Growth 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.

If there’s a Growth Product & Engineering team that has enough work to support a growth product marketer, then I’d say it makes sense. Their work and scope should be closely mapped to the roadmap of the Growth Product team. Typically will be focused on experiments to improve core user metrics through product adoption, rather than big GTMs / product launches. 

Totally! I’ve helped multiple growth marketers make this jump before. You’ve already got the marketing channel performance chops, so I would lean into that. If you’ve built out a strong understanding of what messaging works for your audience, that can also be highly applicable to product marketing.

In terms of areas for self-development, I've found that those moving from growth to product typically need to shore up their customer research & insights skills, as well as crafting positioning and messaging. 

It really depends on the lifecycle stage of the product and the goals/OKRs set up each quarter. But it is very common for growth-focused initiatives to be organized around the audience lifecycle. I often organize my teams, strategies, and tactics around some version of the following but adapted to fit my product needs: acquisition, onboarding, retention, resurrection. 

That way you will empower different team members to be accountable for each part of the customer journey and be able to measure where your product is excelling and struggling. 

Each quarter, our team is generally proposing helping with KPIs around:

- acquisition of new users

- activating those new users

- expanding or upgrading users (using their credit card to buy something more)

- retaining those users month over month, and year over year

- talking to sales about our Enterprise plan

How much effort we put it into each really depends on the needs of the business, but we’re generally doing something for each.

At my current company, Clockwise, we’re focused on acquisition and monetization mostly. We’re a new product and there’s still lots of room for growth at the top of the funnel so we’re prioritizing efforts like nailing paid acquisition strategy, driving demand for the sales team with events and content launches, and experimenting on the user lifecycle to improve monetization.

We have incredible net revenue retention organically, so there's not a need for us to focus on retention at the moment.

I think the core definition is still the same but in pure B2B you’re going to have a much stronger emphasis on sales enablement and think of sales as one of your core channels for communicating with customers. In PLG or B2C, you’re going to have a stronger emphasis on communicating directly to users via marketing channels. In PLG, you’ll still have sales enablement as a core part of your responsibilities, but there’s more of a balance of your time spent on direct-to-user communication and sales enablement.

1. Get a good handle on your funnel metrics
2. Identify areas in the funnel where there is disproportionate dropoff
3. Once you’ve narrowed in a bit on where in the funnel you want to focus, talk to your customers. Get feedback on what hurdles exist and what might overcome those hurdles.
4. Brainstorm, scope, and prioritize experiments. I usually like to have some small quick wins complimented by bigger bets.
5. Measure, learn, and iterate. Keep going until you see an impact :)

At Bill.com, we work extremely close to our growth marketing teams. They are a critical partner as we launch and scale-up our growth. Both groups have their strengths. For the PMM, we have the deep knowledge about the customer needs to clearly articulate the value prop that will resonate most with this segment. For the growth marketer, they have the expertise on how to reach this segment and what is the best way to do so. It feels like a 50/50 partnership with co-owned KPIs and regardless of who "owns" the campaign, it requires tight partnership to be successful.

First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt.

Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each demand gen person, asking how can we help them achieve their goals. Sign up for some activities to help them with some shared KPIs. Once you get some shared wins, other departments tend to start trusting you more. Then, they might allow you to weigh in on their strategy too. 

Addressed a similar question related to Campaign teams earlier. Please refer to that response. 

In short, Product marketing is the vital work of developing a customer lifecycle journey, pricing, sales support materials, analyst relations, and press. Demand generation consumes the outputs from product marketing and injects them into marketing machinery that delivers content to prospects at scale consistently.