When is it the right time to invest in a robust industry marketing / product marketing motion, especially if it's a resource-constrained team?

Knowing when to introduce an industry product marketing motion depends on several factors:

• Do you have product-industry fit? Or put another way, are you free of any product-industry fit barriers like compliance or regulatory needs? E.g.: HIPAA compliance for Healthcare

• Are there early signs of success in that industry? E.g.: consistent stream of pipeline, significant contributor to revenue, decent win rates or deal sizes.

• Is there buy-in from other dependent functions to support an industry GTM motion? Web/content resources to support the additional content needs; Budget to test into industry-specific campaigns, etc.

• Do you have industry expertise on your sales/success team? For example, at SurveyMonkey, we had a dedicated team selling into financial services that was hired from that industry, spoke the lingo, etc.

• And probably the most important: Is the messaging needed to attract your target customer in that industry significantly different than your current persona or use case based messaging? E.g.: for SurveyMonkey, we talk about patient feedback instead of customer feedback when marketing to Healthcare.

When we first introduced industry product marketing at SurveyMonkey, we did an analysis across the above factors to make the case for a dedicated PMM hire. We already had experts on our sales team, and a significant portion of revenue from a couple key industries.

It’s important to note that introducing an industry PMM function or motion doesn’t mean tackling ALL industries at once. You can start with just one, learn, and build a playbook for expanding to more industries later if you see success. You don’t want to overdo it, especially when you’re resource constrained.