Enterprise Product Marketing

Great question! I generally look for folks that have a bit more of a technical background or have worked with products that are a bit more technical in nature. Specifically I’m not looking for them to be technical, but I want them to understand when they need help, and when to turn to a sales engineer or PM rather than struggle through it, or ignore a concept.  Another key component is experience working with large companies, understanding the nature of how a big company is structured and how deals work through a bigger company is key. Having analyst relation experience is also valuable....

When it comes to hiring a segment PMM like an Enterprise Product Marketer, one key trait I look for is someone who is problem-solver. As an enterprise PMM, you’ll need to identify and investigate business issues, read through the data, and solve challenges or make appropriate suggestions and be able to pivot when needed to get the desired results. I would also prioritize communication and story-telling abilities. From internal enablement to GTM functions-– a PMM needs to tell a compelling story with a POV to spur action.

* Understanding of an enterprise sales motion - Enterprise buying is complex . I look for PMMs who understand this complexity and have experience dealing with it. Do they understand that buyers and users and influencers are not the same ? Do they understand the concept of a buying committee ? Do they understand the varied nature of sales collateral by different stages of the sales process ? Do they understand the number of meetings/weeks/time it takes to go from discovery to closed won ? Have they worked with sales frameworks like Command of message or Challenger sales...

I have taken the certification offered by Pragmatic institute foundations and launch certification. I found them to be good courses for PMMs in enterprise companies. They have used their generic framework for GTM. I got some clarity on a few concepts, but overall I was expecting to come back with many more actionable frameworks, learnings from instructors' experiences. I am looking to engage with an alternative program that may be focused on PLG and low touch sales programs where we can learn about how marketing has influenced growth more comprehensively.

I am aware of just a few 1. Pragmatic institute - I took it. However, I found that to be specific to B2B enterprise sales. 2. 280 Group: I recently found out about this institute, I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program. 3. AIPMM: Seems to offer courses similar to Pragmatic Institute. I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program to understand more. Outside of these, I am looking for more engaging courses, especially where we can learn how to influence PLG in low touch product environments, and contribute to strategy comprehensively.

I am not aware of any one key certification for product marketers. I work with PMMs that come from backgrounds in campaigns, sales, engineering, and product management. Each of those backgrounds lend themselves to a specific function in product marketing.  In my experience, there are three types of product marketers:  1. Technical PMM 2. Market Programs PMM 3. Go-to-Market PMM.  An aspiring product marketer should identify their entry point into one of the aforementioned functions. If there was one skill that unites each type of PMM, it is their ability to diagnose a market, create ...

I'm a little biased here, but I don't believe that there are courses or certifications that are a prerequisite or requirement to jumping into product marketing. If you haven't done any marketing before, or worked alongside a good marketing team, Pragmatic Marketing by the Pragmatic Institute is a solid framework for twisting your head around what marketing is really about.  But the best way to learn is on the job. If you have a PMM function at your current company, get to know them. Ask about what they're working on, why it's important. What are the biggest challenges they're trying to o...

Courses, certifications, and books can definitely help transition into product marketing, but the best way to learn is by doing. I would see if there are side projects you can take on with the PMM team, in addition to self-driven learning.  For courses and certifications: * I typically recommend the Product Marketing Alliance: https://www.productmarketingalliance.com. They have a variety of programs depending on how broad or narrow you want to go, and how much time you have.  * I've also had great experience with General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly); depending on your ...

Good question. I am sure you have heard this statement many times - “PM and PMMs are like two sides of the same coin”. It’s absolutely true, and work wise I see the roles to have a Venn diagram. There are things each team leads and drives by themselves and then there are overlap areas. The overlap areas usually are: 1. Product strategy 2. Product roadmap 3. Target markets 4. Positioning and messaging 5. Sales enablement (includes launches) The first step to building joint KPIs is building a trusted, valued and collaborative relationship. Where each party trusts that the other ...

