Pricing and Packaging

It depends on the competitive dynamics in your market. Are you the market leader or a new emerging alternative? What are the important buying factors in your market and with your buyers? Is price a primary buying consideration (hint: it often is not unless you make it that way)? It's always important to understand how direct competitors and/or alternatives are tackling pricing. You need to determine what your differentiated value is and how you want your brand represented in your market.  Are you the premium, high quality fully featured solution? Do your customers and the market see you ...

A truly successful pricing and packaging exercise can't be completed in a vacuum which means competitive positioning must be included in the discussion. The main reason is that you don't want to create EXACTLY the same pricing and packaging approach as your competitors but you also need to be aware of how customers are already being asked to buy. In addition, the competitive positioning will help to determine if the product has already moved to a commodity or is still being priced and packaged in a value-driven approach. This last piece is particularly important because if your product / or...

Your pricing inherently reflects the value of your products, and since competitive comparisons will inevitably come up in deals, you have to translate all your competitive research and market understanding into a compelling set of content and enablement for your Sales team so they can sell the "value"/better position your priducts throughout the life of your deal. If this happens primarily when pricing is being discussed, I'd argue that it's a much harder to successfully navigate.

Positioning (which by definition is competitive positioning since it carves out a place in the market where you are the clear winner) is your strategy. It defines who you're for and how you'll win.  As a result, not only pricing and packaging but your marketing strategy, product roadmap, partnership strategy, etc are designed to deliver on that position.

The truth is most pricing problems aren't pricing problems. In fact, they are rarely pricing problems. They are just the causal impact of poorly understood and/or communicated positioning of a product leading to a lack of conviction and a whole host of downstream issues. Pricing cannot be set without the Positioning being clearly thought through.pricing is intimately connected to Positioning.  Knowing the positioning will help you answer the following questions: 1. Is your product a 'tool/widget,' or is it a 'platform'? 2. Is it a vitamin or a painkiller? 3. How is it uniquely differ...

Pricing and packaging are positioning. They're the most concrete way you are defining the value and TCO of your solution relative to the pain a customer is feeling. But it's important to remember that they're only one tool in your toolbox.  Pricing relative to competition can signal a premium product in a commoditized market. Or it can indicate a value-driven sale as a disruptor. Certainly free or freemium is the most aggressive disruptor approach (though not always the most successful).  Packaging is a layer deeper and is a great way to demonstrate that you understand how your custom...

They go hand in hand. You need to keep a pulse on your competitors pricing & packaging so that you can adjust or create promos/spiffs to support your sales team when needed. That said, you don't buld your pricing & packaging process based on the competition. You should undersand the market - conjoin anaylsis, willingness to pay, price elasticity, value metrics your buyers assign your product and capabilities that are seen as table stakes versus a broad or niche value driver. You should use this market data (buyers, customers, competitors etc) and your short term business goals to determi...

I think competitive is one aspect of overall pricing and packaging, but it shouldn't solely dictate how you price or package your product. There are exceptions of course, and if your competitor is the defacto market standard then aligning it more closely to competitors is likely necessary.  Overall, focus your pricing and packaging on your customer, target segments, and unique differentiation. Then ensure it's not wildly off from competitors. A tool like Klue or Crayon can also help you track when competitors make updates to their pricing page (if there is one public-facing), so you c...

There are probably three major questions to answer when operationalizing a GTM plan: What is the governance? Meaning who is in charge? What is the division of labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)? When do you scale? There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and across the enterprise. This type of GTM implementation makes sense in a low-risk, high-resilience situation. In a t...

If the product strategy and positioning isn't nailed down, it will be diffiicult operationalizing a GTM plan. You need to have alignment on the product messaging, key personas it will benefit, how it will be sold and what the upgrade and expansion paths are. If you don't have those nailed trying to operationalize a GTM plan will be quite difficult.

There are three major questions to answer when implementing a GTM strategy:  What is the governance? Who is in charge? What is the division of labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)? Passing over these questions or not answering them satisfactorily are two major reasons most Go-to-Market implementations fail. When do you scale? There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and ac...

