What do self-serve product marketers spend their time doing, given that they don't have sales enablement responsibilities?

You’re right that as a self-serve PMM, you’re no longer as focused on sales enablement as many B2B product marketers are. Here are some of the big areas my team is focused on that might be a bit different than a sales enablement focused PMM role.  Acquisition: My team is very focused on how we can help prospective customers understand the value of Airtable, what it can do for them, and why they should use it. We get a ton of website traffic, and our performance marketing team does a great job ta ...Read More

A lot of questions about self-serve PMM vs enterprise PMM activities, so I'll summarize here! A self-serve PMM's day looks very different from an enterprise PMM. Some might even call you a cross between a growth marketer and a product marketer. Here are three of the biggest differences: MetricsSelf-serve PMMs look at funnel metrics. Funnel metrics can (and should) include things like website traffic, sign-ups w/ activation, and purchase (especially in Freemium, your job isn't done with a signup, ...Read More

Great question! I’ve sat in product marketing roles at both consumer/product-led companies and B2B companies so I’ve seen both. In a B2B setting, product marketing is making its impact on revenue and user growth by enabling Sales. Well, in a self-serve world, your end goal is the same but the methods by which you do that are different. Let’s take monetization and generating revenue as an example. With B2B, you’re arming the Sales team with killer decks with just the right sizzle and proof points ...Read More

Even in sales-enabled businesses, sales enablement is just one aspect of product marketing responsibilities. The bulk of the work is consistent across both self-serve and sales-enabled product marketing teams, such as: Owning positioning and launch of new products and features Building, maintaining, and enabling the company on foundational insights: Messaging, competitive intelligence, customer/buyer journeys, personas, proof points, etc. Creating content that drives revenue and retention: Websi ...Read More

In my eyes, much of the time you spend and core fundamentals and responsibilities are the same. As a PMM for self-serve and sales-led motions, you need to be an expert on the product, customer, and market. Doing this well involves time with customers (and non-customers!), analyzing data, partnering with product teams, and so on. Where you spend the rest of your time will depend on the GTM motion (or combination of motions) you've decided are best for your product/company. See my answer to: 'How ...Read More

Great question. Let's start by asking the primary question here: "Why is sales enablement a key activity for PMMs". Primarily because sales people are the most important voices of influence for a potential customer, we want them to echo the best parts of our product, with the best possible stories. Now if we ask the same question again, in self-service the enablement to our users STILL needs to happen -- just not through sales. Self-service PMMs need a clear understanding of who influences their ...Read More

Lol. They spend their time getting to know their audience. Self-serve product marketers are their own sales enablement team. Selling a dev product? Do you understand what is going to get you to the top page of hacker news, or organic traction on reddit? Ok great, now go and create that content. Now do you understand where you LLM traffic is coming from? What questions people are asking to find you online? What about once a user signs up? What are the key activation points? How do we help people ...Read More

Similar to my earlier answer, product marketers who work on self-serve products are mainly focused on communicating with customers at scale - since this model relies on broad-based channels to interest, educate, and retain customers. Your website, product UI, and resource center will be doing a lot of heavy lifting to accomplish these goals and you’ll be investing in contextual product education, demos, walkthroughs, resource guides, and email journeys.  Also, in a sales/account management drive ...Read More

Ooooh I'd challenge that if you have a sales team, self-serve PMMs should still be thinking about sales enablement when it comes to education around the features you're taking to market. Ultimately, sales and customer success should be equipped with knowledge of the entire product. Other self-serve PMM responsibilities include: Doing customer, market, and competitive research to inform the product & GTM strategy Owning product messaging, including ongoing maintenance of a product claim libra ...Read More

Sales enablement is only a small portion of what the product marketing craft entails. That said - there are definitely roles and organizations where enablement makes up the majority of the job. IMO PMM work generally falls into (3) categories: Upstream Product Marketing Includes: voice of customer, user research, competitive intelligence, collaborating with with product on roadmap, persona building, segmentation Lots of foundational work in this bucket GTM Includes: product launches, feature lau ...Read More

In most B2B settings, Product Marketing, or a distinct Enablement team (if your organization has one), spends a lot of time driving revenue and user growth through enabling Sales and CS. Whereas, in self-serve or consumer-facing teams, this time spend enabling should be redirected to users directly and communicating with them through all the channels you're utilizing -- email, in-app, SMS, etc.  In self-serve, you're directly selling to your customers, and also educating them on the value of you ...Read More

Great question. There's still a lot of internal enablement involved in self-serve GTM, as we need our website creatives, email marketers, social media managers, and so on to be well versed in our product and value messaging so that they're empowered to drive awareness and sell through digital channels. In a perfect world, if we do our jobs right, outbound marketers are able to do this without too much PMM intervention, which frees our team to focus on high level GTM strategy, delivering market a ...Read More

One of the core benefits of self-serve marketing is faster and cheaper growth when done right. Self-serve product marketers should proactively propose, test, and iterate new marketing approaches to make their funnel faster and their acquisition costs lower.   At Square, I focused on improving outcomes across all stages of our self-serve funnel to deliver faster and cheaper growth. Some tactics to consider include: Awareness: What positioning or messaging resonates the most with your targeted aud ...Read More

Great question. To clarify, self-serve product marketing still needs to enable sales teams. Just not as frequently as sales-led organizations.  Typically, self-serve products have a tiered pricing structure that includes free/trial, premium, and enterprise with limits around seats, usage, storage, and/or specific features.  For those who sign up for free or with a trial, there's a ton of self-serve value and education that rests on the product marketing team. For this base tier, success comes in ...Read More