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How does your team divide up the responsibility between the PMM team and the Campaign team? How has that worked for the new products/new markets for existing products that company has wanted to go into, where the campaign team cannot just package up existing asset but needs to create a PoV?

Jason Perocho
Amperity SVP, Head of MarketingMarch 11

PMMs are responsible for the following:

  • Positioning Statement & Messaging - This is the heart of Product Marketing. Using our expertise, we'll create the positioning and messages we want in the market.
  • Business Goal - We'll define what impact we're trying to have on the business. This includes what segment / industry / geo we need to go after to lift our business.
  • Market / TAM - We'll identify and define the market and opportunity we're going after
  • Sales Enablement - We will work with sales ops to create a standard BOM that includes training, a playbook, customer stories, a first call deck, discovery questions, CTAs, and incentives (if budget)

Campaigns are responsible for the following:

  • Campaign messaging - Campaigns will take our positioning and create campaign messaging that shifts a customer's perspective on your product.
  • Channels - Campaigns will identify what channels they will use to reach the prospective buyer. This includes identify content types for each channel.
  • Customer Journey - Campaigns will craft how the prospect will become a marketing qualified lead. 
  • Account list - They will work with field demand gen teams to identify what accounts to go after.
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Jeff Beckham
Gem Head of Marketing | Formerly Mixpanel, Slack, BlueJeans, CiscoMay 7

The setup at my previous company, Mixpanel, is one that I’ve seen be more and more common at businesses scaling up. We have two arms of marketing: product / content and growth (the “campaign team”).

When the head of growth and I need to explain who does what, we like to simplify things to: PMM builds messaging and content, and growth distributes those things everywhere in the world through ads, email, etc. I’ve personally found this setup to be much more efficient than more siloed organizations, but the right way to do things certainly varies by company, business objectives, and the relative strengths of the people within the marketing org.

You asked about how collaboration varies by product maturity... In my experience working at B2B companies, mostly on fairly technical products, there is a natural need to collaborate across PMM and campaigns. Without PMM’s help, campaigns doesn’t know what the angle of the campaign should be or who they should target. And without the help of the campaigns team, the PMM team can’t drive awareness / adoption / purchase of the products they’re responsible for. Working together is a win-win.

This is especially true when it comes to new products, where the market, message, and target audience are less familiar, PMM will need to play a bigger role in driving things end-to-end. There’s no precedent for what works and no starting point to iterate from for the campaigns team.

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April Rassa
Clari VP, Solutions Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, AdobeJanuary 19

PMMs are experts on the “who” (i.e. target personas) and “why” (messaging for these personas) while Campaign is the expert on the “how” (channels/tactics to reach these personas). If the two teams take a collaborative approach on everything from brainstorming campaign themes to execution and performance tracking, it usually leads to great outcomes and a shared purpose.

Our PMM team works very closely with our Growth/Campaign teams in terms of quarterly planning including content strategy, thematic product announcements, events/webinars (submission of key tracks that require a unique POV), etc. PMM leans in on the messaging and helps brainstorm on key POVs related to either a key theme we have defined for the quarter or a product announcement. 

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Daniel J. Murphy
Marketing Strategy ConsultantJune 9

Interesting question. I'll say Demand Gen (a.k.a campaigns team) owns the offer and executive associated with the campaign the product marketing team owns the strategy and intel for that campaign. Depends on how the demand gen and product marketing team as staffed as well. Usually demand gen has more people to handle the execution and can own reporting too. 

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