How do you recommend setting up a process for marketing to support sales when that doesn't already exist? Think scrappy startup phase! :)

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Director of Product Marketing, SnorkelAI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • May 25

Congrats, scrappy startup phase is exciting, lots of opportunity to make a big impact!

I suggest starting by getting a baseline understanding of their sales cycle today. What has their approach been? Where are they seeing success, and where are they bottlenecked? Your focus should be different if they're not able to get in the door (help them with ICP insights and positioning for outbound targeting!) vs. struggle to get from first call to pitch (work on discovery questions!).

As you go through the sales cycle with the team, "feed two birds with one scone" by mining for customer stories among the wins they've landed. Package those up into callouts for outbound emails!

Given you asked about process, I'd focus on a regular cadence of connection between you and the sales team to build a relationship and shared understanding of priorities in an ongoing manner. Use that time to learn what the latest experiments have been, and how you can build on what they're seeing works.

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James Winter

VP of Marketing, Spekit

Pat and Sean did a great job answering with some more tactical approaches so I'll be brief with a couple tips. There are purpose built tools like Inkling that can be a great way to enable massive sales teams, but they require a ton of investment to do well. Webinars and quizzes are things that work well remotely. Salespeople are competitive so use that to your advantage. If you have a massive sales team, you should also have the budget to get some outside help to help train them. I’d recommend hiring a professional services firm to make sure the training doesn’t consume all of your...

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Daniel Kuperman

Head of Product Marketing, ITSM, Atlassian

You have several products with release dates next to each other and limited resources, so what do you do? Here’s how you can think of this: first, identify the releases with the highest ‘tier’ or ‘priority’ (classification of release tiers vary company by company). The highest priority feature is typically the one with the highest impact in the market and that should get more enablement focus.

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Dave Kong

Head of Product Marketing, Scale AI

I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge specifically is around balance. A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND What you can control? This requires leadership buy-in from multiple groups — ideally they would understand Marketing and Product Marketing (this is not always the case!) Based on Your Goals, I would then identify metrics. Some examples below: * GTM / Revenue Initiatives —> Before and After Analysis (ideally based on something specific) * Content —> Content Metrics * Support —> NPS

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Roopal Shah

Head (VP) of Global Enablement, Benchling

Your CMS (content management system) should have some sort of archiving parameters in place that should remind the PMM team when things get stale. With that said, all the reminders in the world won't matter if people ignore them, so I recommend you also have a "librarian" of sorts manage your content site - whether it's in a sales portal or in another tool, someone who is in charge of managing the site, tracking metrics, and also monitoring / organizing PMM when content needs to be refreshed/archived.

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Gregg Miller

VP of Product Marketing, Oyster®

Man, I love this question! As PMMs so much of our work only has impact if it has engagement from others, and the only way to get that engagement is by having credibility in the organization. This won't be a perfect list or exhaustive, but some things that come to mind are: * Take the time to understand their world: Get out in the field with them, get to know them over drinks, learn what customers are saying about how the product is/isn't meeting their needs, see how our assets do in the wild, etc. There's so many steps we can take to demonstrate we care, that we recognize t...

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Charlene Wang

Vice President & Head of Marketing, Fin.com

Different companies will define product marketing and sales ops / sales enablement in different ways. The distinction tends to run along a spectrum where on the one hand, Product Marketing will lead the creation of content that focuses on market positioning and differentiation, and on the other hand, Sales Ops will lead specific activities or content that helps translate that marketing positioning in a way that resonates with the experience of being in sales. For example, a Product Marketer may create content that talks about how your company has designed product capabilities to addresse...

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