How do you keep competitive, personas, and market research info up-to-date and moving from product marketing to sales materials?

Align on needs and get buy-in on the program from key stakeholders upfront, otherwise, you will just be reactive and the expectations will be that every request is handled and every asset is up to date. By setting a strategy upfront, defining the set of deliverables and the cadence at which they'll be updated, and creating rules of engagement and set venues / channels for to communicate with teams, you can create a scalable system. For larger orgs, you may have to create SLAs between your team a ...Read More

Your CMS (content management system) should have some sort of archiving parameters in place that should remind the PMM team when things get stale. With that said, all the reminders in the world won't matter if people ignore them, so I recommend you also have a "librarian" of sorts manage your content site - whether it's in a sales portal or in another tool, someone who is in charge of managing the site, tracking metrics, and also monitoring / organizing PMM when content needs to be refreshed/arc ...Read More

You have to establish a cadence of updates for different assets, which will vary based on how they are used and your market dynamics. Personas don't change often, so revisting them every 6 months might be enough, but if you are on a competitive market it may require a quarterly or more frequent update of competitive battlecards. The important thing is to establish a schedule for revisions and set time aside for updating those materials. Another part of your process should be communication to the ...Read More

I'm big on updating information based on actions that need to be taken / decision that need to be made.  When it comes to market research and personas, clarify what decisions you need to make based on the information and the cadence to which you will make them. If you use market research to inform half-by-half planning then updating the information prior to the beginning of each half is a good starting assumption.  I recommend keeping a regular pulse on the competition, though. For example, by r ...Read More

The good news is sales people notice when materials are out of date, and will let you know it is time for a refresh. :) Joking aside, here are some proactive tips on how to keep materials up to date. Market research: With Google alerts, you can capture trends, survey results and news for the topics your personas care about. If you subscribed to analyst research, be sure to have a look at new research on a regular basis. As PMMs, we write about many of these trends in blogs, and use updated stats ...Read More

This is tough, but you can prevent foundational PMM assets from going stale by having (1) defined processes (e.g., establishing which components of your market intelligence are most important to update and on what cadence, and using what inputs), (2) quarterly prioritization to revisit key assets (e.g., dedicate budget and get buy-in from cross-functional partners to spend time and energy updating these assets as a part of quarterly OKR planning. If you don't dedicate and protect the time and bu ...Read More

Make it jointly owned. Your team will (almost certainly) not grow as fast as sales, success, support, etc. Even talented PMMs struggle to keep these things relevant and useful for every season of the company’s journey. So rather than boil the ocean, make it everyone’s responsibility. If your best competitive and market positioning is in the sales onboarding guide, sales managers and VPs have an incentive to keep it accurate for new hires. Plus new hires can comment on/correct things over time. I ...Read More

Starting with the customer insight is always the #1 job of a product marketer. Ideal customer profile, target verticals, buyer personas, etc these are things that aren’t going to change on a weekly or monthly basis. However, as part of routine planning cycles – perhaps every 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your market or industry, it’s always good to re-evaluate with sales and CS leadership and understand if we’ve been seeing any shifts in user base or even with the demand gen team to understand ...Read More

One of the hardest things for product marketing teams is to keep things up to date! Unfortunately there's no magic bullet here, you have to schedule regular reviews of battlecards, decks, etc. One way to do this and leverage analyst insights and data is to use analyst report publication times as a trigger for your content reviews. Gartner, IDC, Constellation etc typically publish their reports (MarketScapes/MQs, market guides, hype cycles, etc) on an annual basis so each year at that time it giv ...Read More

Simply put, it's a big commitment of time, effort, and energy to both build and maintain. My advice here is before diving in to build or if your assuming the responsibility for a program that has become outdated, that you get stakeholder and partner alignment on what the goals are, what the key pieces of information that it useful and usable for functional areas, frequency of updates, and get clarity on how teams will utilize. If you've got a big field of competitors your tracking, get agreement ...Read More

In short, you can’t hit ‘snooze’ on any of those even after you launched internally new resources and programs. A few ways I used to make sure that doesn’t happen: Make it a habit to talk to your team. Have a monthly catch up with a few AEs and/or SDRs, and ask them—have you seen any changes in the market? How have you been using the material, has it been helpful? In what situations does it come handy? Is there anything you think is missing? They’re often the first to hear about a new competitio ...Read More

Outdated information is almost worse than having no information since you might be making decisions from data sources that are no longer relevant or valid.  To make sure this doesn't happen to you, come up with a process or SOP (standard operating procedure) where you refresh/update your information on a regular cadence. This could be bi-weekly but even quarterly works.  It's also important that you incorporate some sort of social listening and competitor tracking solutions. Your prospects are a ...Read More

There's two parts to keeping all the above content up to date, including content creation and content delivery: Content Creation: This is all about capacity planning of the Product Marketing team on the capacity of the team to update content vs. the amount of content that needs to be updated. First, you need to define what content must be kept up-to-date and how frequently these updates need to happen. For example, some product marketing content needs to be updated frequently (e.g. information a ...Read More

This really requires a dedicated effort and should be owned by Product Marketing. Different industries change at different paces – in some cases, a quarterly review process is needed, in other case, it might be less frequent. It really depends. Product Marketing needs to keep a close pulse on customers, talk to sales and product management, and keep an eye on the competition. There are other factors to consider as well that may trigger an off-cycle review: major industry news, significant new co ...Read More

In the "real world" this is a function of whose responsibility sales collateral is. If it's product marketing, the answer is simple: Supply new collateral when it's time for an update. However, if product marketing is responsible for informing, and letting sales create its own materials, then it becomes more complicated. For me, it all starts with the buyer personas (or, as I like to refer to them, stakeholder profiles). I have a particular way of approaching these, leveraging psychographic, rat ...Read More

Talk with at least 1 customer a week and you'll never be surprised by any changes! I like to follow Gartner and Forrester for changes in the market, as well as keeping a pulse on new PLG companies who are bootstrapping (don't underestimate those folks).  The truth is, most companies do these items once a year at best. If you're able to spend time every 6 months, I think you'll be ahead of the curve.  It's a lot of work up front to create, but shouldn't be much to update. I like to check them any ...Read More