My advice would be to build this into your regular team processes. If your company has an OKR setting process, this would be the right time to cross-functionally align with product partners on shared KRs or KPIs at a high level. Beyond that, I would suggest gaining this alignment at the PRD and GTM plan stages of the product lifecycle. In an ideal world, PMs, PMMs and Tech Leads collaborate on launch objectives (financial, product, marketing, risk), which make up the shared launch KPIs. Data Science or Analytics partners can use this as a guide to creating measurement and reporting plans...

Great call to have commonly shared KPIs with the product team - this is the best way to ensure mutual success. When it comes to product launches, it depends a bit on what you're launching. If your company has a "core" product and you're launching a new SKU or a product with a separate revenue stream, a great shared goal is attach rate: percentage of customers that have purchased the product. You'll want to look at the overall attach rate as well as the attach rate for new deals (out of all the deals that close after the product is launched, what percentage buy it).  For all other new ...

Broadly, alignment with Product should happen in an OKR or goals planning process at some regular interval. That's the real moment to align with you product partners on what problems you're trying to solve and what success means for a number of initiatives.  More specifically, I push that Product Marketing co-owns Product goals (to ensure alignment) and that they're the responsible party for product adoption metrics. What % of the audience has tried XYZ product is a strong measure of adoption and engagement.  Product launch KPIs should ladder into an adoption target (as stated above),...

At a high level, I think it's essential for all teams involved to understand the ultimate goal of whatever product or feature they are launching - meaning what is the problem you are trying to solve and for whom? In terms of process I have found the most success from establishing formal kickoffs, consistent check-ins along the way, and retrospectives post-launch. It's all about having several touchpoints between teams and making sure people are on the same page.

This idea of cross-functional KPIs is core to what makes PMM the most interesting and the most challenging function to quantify. But, you can do it! Two things I believe strongly: *  Cross-functional (or shared) KPIs are the most powerful KPIs any business or team can measure, because they're qualitative and quantitative and they force alignment across teams. *  Product Marketing exists to amplify the impact of other teams. If you don't have shared metrics, you're probably amplifying only yourself, and missing the chance to deliver on your true objectives. The best example o...

Great question! A lot of collaboration can come from shared KPIs, so it's great to align where possible. I'll divide this into two groups, on-going and launches. On-going KPIs: * These should largely be goals you can both impact over time. Things like adoption, revenue (particularly if there's a freemium, or PLG motion at your company), retention, NPS.  * For example, with adoption there are product changes that can likely be made as well as dedicated marketing done to drive success. At Iterable, we were working to drive adoption of one of our AI products and did just this...

Super important question 🙌 Cross-functional collaboration happens much easier when teams have shared KPIs, OKRs, or North Stars. To be honest, those goal-setting frameworks really work when they are adapted across all of the organization. This means that everyone is motivated to solve the company’s challenges, instead of working in silos on their individual projects.  For this setup to work, it’s important to understand the Objectives of other teams. Here is how it can work with setting up common OKRs between PMs <> PMMs: 1) Setting up strategic company-wide OKRs It’s important ...

Ideal customer profile (ICP) is a great way to focus on the most valuable prospects likely to purchase your product and align all areas of the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy on targeting those accounts. I recommend taking a three-pronged approach when it comes to collecting data for ICP. 1) Do the quantitative analysis 2) Conduct internal interviews from sales and account managers 3) Talk to customers. You’ll then start to see some trends across several attributes like industry; use case; tech stack; regions, growth rate; etc. It’s always good to think about your future ICP as well when des...

I’d keep an eye on all the indicators - leading and lagging. For leading, do your campaign metrics indicate that people are interested and engaged? How is this helping you fill your funnel? Can you use technology like Gong, which records and transcribes sales conversations, to track keywords associated with the launch? Was there a spike in keyword use post campaign? And were mentions in a positive context? For lagging, what did win/loss reveal? Was the product/feature instrumental in their decision? How did they find out about it?

I think this depends on the product and tiers. Not all launches should correlate to the sales cycle. Some launches will affect the sales cycle, and sales win. Some launches are for current customers. You have to be clear about your goals, and they shouldn't be more than two goals. Ideally, you should have one goal and a max of two metrics. 

