What does an industry product marketing manager need to be exceptional at compared to product marketing manager?

With my industry product marketers, I nurture the development of a set of skills that I feel differentiate them. These are the skills I feel an industry product marketer should be exceptional at: 1.) Know your industry buyer personas. 2.) An industry product marketer should be able to speak in the native language of that industry. They should know the industry jargon, abbreviations, and the way their business functions. 3.) They should hold themselves accountable to ensuring their messaging is r ...Read More

PMMs and Industry PMMs are very similar in terms of the core skill sets needed to be successful in their roles. The biggest difference is that they need to intimately understand the industry or set of industries that they are responsible for and the unique needs of the personas that they’re targeting in those industries. With this lens, there are 3 foundational areas an Industry PMM needs to be exceptional at (all of which are powered by deep knowledge of their industry, customers and competitor ...Read More

Generally, I'd say two things: 1) having enough familiarity and understanding of an industry to know how to craft a message that lands with a given audience and avoid missing the mark by either being vaguely horizontal or not speaking an industry's language. Every industry has their own tone, lexicon and tribal knowledge that need to be understood to connect with that audience. A great PMM can have the use cases, feature set, benefits and competitive landscape down cold and still not sould like ...Read More

Internal evangelism and industry expertise.  Yes, you need all the core PMM skills. You might even need to be a stronger writer and positioner than the core PMM. But if your sole goal is to help grow your share in a specific industry or set of industries, you're going to have to: Sell hard on behalf of your customers. Industry features are niche features. Functionality, file support, integrations, compliance, partnerships. Industries are specialized and niche, and each of these will never be "ab ...Read More

Storytelling, bringing the customer vision to life, and having a wide variety of skillsets (I always love ex-entrepreneurs) is vital for an industry marketer to be exceptional.  The industry marketers job is to bring the buyers vision front and center. A key difference here is that product marketers are more focused on ensuring the product is the centerpiece; Its features and benefits are all around the product, not the customer. Solution marketing, which ties into industry product marketing, br ...Read More

Industry PMMs must: Have a comprehensive understanding of the entire product suite Be exceptional at influencing and building relationships with Sales Be especially knowledgeable about how their product aligns with industry-specific regulations 1. Industry PMMs often require a more comprehensive understanding of the entire product suite. Generally, you'll find Industry PMMs at larger companies. Such companies have several products with conventional PMMs assigned to each of those product areas. I ...Read More