One of the biggest risks of operationalizing a GTM plan is the lack of a common understanding of the time it takes to do good marketing work, internally. Marketing shouldn't slow down product; but at the same time, the more time and advance notice marketing has, the more we're able to enrich, adapt, and customize a GTM plan appropriately. A GTM playbook is a best-case scenario and a guideline which has to be adapted rapidly and practically to the lead time available. The marketing team for WordPress.com is relatively new (around 5 years old for a product almost 15 years old), and speed is...

I'll answer this from the aspect of a GTM plan for pricing and packaging changes. The top 3 areas to identify and mitigate risk around include: 1) RISK: Did you get the Price/Packaging right?   * Does the price and what's included in the packaging resonate with the buyer?  * Is the price point in the ball park of what the customer is looking for and relative to alternative solutions? MITIGATION PLAN: Get input from customers, prospects, analysts and advisors in advance of the change and GTM roll-out. 2) RISK: Are your revenue teams (sales, CS, renewals, etc.) properly enabled? ...

Great question. There could be many reasons why a GTM plan is deemed risky. Perhaps because a lot is hinging on a product launch, or a risky marketing campaign and the riskiest of all - you as a PMM are not completely on board with the product. (The later should not happen but it has happened to many us, I assume) IMO, the key is to  1. Over-communicate: Define a DRI, make sure every stakeholder is involved, follow a decision-making model such as the one I mentioned above (RACI model).  2. Plan plan plan: Have a mitigation plan B ready if your original plan fails, or perhaps even a Plan ...

1. Making assumptions about pricing and not vetting them with sales VERY early in the process 2. Assuming that its a 'handoff' to sales enablement vs in reality its an ongoing partnership where PMM needs to lean in quite a bit to help 3. Not factoring in global requirements VERY early on and discovering late in the game that its not just a 'localization' issue that will handled by the 'local' teams 4. Not factoring in migration or EOL requirements and just focusing on the new, shiny products. Customers have more heartburn about migrations than marketers account f...

This is a great question because, as every PMM knows, each launch holds a surprise hiccup. If you can mitigate as much risk as possible before that time comes, then you’ll be successful in solving those last minute snafus. Assuming your marketing brief and GTM plan are finalized and approved, a successful GTM execution comes down to organization, stakeholder alignment and (the hardest one!) seeing around corners. Here are the riskiest components in each of those categories and how to mitigate that risk: 1. Lack of organization: * Misaligned plans * Losing track of documents and ...

Operationalizing a go-to-market strategy is not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot that happens between writing the doc (see narrative above) or slides and executing the strategy in the market. Here’s my list of the riskiest elements and how I solve for them. First, team alignment. In my experience, aligning the team is the trickiest element because the amount of stakeholder voices expands seemingly exponentially the closer you are to launching your GTM activities. This is just as true for the early stage pre-product market fit startup as it is for the hyper-growth, more mature compan...

Almost every launch has something unexpected arise not matter how much you plan. To me, the riskiest items are the ones that might be harder to change or adjust post-launch. 1. Making sure there is product market fit is make or break. By that I mean, the buyer you've identified has a clear pain point and the product that was build addresses that pain point. I've seen launches across different companies struggle because a product was built before fully understanding the buyer need. 2. Lack of alignment on decision makers can derail a launch plan. If decisions makers an...

This is a great question, and one that I ask most of the candidates I interview at some point in the process. The kinds of materials I like to see are dependent on the job they’re being hired for, but generally speaking pitch decks, sales one-pagers, competitive battlecards, messaging docs, launch strategies, buyer personas - these are all helpful bodies of work to share with your PMM hiring manager. If you’re brand new to Product Marketing or even Marketing in general, don’t feel shy about making that known to your hiring manager when sending work samples. Lots of candidates transition to...

First - anyone inviting you to interview will see from your resume whether you’ve done product marketing. If you haven’t and you still get invited to interview, then there’s no need to worry about being new to PMM. Instead keep in mind there are likely a few key areas your interviewer will want to assess. Take your past work and reframe it to demonstrate your ability to grow into your role, while proving you’re showing up Day 1 with skills to contribute: 1. Identifying Insights: Share a way in which you helped a business or team identify something they did not know before 2. Positio...

Try to align your portfolio with the job description: * If the job description focuses on messaging and positioning, share an example of a messaging framework or landing page that you put together. * If the job description focuses on launching products, share an example of an Asana board or spreadsheet you'd use to coordinate a cross-functional launch. * If the job description focuses on writing, share a blog post, case study, or e-mail you've crafted. If your portfolio doesn't align with the job description or you want to stand out, create something new for the company you're...

