What's the easiest way for you to convey the value of product marketing?

Product marketing is the process of taking the right product to the right market with the right narrative to the right audience and at the right time. More specifically, a product marketer is the voice of the customer, helping organizations uncover insights that can inform product and marketing plans. The best way for you to convey the value of PMM is to fight for your customers. A lot of times, PMMs will face the dilemma of supporting internal goals vs meeting external customer needs. No matter what, always represent your customer interests, be their voice internally. It may make you feel uncomfortable, possibly even create some short-term friction with peers but this won’t go unnoticed with senior leaders and overtime you will build a credible reputation for championing customers. You will start to have a bigger voice at the table, helping polish product roadmaps, weighing in on strategic partnerships and helping prioritize what new verticals to enter next. These are the stories and experiences that will position you as customer-obsessed product marketer helping you get promoted or nail that next job interview.

In smaller organizations, I've found this is much harder. The marketing team, sales team, and product team might all sit very close to each other. Small organizations essentially require everyone to have a technical/product expertise that just doesn't happen in larger orgs. The sales teams will just ask the PM directly, and the marketing teams will focus on the key messaging for the product(s) that drive the company.

As the company grows, the roles required within marketing, sales, and product get more specialized and the spaces between them grow. There might be multiple products, geographies, or lines of business. This is where Product Marketing Managers really get to shine. Taking the technical solution built by product, and creating a sales message that can be amplified by marketing in properly targeted campaigns is critical.  

Thus if you're in a small company as a Product Marketing Manager, you need to make sure that you're driving that value for all three teams I mentioned above. Defining the product messaging for the PM, aligning a marketing campaign to deliver a robust pipeline of leads, and enabling sales with the right pitch and materials to close deals.

Product marketing is the core of any organization. We are the product experts, which means: 

• We work closely with the demand gen teams to create compelling ads in the market. 
• We partner with the awareness teams to hype the product / upcoming features.
• We align with the product teams on feature prioritization and the right short-term and long-term product strategy.
• We work with the field to arm the sellers with the latest product innovation and how to sell them. 
• We work with the AR and PR teams to ensure we stay relevant in the market. 

Can you name another team that's central to an organization? ;)

Find ways to connect product marketing output to metrics that matter to the business and shamelessly self-promote when product marketing influences those metrics, even if you can’t do it in a scalable way. I’m speaking through the lens of sales-led growth rather than product-led, as PLG PMMs can usually tie their success to traditional product metrics related to user growth, adoption, and conversion. Sales-led PMMs have a more challenging time demonstrating value due to the foundational nature of their work. A product roadmap or new messaging can be the difference between making or missing revenue targets. Still, it’s hard to see that ROI on a dashboard, so PMMs need to understand the business’s goals clearly and get into the weeds to surface their wins and shine a spotlight on them so the world can see.  If new messaging targets specific personas - use the Demand Gen team’s dashboards to track response and conversion rates at the top of the funnel to see if marketing campaigns built with the new messaging attract and convert that persona at a higher rate. Set up search alerts in your conversation intelligence tool for key terms from your messaging to see if sales use the messaging in sales calls with prospects. Share clips of those calls on company slack channels as best-in-class examples when those prospects are associated with opportunities and revenue.  If the sales team brings you in for roadmap presentations on late-stage opportunities, keep a list of the accounts you present to and check CRM at the end of the quarter to see which of these opportunities were marked closed won and share a readout with company executives of the aggregate amount of pipeline and revenue your team influenced.  Stand up, and don’t be humble! :)