what is the most expensive problem we have right now, and is it a PMM problem? Sometime ...Read More

This varies widely by company, org structure, and maturity.When I worked for smaller start-ups, we only had 2 dedicated marketers: me (generalist) and my VP (also a generalist, but she was running sales as well!).In that case, I had to divide my time by priorities for the business. This was determined as part of quarterly planning and product launches. If we had a product launch, then that quarter was dedicated to building the materials for the launch, and promoting the new product. In quarters ...Read More

I would recommend try to apply the common rule "80% of the business comes from 20% of the customers". We have our customers divided into 3 segments:   New-New: Completely new to the organization Existing-New: existing customer but buys new product  Existing-buying more: Existing customers buy the same product but buys additional plan    For each product we see % revenue for each customer segment. Depending on that we prioritize if we want to focus on demand gen vs engagement vs sales.    Say if ...Read More

I agree with the great points made by Jennifer and Ruturaj, but want to add that the stage of the company matters quite a bit as well.  For young companies, it is often beneficial to get engagement and retention right before trying to optimize demand gen and sales. Marketing and sales are going to be very expensive if you can't deliver value for customers and in turn make them valuable for you. If you've got a 90% churn rate and spend $1M on demand gen, you're going to get a terrible return comp ...Read More

Every PMM should answer this question based on 2 factors -- the needs of the business and the strength of the funnel.   (1) Org & Biz Needs - If you have a strong sales team established with sky-high close rates, the strongest need might be in widening the funnel (demand gen). If you have a green sales team that is drowning in leads, but not effectively closing, then focusing your efforts on sales enablement or nurturing might make more sense.   (2) Funnel Strength - It’s like running a rela ...Read More