Not sure I completely answer the question. Typically when I ask candidates to give a presentation, it's less about the specific products they're presenting, but rather HOW they present it. Can the candidate articulate how they effectively approached their GTM strategy, from ideation to execution and beyond. Can they effectively launch a product/feature and properly engage the right cross-functional partners to make that launch a success? Are they outcome-oriented and think about the metrics they're trying to drive with a given launch? Those are just a few things that I would be looking for ...

I would also add: Can they clearly understand the customer pain points and technical capabilities of the product, and translate that into clear marketing messages that resonate? The folks that I've seen who stood out were able to tell a story with their presentation and were clearly outcome-oriented vs tactic-oriented. I don't want someone who's just going to go through the motions. I want a critical thinker who will think outside the box.

Welcome to the PMM world! ;) My approach to this would be:  * Take a closer look at the particular job responsibilities. If the job responsibilities are heavy on content creation, I'd include samples of the content you've created in your marketing portfolio.  * In addition, include a variety of different content pieces too. This will help the hiring team know your diverse skills as well as give them ideas on what they can do -- making you a standout winner.  * You can also look at the company's website to understand their current content mix, voice, etc. And see if you ca...

First, welcome to PMM. It would depend on what kind of PMM they are looking to hire. I would do three buckets. (1) a thought leadership piece or website/landing page (2) a launch plan or GTM plan (3) examples of enablement like slides etc. They want to see if you have done core PMM activities: messaging, launch, and strategy. 

Maybe I'm unique but I've been in Product Marketing for a long time and I've never been asked to present a "marketing portfolio". I have, on the other hand, been asked to present on specific topics or share specific experiences on many occasions. If someone is asking you to present a "marketing portfolio" and you are new to product marketing, I would ask the person asking you to provide more detail on what they are looking for.  If you don't have a portfolio, then I would tell them that you are very interested in the role and I would ask them whether or not they can think of a specific ex...

I would be super metrics-dr :iven here. Maybe show a few functions you've owned (or contributed to), from top of the funnel to middle and bottom of the funnel, with the corresponding programs and the metrics you've optimized for each. For ex: - Owned awareness plan - running exec programs and targeted PR, I could increase the share of voice of my company by x% - Built strategic narrative - creating company messaging and enabling field, resulting in y% in sales velocity and z% competitive win rates - etc. Hope it makes sense! 

Think creatively about marketing-adjacent work you've done, and put together a series of case studies that you can share with the hiring team. Examples can include:  * Identifying customer insights and defining a scalable solution or creating a piece of collateral, e.g. identified a trend in X vertical, and built a vertical playbook to help customers in that vertical grow  * Website work that shows how you structure problems and present information * Presentations you've created that could be customer facing  * Work you've done to help a nonprofit or organization grow  * Example...

There's a lot of potential variability here depending on company, exact role, industry, and more. That said, here are a few ideas of what you can show: * Cross-functional Initiative: If you've directly led a cross-functional initiatve that drovesome key business results, showcase them! For example, a sales deck that you created that drove win rates in that vertical. Talk through how you worked with Sales to create the deck and enabled the team doing so. * Launch campagin: This is similar to above, but showcase a launch campaign that you worked on and the results it had on ...

The product marketing portfolio could be: * Messaging: key messaging on the products you worked on * GTM: links to your part launches (landing pages) * GTM: launch brief which you can share * Content: links to case studies you have prepared * Sales enablement: sales presentations, personas, sales emails You can also share articles explaining your work approach. For example, I talked about incorporating user empathy and it explained how I actually did it. You can see it [here](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/398284).  

It's hard. Real hard.  Many PMMs make the mistake of starting with messaging. This is a no-no. Messaging comes last and just puts words behind what was already decided. You have to nail this in sequential order.  1. First comes strategy 2. Then comes positioning 3. And finally comes messaging Your CEO owns the strategy. Period. If they don't know where you are going, the positioning will be unclear or may work for a little while until the market or your product evolves. I recall a meeting in a prior company where I aligned with the positioning of our chatbot/customer service...

