When building a new PMM organization, what are the most important things to focus on when getting started?

IMPACT. So often product marketing teams get snowed under by trying to do all the things. They focus on completeness. They want to have every box checked. But they have no idea if any of it is working. Every other team in the business will have endless needs - endless requests - of PMM, but you have to get good at calling out what metric you're focused on and how you think you can ladder into it. Get good at talking to the metrics of the business and get good at thinking about how what you do ladders into the business stategy.

Two things: 

Build company narrative: If you are just starting the PMM function in the company, this would be one of the first things to focus on. Most likely the existing narrative was built out by the founding team but bringing expert perspective and start building out a differentiated narrative for your company. A good framework is a 3 Why funnel. I recall reading a blog about 3 Whys funnel (Apologies that I don't recall who wrote it). Why the problem you are solving is critical, Why they should choose you and Why should they make the decision now.

Support the lead gen engine: Every company needs leads. Most likely at this early stage, the company is still figuring out what is the right path to generate leads. That would be a top priority for the marketing team. So, it makes sense to align some work of PMM to support this priority. If the company is focusing on inbound then building out content or overseeing content development and influencing what content gets rolled out would be helpful. If the company is focusing on outbound, then arming sales with right talk track, and assets would be critical. 

It definitely depends on the company stage/goals. So I start there - get alignment from exec leadership on what the company North Stars are and begin building a crawl, walk, run strategy to cover departmental growth. In parallel to strategic alignment with leadership/executive team - you must, I stress MUST, complete listening tours.

• Meet with your customers
• Meet with your prospects
• Meet with your sales team
• Meet with your customer success team
• Meet with your product team

Listen to how they talk about their pains, needs, wants and dreams. The listening tours will crystallize areas of need and allow you to place a strategic lens on the buisness priorities that ladder up into overarching company goals.

For most well-oiled PMM teams, the PMM leader will establish the foundational GTM launch process (inclusive of tiering + enablement) with the help of cross-functional stakeholders. This is the first thing many PMM focus on while companies establish PMF. Next, it's important to understand product utilization stats to inform programming across 4 A's: (awareness, activation, adoption, advocacy). This could look like launching a product newsletter, webinar series, in-app tours, nurture campaign etc, but again, highly dependent on business needs. In parallel, develop your messaging, positioning, and strategic narrative frameworks to begin influencing enablement programming. These are the heavy hitting projects/intiatives a PMM should tackle, first!

Messaging and revenue. But to be clear, here are the specifics: 

• Drive pipeline and top-line revenue growth, inclusive of new logo and cross-sell / up-sell (land & expand growth)
• Partner with enablement to ensure quota-carrying teams know what to say to whom and when
• Bring customer feedback into the product and technology team in order to inform product roadmaps.
• Prioritize, open, and adapt to new markets and industries
• Drive home differentiated and unique value

To build a new product marketing team or strategy for a company, can be challenging, especially if this is the first time you are taking this journey. Here a some tips that could help navigate this process

1. Identify and Educate your main stakeholders: It might sound silly, but you will need to do some teaching if you want anyone to buy into your idea. Explain preferably with business cases and examples how product marketing teams had successfully created value for other companies in the past. The good news is that usually the main stakeholders are reduced to 2-4 people at most. Make sure you get the right ones though. 

2. Align with overall business goals and strategy: The easiest way to get your project rejected is to show that you are not connected to the organization’s objective. Make sure you show how a product marketing team can help close the company’s gaps or pain points and how it can  help to achieve x results. Any top executive from any company will most likely ask for measurable goals for your product marketing efforts.

3. Start small:  Getting resources for a new area is always a challenge especially if you haven’t proven its value. So make sure to create a MVP that can help you scale once you proven the value to the company and focus on a few key initiatives that will have the biggest impact.

4. Get the right people involved: You are going to need to work with different areas of the company to make it happen, So it could be a good idea to create a cross functional team structure that can ease the whole process.

In my experience, the most important thing to do to support focus is assess organizational alignment and capabilities when you arrive at the decision to build a PMM team. It's not very common for organizations to invest heavily in building whole Product Marketing teams, but when they do, it's to support growth through more effective market expansion or better profitability. The trick is to understand what the real objective is, which means getting to the heart of the corporate strategy. You need to know what the real 'ask' is. If the organization wants to expand market share you may feel the urge to build a team capable of supporting go-to-market (GTM) operations at scale -- things like release marketing, sales enablement, etc -- but if the product-market (or message-market) fit is not there the real work you may need to do is in GTM strategy (segmentation, sizing, positioning). This can have a real impact on the complexion of the team you create. My suggestion is to level set with leadership (marketing, product and sales) to get alignment on what the drivers are and then build a team calibrated to the 12-24 month trajectory. 

If you can't invest time in the above, resist the urge to just add bodies to support purely tactical projects like taking releases to market and so on. You can only operate at that level for so long in the absence of strong strategic foundations and alignment.