It can be hard to measure effectiveness of an asset, launch or campaign in longer sales cycles because attribution is tricky in a 6+ month sales cycle. Measuring the number of touchpoints that influences customer behavior spanning a quarter or two will show you the bigger picture of the pipeline you have influenced. Expect to see bookings more than a quarter out during the enterprise sales cycle, but you can still measure “created pipeline” and “influenced pipeline'' in quarter. Additionally, you can also report on cumulative bookings at the close each quarter or report a 6-9 month roll-...

Enterprise Product marketers really need to be able to understand the long, and complex sales cycles that Enterprise deals take. In addition, they need to understand all the additional nuances that come with large companies. Larger companies are generally public, and have to adhere to many more regulations and complex company policies to protect themselves, their customers and shareholders, and their own employees. Because of this, they’ll demand more features, and understanding of how your company handles their data, and what happens when your software gets installed at their company.  ...

One of the key areas of differentiation is the buying group involved with a larger organization which typically lengthens the sales cycle. It’s critical to understand who are the key players in your buying group at an enterprise level organization. You’ll likely need to build business impact messaging and content for executives/c-suite in addition to the economic buyer and end user as enterprise sales motions typically require senior leadership review and input. Enterprises also usually require more steps during the sales process, for example sometimes they require a Proof of Concept (Po...

Every enterprise sales rep wants to sell more, faster. The most valuable PMMs I’ve worked with are experts on their product, market, customers, and competition. Individual sales reps don’t have time to track these things at the level of detail PMMs do, but require smart talking points to be successful. On top of expertise, PMMs bring a macro view and can surface best practices from across the sales org. Ideally, you’re joining calls, talking to reps in different regions and segments, and even participating in pitches. That gives you a unique perspective. There are many ways this knowledge...

PMMs are the most important when it comes to being able to simplify what the product has built and clearly describe what it does and why it’s important. Sales teams are constantly being bombarded with new features that product teams have built, you can’t feed every single feature separately for sales teams to sell.  PMM should be able to help package up these new features (or existing ones) into a narrative to better help sales go to market with them. We did this at Dropbox by leveraging Sales Plays. By packaging up features (new and old) into a narrative, it helps the enterprise teams t...

(1) TOFU - create awareness [enteprise messaging]  (2) BOFU - making sure you have the right messaging and assets along the journey to closed won [sales play]  Together these two parts make an enterprise play. So depending on the problem, you can spend your time creating though-leadership pieces and campaigns, or you have to enable sales and cs. Or in some cases, you have to run a full integrated campaign. 

PMM can influence several touchpoints across the enterprise sales motion. PMM’s biggest impact will likely vary widely depending on the business stage. Identifying and anticipating the needs of each person in the buying group and building appropriate content and messaging and aligning that to the sales process will be key. Adding value through the enterprise sales cycle can be done in a number of different ways including managing standardized Request for Proposal (RFP) responses, building a partnership with analyst relations team to help drive analyst outlook, and enabling the sales team...

Measuring sales success is unique to your organization but you can gauge general effectiveness by understanding the volume of opportunities, conversion rates, and productivity.  Volume of Opportunity Cross-selling, renewals, and upselling are more effective ways of generating revenue than acquiring a net new customer. According to InsightSquared, the average cost of acquisition for a company to renew a product is $0.13, the average upsell costs a company $0.28. Both are dramatically more cost-effective moves than acquiring a net new customer—at $1.18 to earn $1.00.  These cost-effectiv...

My top 3 metrics to measure sales enablement success are : 1. Reduction in ramp time for new AEs coming into the company - defined as 'how many days does an AE spend at my company before they close their first New Business deal?' 2. Quarterly rep participation rate - defined as 'what % of my ramped sales team closed a deal this quarter?' - this number should increase every quarter if your sales enablement program is effective. If your sales cycles are close to a year long, then perhaps you evaluate participation on a bi-annual basis (2x/year). If your sales cycles are much shorter (less ...