It's key to align around a high-level story that powers success—in sales, marketing, fundraising, product development and recruiting—by getting everyone on the same page about strategy and differentiation. Alignment is difficult. If you can start with your CEO, that is key. Ultimately, your CEO is yuor ultimate storyteller and if she is bought in, then its easier to get the rest of the executive team aligned. The story is the strategy and that should be your starting point. What’s driving your story in the market? New features and functionality … or a bigger promise to your customers?...

I see three parts to driving alignment, both with execs and among all other stakeholders: 1. First, bring them along for the journey. Messaging cannot be done in a silo, and it’s difficult to properly adopt if not everybody feels bought in. Interview your execs and stakeholders to learn their perspective, where they feel the company or product is differentiated, what customer pain it solves, what benefits it delivers. The answers will vary and will be meaningful inputs as you craft and test your messaging. 2. Second, set regular check-ins and milestones with execs a...

To drive alignment, make something that execs can respond to. Recently, I created an example “future state” pitch deck to articulate a future narrative for Glassdoor. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped drive discussion and alignment on overall company positioning and direction. But in general, make something for folks to respond to. I think it is so important for product marketing teams to establish credibility and expectations that PMM owns specific artifacts that ultimately help the company make smarter decisions. We have a toolkit of go-to templates that we try to work from for whatever b...

I feel fortunate that I’ve led positioning/messaging workshops since I graduated college because I worked for an agency that mandated them for every project we worked on for tech clients.  Getting an exec team to agree on a document outlining positioning and messaging isn't the hard part in my opinion. The difficult part is to get the messaging to stick once you put it out in the world: on a homepage, in a blog post, an ad, a slide deck for sales, etc. When positioning and messaging is put to use, execs start to realize what they signed up for. “Wait, we’re going after that job title in ...

At the end of the day, Product Marketing owns messaging, and there should be general alignment around that. I think that's a really important place to start because literally everyone has an opinion or point of view on messaging, but someone ultimately gets to 'own' it. If in your organization, that's PMM, there should be and understanding across the organization that it's the responsibility of PMM/Marketing to come up with product positioning and messaging. If you're an exec / leader in Marketing, you should be building relationships with other execs to create alignment around that; if you...

This is an iterative process, and always better to over-communicate than under-communicate, so we can get everyone's feedback and input and people feel they have been heard and their input taken into consideration. Even if you do not end up going in a certain way, be able to explain why not and why that input was still helpful.

I start with personas. I develop a thesis about core personas based on sales and customer success feedback, and then conduct user interviews to validate or invalidate those ideas. That's probably the most important bit–my job isn't to just synthesize learnings from within our business, it's to continually test and validate those learnings externally. I then circulate research + personas with key executive leaders (CEO, Head of Product, Head of Sales), until we agree on the shape of each. Then I create a messaging house for the business, and each product line, according to the primary person...

Start with data. Ground your messaging in first and third party data that illuminates what is important to your target customers, key pain points, aspirations, how they like to be messaged to, language they use, etc. Show your work -- don’t just include the suggested messaging in the doc; add an appendix or reference section that demonstrates a thoughtful approach that is grounded in the data. Next, see if you can get some quick feedback from target customers on your messaging to further validate the approach before showing it to your exec team. This can be a great use of a CAB (customer ...

Ha! this skill is probably the hardest. When it comes to messaging, everyone will have an opinion. Before you drive alignment on the messaging, align on the problem and solution. That is 50% - 60% of the battle. The rest is just wordsmithing. Depending on the level of messaging, I would incorporate them into the messaging development process. 

Here's my general approach: * Do customer and prospect research (exec team will be more likely to be bought in with data - especially from your key personas and customers)  * Consolidate findings and prepare a messaging brief using the framework you landed on.   * Present those findings to and get feedback from key stakeholders - including marketing leadership, sales, and product team - and (most importantly) customers  * Incorporate feedback into the final messaging brief  * Present messaging to leadership along with the data and the 'why' behind the messaging. Presen...

We typically prepare and validate a strong Messaging and Positioning Framework (MPF) document first. Our template typically includes things like the market context, objectives of our messaging (i.e. what we hope to drive/influence), quick single-sentence description of the product etc. Once we have this document, we circulate it among the exec team (typically months in advance of a launch to give everyone enough time to reflect and comment). We also typically have multiple live discussions on the topic (depending on the complexity of the product/launch) and use the MPF document to drive ali...

