If you were the first PMM hire in a B2B company, what would be your approach to growing your PMM team? How would that be different between product-led-growth and enterprise B2B companies?
As a first PMM at any company you first want to establish your charter and define key areas of responsibilities based on company priorities. Based on that, you'd want to identify where the gaps are and build a hiring plan.
If you are B2b, you likely need to support both product and sales efforts - so you'd want to structure your org design accordingly, and there are several ways of doing that.
While this does not always apply, in general:
- For companies with an early-stage product, you likely want to closely align more closely with the product team and build skills on the PMM team around market research, competitive intel, positioning/messaging, and launches.
Then there are dependencies on your GTM strategy:
- For Self-serve, PLG products, you also want to have skills on the team around growth marketing - someone who can think through onboarding, adoption, engagement, and retention efforts - with a focus on the customer lifecycle. I would look for people who have managed self-serve products before.
- For enterprise, you want to add skills around sales enablement, but you also might want to add skills around solutions selling for instance, if you have a vertical sales motion.
If you are the first PMM hire in a B2B company, you need to very quickly establish your charter/mission and socialize your team's priorities and the corresponding KPIs that support the company's strategy. From there, you'll want to align with your leadership team on the gaps where you either need a new hire or a new skillset (i.e content) and come up with a hiring plan accordingly.
For enterprise B2B companies, you need to work across product, marketing and sales so you need someone who has experience running sales enablement programs, partnering with sales, and can generally understand what it takes to help navigate complex buying cycles and buying groups with the right sales materials and selling strategies.
For product-led-growth companies, you may or may not have a sales team. You'll be working closer with product, UX, and growth marketing to ensure you've optimized the customer journey and lifecycle. You'll need someone who has experience in testing new strategies that drive better conversion and engagement on your marketing channels and who is constantly looking at that data to tweak and create a more frictionless experience.