It first starts with identifying who your target buyers are, and building a set of “persona packs” that establish a baseline of key information in understanding buyer needs and evaluation criteria. This is critical to have so that you can properly educate your sales teams to have more effective conversations with prospects. At a high level, they include:
- Distinct buying roles that exist within an organization
- Desired business outcomes driven by each role
- Sample org charts within each function
- Your products/solutions related to their business goals and objectives
- Key customer stories by persona
Once I have this established, my teams update them every 6 months.
This is only part of the research needed in order to influence the product roadmap. There are other insights you should gather, such as industry analyst insights (if applicable), competitive landscape, customer feedback, sales feedback, CS feedback — and use this data to inform the evolution of your recommendations around product strategy and messaging. It’s this collective insight and expertise that separates great PMMs from good PMMs, and the type of expertise that Product values.