Here's my process, I * Conduct customer and prospect research (exec team will be more likely to be bought in with data - especially from your key personas and customers)  * Consolidate findings and prepare a messaging brief using the framework we landed on.   * Present those findings to and get feedback from key stakeholders - including marketing leadership, sales, and product team - and (most importantly) customers  * Incorporate feedback into the final messaging brief  * Present messaging to leadership along with the data and the 'why' behind the messaging. Present ro...

Every executive team is different, so I would encourage you to think through the culture (and sometimes - quirks!) of the members of that team as you craft your own approach. That said, I've found a couple things particularly effective in my experience.  * Bring along key lieutenants for the ride - once you get to the exec team, a number of important leaders should have been part of the ideation and review process. Individual sales leaders, product owners, customer success leads should all be stops on your journey to craft the right message. That way - one of the first slides ...

First, start with data-driven positioning. Who are you in the marketplace? Where are you heading or trying to become? How do you think your competitors are moving in the space? If you skip this step, you'll lack differentiation in your messaging, and you'll get a lot of resistance from executives who think in visionary terms. To build the most effective messaging, you need to start with a deep understanding of how your customers think about your company and why they are buying it in the first place. Draw on insights gleaned from customer blueprints, interviews, surveys, focus groups, looka...

This is so important, and not focused on enough so I'm glad you asked! A few thoughts around this: * Get your CEO and CMO involved early. Ideally you can get early drafts to them, and also get them bought into the importance of the process and value of this effort which will make every aspect of this a lot smoother. * Have a consistent review process. Depending on your size and stage of company, it's unlikely that your executive team needs to see or review every piece of messaging. If you're working on a minor "enhancement" to your product and some lightweight messaging, t...

This requires having a strong relationship built on trust with your executive team and, depending on the size of your company, the CEO. Get the executive team involved early and often, and be willing to disagree and commit. Come prepared to conversations with data, market insights, competitive intelligence, and anything else that will help them understand how critical the work you are doing is. Help them buy into "why this messaging" and "why now" by anticipating their questions, bringing a lens of customer-focus, and a broad understanding of the crossfunctional strategic impact. 

So I have done a lot of work with Profit Well, they have some great frameworks and suggestions for building Pricing and packaging. The ideal scenario for me is to find out what I am building towards, what is our goal. Is it a land grab, are we just trying to get as many people as possible or are we building towards revenue and that is the biggest driver. From there you should be able to find the framework that either brings in more registrations or optimizes for revenue in order to make sure you are hitting company goals. But if you haven't checked out profit well, I highly suggest them!

If you want the highest company valuation possible, you need a recurring stream based on a value-based and/or usage-based pricing model. Investors and Wall Street value recurring revenue streams at a much higher multiple than one-time transactional revenue because they are predictable revenue streams with higher profit margins that build longer customer lifetime value. This is why many companies are moving to subscriptions. There are 4 key levers in determining your recurring pricing strategy for a B2B product: * Market Segment: who are your target markets and what are their shared pr...

Pricing is hard, especially when the product price has to extract the maximum customer willingness to pay and still leaves some customer value. There is plenty of resources on the web you can find and I don’t want to recommend anything here. From my experience, here are a few things that will be helpful when pricing your B2B product. Good research from interviews and surveys from existing / potential customers, supplemented by consulting firms’ pricing models is a great start. Trade-offs between long-term commit vs discount are a must. Keep the pricing window open for sales leaders to build...

Pricing is hard, especially when the product price has to extract the maximum customer willingness to pay and still leaves some customer value. There is plenty of resources on the web you can find and I don’t want to recommend anything here. From my experience, here are a few things that will be helpful when pricing your B2B product. Good research from interviews and surveys from existing / potential customers, supplemented by consulting firms’ pricing models is a great start. Trade-offs between long-term commit vs discount are a must. Keep the pricing window open for sales leaders to build...

Figuring out the willingness-to-pay (WTP) by conducting research for your product with your target market/buyers is an effective approach. I've mentioned more details in a previous response. There are lots of good articles on WTP research (including HBR). Also checkout the Profitwell/PriceIntelligently blog for some good articles on pricing. 

