What is your advice to someone with a background in software sales who wants to move into Product Marketing?

The first think you need to recognize is how different the roles are (not just the job titles). Someone in a sales role deals with 1 to 1 issues everyday. You have a need and I have a solution. I address your need and move on to the next one. Customer support is another example of a 1 to 1 role.  Product market is a 1 to many role. You have to make decisions and think about how to leverage your skills to help the many. Product marketing, product management, and marcom are examples of 1 to many r ...Read More

I've run into a few former sales people and SEs who have made the switch into PMM. I've only done one internal transfer myself - an SDR wanted to get into marketing and approached me about it. He had made a good attempt to understand what PMM is and what a good PMM does and impressed me with his knowledge - it was better than several experienced hires I've made over the years.  From a skills standpoint, as you'd expect his buyer empathy and understanding of top of funnel personas was pretty good ...Read More

I made a major career change a few years ago from public sector to enterprise tech, and some of the most useful things I did were adjust my language, incorporate marketing terms into my vocabulary, and learn how to explain in marketing terms what I did in other places. Many skills and experiences translate across industries and roles, with "translate" being the keyword here. If you are going to be a marketer, you need to speak the language of your audience. Practice this in conversation with fri ...Read More

I've led several transformation and organization change efforts involving product development, marketing and sales. Here's a few lessons:  1. PMMs specialities depend on what's needed to link engineering / product development (internal competencies) and marketing / sales / customer success (external facing).   Product launches, segment analysis and sales enablement capitalize on process skills, not just functional expertise.   In contrast, for demand gen programs, value prop/personas and partner ...Read More

This is a great question, but unfortunately not one I have much personal experience with as I haven’t made that particular transition and also haven’t hired anyone with a Sales background so far. I would absolutely be open to hiring someone from Sales though if they showed they had the potential to be a great product marketer. I would look for the classic things like the ability to truly understand a customer/buyer, create compelling messaging and positioning, understand our product (this is def ...Read More