Enterprise Product Marketing

In my opinion the effectiveness of sales enablement should be measured by reducing the customer acquisition costs over time and reducing the time it takes to close a deal. Having these in-process KPIs that you can track month over month will help you demonstrate how your enablement activities are helping sellers meet their quotas. 

I think there's a similar question above on measuring KPIs. Please refer to it. But essentially I'll look at 2 parts 

1. Whether sales has received the information

• Attendance rates, Tests/Quizzes to capture main points, engagement rates during the training, feedback post the training and % of sales force trained

2. Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer

• Adoption of product/recommendation 
• Revenue growth attributed to the product 
• No. of clients pitch to
• Higher win-rates

Create a quiz or set up role playing for your sales team on their understanding of the product features, capabilities and messaging. When you set aside time to observe how your sales teams are understanding and consuming your sales enablement, you create a better relationship with the team, and know which reps may need more help in what areas. By watching how well the reps could talk through the key messages in a role play, or through their quiz answers, I know what was working and what wasn’t.

As an industry marketer I am mostly concerned around the sales cycle, ASP, win rate, content performance, and rep productivity. Good enablement, marketing, and content, should shorten sales cycles and drive how things are leveraged ie case studies, whitepapers, solution briefs, and blogs.  

Often times good enablement will measure these variables continuously on a rolling basis and will work closely with industry and product marketers in understanding training gaps.

Sales and customers will be your most vital partners for this task. They will have likely have had multiple run-ins with your competitors. As a result, they will give you an excellent high-level understanding of competitive pitches, pricing, what attracted customers to them, and how the market, in general, perceives them. When you want to go deeper on a technical level, SEs, TMEs, and other PMs will be able to assist you with a feature-to-feature comparison, but keep in mind to approach the problem from multiple angles to get a better picture. 

The definition of "Extensive competitive product research" may be different for different people. I suggest asking the CEO and Product / Engineering teams the kind of questions they are looking to answer. Sometimes the high level market research you can get from a 3rd party will not be enough, and you will need to get creative to get the information needed via surveys, primary research or other methods. My best advise here is to define the task in more detail to undertand what people are expecting.

Not sure what mark you're missing. But your CEO and product/eng team are probably looking for (1) an overview of the space, where everyone is going (2) highlighting a few players and going deep dive into why they're building it and who they are building for. [I would hire a secret shopper for the second part] 

The best competitive research I've seen goes beyond the competitor's website, press releases and YouTube videos. They might include competitor customer interviews and tailored sales demos. I've personally worked with great small businesses and consultants who are experts in doing this analysis and research. If you have a little budget, I'd recommend that path. 

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.

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. 

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! 

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.

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. 

PMM is about product and sales success so your OKRs should align with company, CMO and product OKRs. However, I think these 3 serve as a good 

"PMM OKR template"

1. Build a POV and become the hub of market intelligence: Think of this as all PMM programs: Competitive intel, Voice of Customer, Analyst Relations, 

2. Bridge the gap between product and sales: Product launches, sales enablement, technical and release marketing, Roadmaps, CABs

3. Win in your core market: Your ranking, Customer advocacy, SOV, Content hubs, Thought leadership, Pipegen, ACV, Website 

In general, OKRs can become quite vague and hard to measure for PMM. However, the OKRs I’ve seen that are easier to measure are:
1) Successful and ontime product launches. This means the product launch was able to happen on time with all cross functional teams trained up prior to the product launch so there were no surprises.
2) Completed messaging maps/documents for a target segment or new feature.
3) Completed research around target customer segments and who to go after next.
4) Updated pricing model or structure for new features.

Oy! First, good luck! I have done the "first" before. I don't think you have the luxury of 30/60/90. I think it's more like 30 days to identify the problem and tackle easy wins. Sixty days build out a basic launch framework, then a GTM strategy, align both with leadership. Then 90 days to test and what you build and revise based on market feedback. My advice is to prioritize like crazy. 

Show up! In my last role, I was on a team where it wasn’t usual for PMM to play a significant role in the PM planning or organization. I showed up, spent time with the leaders, shared what PMM could do (by doing it!), and was consistent and available. I ended up being BFF with the PM lead. Together, we had a massive impact on the product and customer adoption. It was also a lot of fun.

This can definitely be a challenge whether you're the first or tenth PMM at a company. I'm a fan of working backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for the product team or from the sales team. From there, I like to ladder needs/deliverables up to team goals and business goals (impact). Then I'll stackrank them based on perceived effort of the deliverable. 

Essentially, I'm creating an 2X2 grid based on business impact and perceived effort to complete the task.

Currently, I am working with someone that I highly respect: John Hurley. But others like Grant Shirk, who is really thoughtful PMM leader at Cisco Meraki. Mary Sheehan who is at Adobe in campaigns, but has spent years in PMM before she switched over to campaigns. 

This question is hard to answer because it really depends on stages of careers and what you are looking for.