What research and alliances should a PMM engage in when starting with a new company?

Research and get smart on your positioning, message, personas, competitors, customer journey, ICP (ideal customer profile), market sizing with TAM (total addressable market), SAM (serviceable available market), SOM (serviceable obtainable market). Know your customers, the pain point you are solving and have an opinion backed by the data you’ve researched. My PMM 100 day plan here has a comprehensive list of areas you should be researching.

Get alliance with the Product and Marketing org first. You are a Product Marketer – in your title you are equal parts both, regardless of which group you officially map into. Other orgs to eventually build alliances with are Leadership, Sales, Services, Ops, Biz Dev, Eng, Finance, HR and Legal. You are such a cross-functional person, you ideally need a stakeholder in every department to ensure your cross-functional efforts and projects are smooth.

When starting out, I always try to understand:

1. What are my company's business priorities? (This is internal)

2. What market does my company play in? Who else competes in that space?

3. Who are our customers? What are their jobs to be done?

4. What does our product do? How does it work? Why does it matter for our customers (i.e. what value does it deliver)?

Any research and alliances you engage in should help you get directional answers to #2 & #3. I'm assuming this question is asking specifically about external research resources and alliances, not internal things like NPS surveys, VOC research, customer interviews, etc.

To understand the market, I'll look for some generic market research guides on the category. Review sites like G2, Capterra, PeerInsights, and TrustRadius are great (and free) sites that publish market guides so you understand your market space. If you're starting at a firm with access to analyst resources or have a subscription to CBInsights, those are also great! Consultancies like McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, etc. often also publish their point of view on market trends, so I try to browse their content as well (do a Google search for "McKinsey" + "name of your product category").

Those market guides will also point you in the direction of who your competition is. The great thing about sites like G2 etc. is that you can read real user reviews to understand what the challenges that customers in your industry are facing as well as how your product has delivered value for them.

Beyond review sites, the publications and alliances that you want to read are likely hyper-specific to your customers and industry. To get an idea of where to start, talk to internal folks -- your marketing and sales friends will have some good pointers on which publications are popular with their customers.

One of my personal hacks to getting started is to set up Google alerts for key terms (my company name, my competitor's name, my product category), and see which publications pop up. Then I'll subscribe to those newsletters. Those newsletters often have links to OTHER newsletters and studies.

Once you've exhausted that Google rabbit hole and all these secondary sources, ask your customers directly -- what do they read? Where do they get their information? What alliances do they find valuable?

Alliances

• Sales, product, and cs are your biggest internal stakeholders. Find your peers in each department and start building strong relationships (need a foundation of trust and respect to be successful)

• Executive team /c-suite. Many of what PMM works on touches the exec team. It's critical to start to build relationships here.

  • Understand what motivates each ELT member - find a way that you can help them to start building respect.

• Customers

  • Partner with CS to identify a few customer friendlies you can speak with and start to build a relationship with

  • Listen to gong calls (prospect and customers) to hear their questions, challenges, objections etc.

Research

• There is A LOT you can do here. I would focus on the following three areas:

  • 1. Understand your market (customers, competition, AR, ideal customer profile)

    • Customers (feedback, challenges, goals, what they love about your product)

    • Competition (who are they, value proposition, differentiation, pricing, product features)

  • 2. Understand your product (how does it work, how is it different from other tools, what are the gaps). Get familiar and comfortable demoing the product

  • 3. Understand your internal processes & performance

    • Sales process & methodology

    • Marketing funnel & MQL/SQL/OPPTY criteria etc

    • Performance KPIs

      • pipeline (from all sources), ARR, avg discount, Average selling price (ASP), sales cycle length, retention rate, G$R & N$R

Definitely product management, to understand the blurry demarcation company to company between those 2 positions such as customer exposure, pricing/competitive analysis and salesforce training. Sales management and CRO, sales ops, marketing functional owners (digital, automation, ops) and customer support even to name a few. PMM can be purely tactical or it can be very strategic, depends on company culture relative to PM and the individuals in the seats.