How has your product marketing team traditionally worked with demand generation / growth marketing?

Great question! Demand Gen team tend to be bigger than PMM teams, and also have access to a lot more budget :) Modern PMM teams should consider pipeline (and ultimately revenue) to be their primary success metric. If PMM teams are led based on this approach, it drives perfect alignment with our DG partners since DGF is typically on the hook to generate sufficient pipeline for Sales every quarter.In my experience, the best way to work w/ DG is to consider them to be true partners. PMMs are expert ...Read More

As a PMM I’ve always had a close relationship with demand gen, from startups to public companies.Here’s what we do together and what we each own separately:Together we discuss themes and ideas but demand gen owns the tactics and PMM owns the strategy. We both own the results. Demand Gen: focuses on launching and driving campaigns, optimizing them to drive pipeline, working with SDRs and AE’s, managing large budgets for paid media, seo, organic. They own the tactics.   Product Marketing: we are t ...Read More

First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt. Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each demand gen person, asking how can we help them achieve their goals. Sign up for some activities to help them with some shared KPIs. Once you get some shared wins, other departments tend to start trusting ...Read More

At Bill.com, we work extremely close to our growth marketing teams. They are a critical partner as we launch and scale-up our growth. Both groups have their strengths. For the PMM, we have the deep knowledge about the customer needs to clearly articulate the value prop that will resonate most with this segment. For the growth marketers, they have the expertise on how to reach this segment and what is the best way to do so. It is a 50/50 partnership with co-owned KPIs and regardless of who "owns" ...Read More

This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you ...Read More

In most organizations, the relationship between Product Marketing and Demand Gen reflects team size and mandate. When Demand Gen is larger, they naturally drive campaign execution and planning, with PMM providing inputs like messaging, personas, and proof. When PMM is larger or more embedded in growth, PMM often leads campaign strategy because they have the capacity to own narrative, prioritization, and sequencing. Neither approach is inherently better. The risk in the first model is that PMM be ...Read More

This answer differs, depending on the size and structure of the organization.However, there's some common themes, including:- Product Marketing should be the experts in the product, audiences, and messaging. They should be able to articulate WHO we should be talking to, and WHAT we should be talking about that will resonate with those people.- Demand-gen and growth teams should be experts in reaching relevant audiences. This means that they know WHERE we should be talking, and HOW to talk in eac ...Read More

Always an interesting question. What's the leadership structure of the marketing team? Is there a director of product marketing and what does the demand gen team expect from the PMM team? To me, those sorts of things dictate the relationship between the two. Also, if a company is more transactional with its products, then it tends to lean more demand gen focused strategies, vs a company with a challenge in educating (e.g., for a more technical product or a longer sales cycle company). Basically, ...Read More

Love your above answer.  Even campaign plans have to be defined together because demand gen team will need guidance on  - who to target  - type of customers - segments, size, revenue, etc  - what type of campaign - lead gen, awareness, account-based marketing campaign, nurturing existing customer contacts in the database etc  - Messaging and positioning briefs so demand gen can creative derivative pieces of content (infographics, banners, social media teasers etc).  On the campaign front as well ...Read More

At smaller companies, DG/Growth and Product Marketing are typically the same team (or person!), and the two functions should try to work just as closely together as companies grow. The hub of this collaboration is campaign ideation and design. As the teams formulate their GTM hypotheses ("campaigns"), both functions contribute their knowledge and information. Who brings what information is typically where the delineation happens: In a past life as a Demand Marketer, we were experts on in-channel ...Read More

In my experience, product marketing is the nucleus of the marketing team - driving and informing strategy for demand generation, sales enablement, and other channel owners (field, content, etc).   Good Product Marketers first need to know what is coming down the pipeline (on the product side) and be able to translate that into why it matters (for the sales team). That’s why great relationships with the product and sales teams in this role are critical. Once the strategy is set from that alignmen ...Read More

Hi everyone! Great to be here with you today! Thanks for sending me so many thoughtful questions...digging in now! This is a tricky one as I've seen 3 different models in my recent career history: Mid-sized tech company where product marketing and demand gen were separate groups, yet connected at the hip Small start up where I ran all marketing functions and thus we were one :) Morningstar, where my team has both product marketing and demand generation responsibilities, although we do share pipe ...Read More