Your question is about: The go-to-resource to conduct B2B pricing power for a product.  There really isn't any go-to-resource, its a set of things to consider such as: 1. Brand Power: Is the product the category leader? Do customers trust the brand? In this case the brand is likely to have more pricing power than competitors.  2. Net Dollar Retention Rate: Numbers of NDR above 130 generally indicate that customers increase usage of the product and spend more with the company.  3. Discounting Rates: Depending on the customer segment, say Mid-Market, a discounting rate <15% is very health...

Generally speaking, developer platforms bring about more customer usage and higher customer retention, so from a pricing standpoint, I tend to not get too deep on how to price dev tools–because the long term approach of healthy revenue generating customers is more valuable than a short term lift in charging for access to the platform. If you’re really getting serious on pricing, I’d suggest you look to a research firm to do some discrete choice modeling for you. 

I think that list is correct and you should prioritize this list depending on your business. In addition to the above, I would advise getting a tool like Chorus.ai or Gong.io. Chorus or Gong will help you scale as your team scales in getting customer feedback both on the new business side as well as current business. In reality, you can't be on all the great calls as that is physically impossible.  

Aim high, and ask for more than you think you'll need - but not by more than 15-20%. People will always be your biggest budget line item in PMM - we're the most valuable asset because structured thinking and positioning can't really be outsourced or delegated to software. However, key items that I would examine for fit in your budget: * Content creation for top-of-funnel assets, separate from Content Marketing * Video production (think $5-10K for an animated explainer video) to fill in gaps in your content * Competitive and market survey data. Plan ahead to learn more about your ...

I would recommend doing a listening tour with your key stakeholder teams in the organization (product, sales, growth, enablement, partner) to help inform your priorities, as budget items could be almost limitless. It's also important to understand the state of your product and where it might need the most help, to help prioritize your asks. E.g you might need to invest more in awareness / thought leadership content or third party validation research, or maybe you have needs lower in the funnel such as demo and video creation. Some good buckets could be: content creation (white papers, webi...

This is a good list to start with. I will add a couple: * Analyst/3rd party thought leadership pieces: Having independent, 3rd party content is very helpful. If you are focused on the Enterprise, having content from top tier analysts is helpful. I have worked with Gartner, Forrester, The 451 Group, Ovum Research and IDC in the past * Graphics/multimedia: you will need to generate lots of great content that you deploy across channels. You may have good writing skills in your team but you will likely need support for research/graphics/multimedia. I have typically relied o...

You have all the right line items! In addition, I'd recommend: * Focus groups for messaging/positioning/pricing & packaging: I'm a huge fan of getting feedback from prospects and customers on any new changes. This helps to have impactful content.  * Video editor/agency: Having a 3rd party video editor helps speed up content creation considerably. Plus, they can usually handle multiple projects at the same time and you can create new sales or external-facing collateral pretty fast. * Tool to track sales content adoption: Highly recommend a tool to track content adoption...

A few other things to consider: * Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant)  * Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts) * Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed * And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)

Great question. Looks like you've captured a lot of the big rocks that normally go into the budget, but a few additional things to consider: * People Budget: Depending on the planned growth of your team for this year, and near-term priorities, knowing your people budget can ensure you can bring in consultants (as necessary) to bridge any gaps and help support short-term strategic initiatives.  * Tools: Beyond Sales Enablement/Content Management, you may want to consider Competitive Intelligence as another tool category if you don't have one already. * Win/Loss: If you're ...

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.  

Oh I love this question! For me, my background is in both PMM and PM... and I believe that my future will be too. As you continue in your product career, you'll find that every organization has their own "classification" of these two roles and that a lot of the responsibilities really blend across the two teams. Sometimes PMM is responsible for pricing, sometimes PM is. Sometimes PMM is responsible for competitive intel, sometimes PM is. So, it's really about what you like about your PMM role and finding an organization that aligns to that. 

I suppose that answer varies for everyone. For me, it was simply about being more comfortable with marketing than with product management. I didn’t really know what product marketing was until a few years into my marketing career but once I got into it, I loved it. In hindsight, I don't regret it for a second. Having said that, there is obviously an overlap and each position must intimately understand the other. 