I’m going to answer this question the same way I answered, “How do you measure ROI of sales enablement?” because ultimately success should be ROI in some form. Here’s my response again:  Ultimately you want everything to tie back to revenue (usually in the form of new versus growth versus retention), but you can never fully hold PMM accountable for those top-line numbers since there are so many other forces at play. This is why you need a set of secondary metrics you can use to measure your efforts a little more directly. For starters, measure the attendance rate of your sales enablement ...

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. 

Sharing how I think about this as an industry marketer. My first step would be to huddle with my sales and product leaders and align common goals (where possible). If you are working within a larger organization, perhaps start by collaborating with your sales strategy, sales programs and sales enablement teams, then up the chain to sales/product leadership.  In addition to business outcomes (ARR, etc.) you'll want to leverage the collaboration with these teams to determine the enablement program strategy and design. What knowledge do we want each seller to have based on role? How do we w...

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

* At a high-level the goal is likely to make sellers more productive in some sense. Probably by making them more effective or more efficient. Let’s just call this “go-to-market readiness” as this is typically a key pillar of any sales enablement team. * GTM readiness is likely the success metric that is going to be most inspected/cared about. So you’ll want to be tracking things like time to close, deal velocity, deal size, churn (if trial to close), or any other metrics that are standardized and easily reportable via your CRM. Other GTM readiness metrics that would b...

Sales enablement success should ultimately drive sales success, including the size & number of deals closed won and win rates. Leading sales enablement indicators of sales success include adoption of content, sales feedback, and feedback from prospects/customers as part of win/loss analysis. In particular, if messaging is done effectively and rolled out properly to the sales team, then the win/loss analysis should show that the messaging ultimately resonated with the prospect upon deal close. Before that even happens, product marketers should be able to see that the field has either downloa...

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.

It really depends on the type of enablement that you’re doing and the problems you’re looking to solve. But at the end of the day, there are two key metrics I’m always looking at, which is the average contract value (in conjunction with number of deals won) and the win rates. In addition to looking at whether there’s a measurable increase/decrease, there are other factors I assess: * Consumption of enablement materials: What % of the field has been trained? And how are the materials being used in prospect conversations or follow-ups? * Gong calls: Not everyone has Gong (software that ...

It's a bit of a white whale in a lot of organizations, but ideally you want to measure not just consumption or certification rates, but the percentage of closed/won opportunties in which the account team directly applied a specific enablement program or content. If the assumption is that sales people who are sufficiently enabled on customer needs, the market and your solution win deals at a higher rate, faster and for larger dollar values, then any sales enablement measure would ideally track those outcomes. Often sales enablement measures are very "top of the funnel" in that they track the...

There are a lot of ways to measure sales enablement: lead-to-conversion rates, win-rates, sales rep NPS, etc. HubSpot does a great overview of popular options in this post.  In my experience, there is no one-size-fits all and getting to the "right" answer requires a deep understanding about how marketing and sales contribute to your business. In the end, it's all about alignment (with sales) and impact (for the business). If you're starting from scratch (e.g. new business unit, early-stage startup), I recommend working with your head of sales to define success. In the short-term, it m...

I've seen this done successfully a number of different ways. Here are a few common ones: 1. Usage - What is the % of your sales team that is using the content and collateral you are creating. If you use a competitive enablement tool like Klue, you'll be able to track usage and adoption of things like battlecards and digests. 2. Win Rate - This one is simple. What is your win rate against competitors prior to your enablement initiatives. How much does it increase post enablement initiatives? My recommendation is to start by trying to move the needle on one or two c...

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.

My favorite way to measure sales enablement success is through a Sales Confidence Score. Start with a baseline survey to the sales team on their confidence across your products, personas, verticals, etc. Take pulse surveys after each enablement session and then make changes to your programming based on their confidence. 

A shorter answer here, but I think there's a pretty straightforward way to measure sales enablement overall. Ideally, this is driven by the sales enablement team, and you're fueling their succces: Key metrics to measure sales enablement: 1. Rep ramp - How long does it take new reps to onboard and reach full quota? What is the success rate in that period? 2. Annual quota attainment - What % of reps are at or above plan? Does it match the business needs? 3. Win rates - How effective is sales at qualifying, develping, and closing opportunities? Win rates is probaly the most...

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 ...

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. 

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.