Which product marketing responsibilities should be centralized, and what should industry product marketers own?

Every company is a bit different, so the structure of roles and responsibilities are specific to the situation (size of the marketing org, product portfolio mix, selling team structure, target markets), but here are a few areas of responsibility that I feel should be in on the charter of every industry marketing team.   First, an industry marketing team should know their target industry buyers better than anyone. They should lead the development and evolution of the internal buyer personas, the ...Read More

Product Marketing and Industry Marketing should both own: Deep category knowledge: ICPs, personas, and competitive Pitch deck, demo script, demo video, customer stories/heros, campaign messaging Voice of the market Competitive insights Win/loss Inputs on Pricing & Packaging Where it differentiates with Product Marketing is: Category & Product Positioning & Messaging Value story, strategy, training on message, pitch decks Launches Demos Category advocacy Industry Marketing should then ...Read More

I love these big questions. What strikes me is there seems to be an underlying tension in several of the questions about industry vs. product marketing. Just like any two teams in marketing, there are superpowers of each that when combined together make a much stronger team.  Paging Indy Sen - I think there's an Avengers or IMF reference buried in here somewhere. But seriously - when industry and "core" PMM work together with a common purpose, there's very little you can't accomplish. By pairing ...Read More

In my experience - product marketers should continue to own all core PMM elements like product/solution-level messaging & positioning, enablement, AR, launch management and competitive intelligence. Industry marketing needs to deliver a great customer-focused message that sits above product/solution-level messaging (like a " for " first call deck any account team can use) anchored in the language and dynamics of a given industry. Talk about what matters to your customer as a commercial bank ...Read More

Typically, when you get to the point of hiring Industry PMMs, I think of their role as sitting on top of the work your core PMMs are doing. In most cases, they're adapting and adding to the work already in motion. Here's how I'd split out the responsibility across product & industry marketers across various disciplines that PMM teams drive: Product Marketers: Messaging focused on product functionality and benefits, covering horizontal industry-agnostic use cases Lead all product & featur ...Read More

When industry marketing is working successfully, this question becames harder to answer because it is a core component of the product marketing organization, and so it's harder to tease apart. In general, pricing & packaging, win-loss analysis, competitive research, release marketing, product launches, and core assets such as pitch decks or demo videos tend to be the most industry (or audience) agnostic, while positioning and messaging needs to be divided out by industry, as does much of the ...Read More

The most critical intersection of Industry Product Marketers and their Solution Marketing counterparts happens with product launches, re-launches, and major feature releases. This helps ensure that relevant use cases, positioning statements, and sales collateral are in place and that the teams coordinate sales enablement and campaign activities to get messaging to the right people. Solution Marketing teams own the messaging frameworks for each product and work closely with product teams as early ...Read More