Great question and I've thought about this a lot, I LOVE watching Product Managers work and think that the problems they tackle are super fascinating, that being said, I'm a marketer at heart. I think PMMs are lucky to be in a position where we get to work super closely with PMs but our jobs are very different. I like Product Marketing because it's so versatile, what I do from day-to-day can really vary but I also get to really own things and take them from start to finish, collaborating with tons of people along the way. Product Marketing to me is the "connector" role, your job requires in...

I started my career in Marketing (Brand Marketing, CPG) and always loved the intersection of consumer/customers, brand building, and business ownership. I went to business school to transition industries - from CPG into Tech - and locations - from Latin America to the US. MBA folks would know that most schools advise to only switch one out of three variables (industry, location, function). I chose two. During this search, I explored and interviewed for both options: Product Marketing and Product Management. What drove me towards Product Marketing is that I still got to experience the asp...

While there’s no perfect answer here, there can be too much of a good thing. Behavioral economics research has shown that we tend to have a hard time deciding from a large array of options. This phenomenon is known as choice overload. It’s also often referred to as the paradox of choice, being paradoxical, of course, because you’d think that more options would be better. In fact, not only is it harder to make a decision when there’s too much choice available, if we do end up making a decision, it can lead us to feel less satisfied with it than we otherwise would. Some experiments have...

At Intercom we believe in value-based pricing, which means we price primarily, but not exclusively, according to the perceived value of our proudct to our target buyers. Competition is an important input, but unless you are selling a fully commoditized product for which many identical alternatives exist (ie. toothpaste), it shouldn't be the primary driver of your pricing. I could hold up two identical black rectangles labeled "smartphone" and put $999 on one and $599 on the other, then ask you "which one is an iPhone?" and I guarantee you'd know. They have the same features. They're probabl...

Hands down the value you deliver. In an ideal world, you figure out the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for your product in the market, and set your price close to the WTP line (and above your costs). WTP is usually figured out through research, both qual conversations with customers, partners, and key stakeholders like Sales and then quanty surveys out in the market (targeting your buyers) to get the actual price points. There are several research firms out there who can run this kind of work for you (or larger companies have teams that do this in-house). You should ofcourse be aware of the...

It’s always really tempting to look for “answers” among what competitors are doing. I think you should absolutely keep competitive moves in mind, but I would urge you to start from a place from the value you deliver and only rely on competition if you don’t think you can articulate the value well enough. To understand why, here are some of the pitfalls of relying too heavily on competitive moves: * Information asymmetry: You might think they’re basing a choice on sound information, but there’s a decent chance they’re not. * Strategy: Relying too heavily on competitors ends up de fa...

Assuming you have a clear strategy, it always comes down to understanding your ideal, target customers. When going from a single product to multiple, you need to figure out who it's for, what drives value, and how you plan to charge. We have a set of richly detailed buyer personas at Intercom that connects segmentation, value drivers, product needs, and willingness-to-pay. To develop packages, you start with a hypothesis: create hypothetical packages, price points, and buying motions (self-serve vs sales) and then pull in cross-functional team (designers, researchers, analysts, and sales pe...

Single product pricing is (relatively) straightforward. When you go to multiple products, or multiple SKUs of the same product (e.g. a Standard Edition vs. Premium vs. Enterprise), the complexity explodes across multiple fronts - Ops/quoting, your website/customer comms, sales enablement, and rep conversations w/ customers.  Perhaps the most important part to figure out when you go multi-product is the GTM model - for example, will you lead with one product and the others will be upsells over time? Which product will you pitch to which type of customer? Defining this clearly upfront will...

This is a good question. Multiple products, sold successfully together can take a company from good to great. You now have multiple revenue streams and a chance to increase the total spend your customers make with you. Leading to high growth rates and NDR (net dollar retention) rates.  From a pricing standpoint, it is important to think about these products both individually and together.  What do I mean by that? All products will have to be priced on their own merits, based on the buyers and use cases they work for. At the same time:  1. The pricing metric should be consistent/similar ...

I would encourage you to make sure you’re putting the customer first whenever you encounter this. In my experience, it’s really tempting to bolt on the next product with slightly different pricing that solves for that particular new product but doesn’t account for the existing one. Then you can end up with a bit of a frankenstein experience that makes it hard for customers to evaluate what’s right for them, having downstream effects on conversion. So make sure that whenever you’re going from one product to multiple, it’s hyper clear to the customer how they are either different or wor...