What's a good strategy to always be talking to customers? It seems so hard to get account teams attention, then get a customers interest, then actually get a call scheduled to for persona, messaging, content, or user research.

Since PMM is the voice of the customer, it is vital to always be talking to customers. Here's a couple of approaches:  - Schedule "Voice of Customer Day": Have day full of customer calls with a specific theme. Bring in cross funcational stakeholders (e.g. Product, Eng, Design, Product Ops, Brand, Comms, etc.) to participate and sign up for roles: notetaker, interview key takeaways, interviewer, etc. Host a kick off in the morning with interviews through out the day and and wrap up at the end wit ...Read More

I’ve often found that personally delivering customer-facing presentations is a great way to test messaging and positioning and learn first-hand about a buyer and their priorities. Approach: First specialize in a relevant topic and master a customer-facing presentation that you know you can deliver impactfully. Then offer yourself as a resource to your sellers. AEs are always looking for help to drive sales pipeline, and given most sales calls are occurring virtually during the pandemic, it is ea ...Read More

Based on this question, I’m going to assume that your company doesn’t have a research function and that the account team holds the key to contacting customers. My first piece of advice would be to work on establishing a research function within the Product Marketing team so that you have constant and direct access to customers. If there is resistance from the Account Team, work to understand their concerns and show them tangible deliverables you’ll provide like battlecards.Second, automate as mu ...Read More

"Talking to customers" doesn't always need to happen via a customer call. I have personally found the following ways to be very helpful: 1) Industry reports published by analysts, consulting firms and relevant market research firms in your domain. These reports usually highlight customer priorities, challenges, pain points and top use cases at an aggregated level, and can be a very effective way to understand the broader market trend. 2) Online communities, be that X, Reddit, G2, Medium, LinkedI ...Read More

It's often difficult to get access to customers, especially in a B2B/Enterprise environment. Quite often, the account team will act as a gatekeeper and be wary of other people talking to "their" customer. Here's what typically worked for me and my team: 1) instead of positioning your project as a PMM research project (personas, testing, etc.), position it as something the Sales Team can benefit from (case studies/win-loss). Instead of: "I need to ask questions to your customers for my research p ...Read More