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SMB Product Marketing
SMB Product Marketing
6 answers
Vice President, Product Marketing at Momentive
First off, I'll say that I'm never a fan of making someone create
messaging/positioning and defining a GTM plan about the interviewing company's
product because you're never going to get to the level of knowledge as someone
in the company...and it takes way longer to do it right. OK, rant over. :)
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 clearly understand t...more
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few.
Pulling this one up. It's outside the realm of KPIs and measurement, but I think
it's really critical. And I have a few strong opinions here.
If I can summarize this back, as part of your interview process, you were given
an assignment to build an overall strategic plan to take a flagship product to
market, do it under extreme time and emotional pressure, and summarize it all in
a few hundred words.
To put it bluntly, this is a terrible way to assess someone's skills, is
antithetical to what we should expect of someone in the interview process, and
really sounds like unpaid consulti...more
Head of Industry/Audience Marketing; Director of Product Marketing at Procore Technologies
I don't think I can help you on the full assignment within the scope of an AMA;
especially since the sub-question reads like the company probably is going to be
using this question for other candidates in the future. However, here are a few
tips for any take-home interview round like this:
* If you're given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, make sure you do
so; one key part of the exercise is seeing how you learn and research.
* Make sure you do your homework; know what the current messaging, positioning,
audience, and content available is.
* Spend the time to proofread ...more
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
Sorry, that didn't work out! Here's how I would approach this assignment:
* Study Certain's website to understand their current product messaging and
positioning. And make sure your draft is different from this but not
drastically different.
* Play closer attention to their customer stories/testimonials to understand
their use cases. This gives you a glimpse of what features to highlight in
your GTM strategy.
* The goal is to get more leads, so take a look at their pricing and packaging
to see if there can be a better approach.
* Understand Certain's key competitors ...more
Head of Product Marketing at Calendly
I’d have to see your assignment response to make recommendations! And I probably shouldn’t print my recommendations here publicly, as this company probably wants to keep the assignment confidential. Feel free to befriend me on LinkedIn, and I'll take a look at your assignment and give you feedback.
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
I have no idea how you prep your presentation. But for an assignment like this
one, I think what employers want to test is your ability to assess the problem
and provide a solution. So before I would even start on the assignment, I would
try to highlight the problem statement. What problem is this product trying to
solve? Who are you solving it for? And importantly, is this a problem, the user
recognizes or not at all? These questions will help you detail your strategy
before you go into messaging and GTM strategy. Start with the problem statement
and how said product solves it. Then flow i...more
8 answers
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
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.
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few.
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
...more
VP of Marketing at Blueocean.ai
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...more
VP Product Marketing at Medallia
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...more
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
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...more
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform at Atlassian
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 :)
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
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 ...more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
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.
6 answers
Senior Director Product Marketing at Skedulo
The end game is for customers to choose your solutions and brand over the
competition, so the most meaningful KPI is your win rate against against
different competitors when you encounter them in deals. To measure that, you
need to make sure your sales team is documenting who they encounter in each
opportunity.
As a personal KPI, you could provide a quarterly or even monthly analysis and
update with actionable insights and recommendations regarding competition. In my
experience, a lot of real-time and one-off competitive intel gets lost. Product
development cadence and process is just d...more
Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte
Ultimately, the change in win rate against that particular competitor before vs.
after your CI project.
There are sub goals and metrics to unpack here:
* QoQ change in the competitor features & functions, and messaging
* The pace at which your product team is able to ship against new intel
* PM survey results on the usefulness of your CI program
This may be a controversial statement, but after seeing CI programs run out of
Product, PMM, and Ops at different companies, I think the actual research work
belongs in Product -- they're the true owners of what's being scoped and built,
a...more
VP of Marketing at Builder.io
This really depends on the actual goal of a CI program, but here are a few
ideas:
For the sales team:
* Competitive win rates (pre and post intel)
* Sales confidence on competitive pitching (This is something you can measure
using surveys at a regular cadence like quarterly)
For the product team:
* Feature parity if that is what you are focused on
* Competitive differentiation - if you really need a metric you can create a
percentage scale and see how that changes over time
For the marketing team
* If you have competitive materials or webpages - measure engagement and
co...more
Director of Product Marketing at Culture Amp
1. Sales confidence - While not a metric measured in SFDC, you can work with enablement to craft a pre and post sales confidence metric to assess how confident reps feel in navigating competitive conversations.
2. Competitive win rate - You're likely already measuring win rate, but competitive win rate will give you a direct KPI to measure the improvment in closing competitive deals.
3. [ Product specific] Reduction in lost deals due to product capabilities - To measure this metric you'll need to be tracking lost reason and have a drop-down for reps to choose "product gap."
Product Marketing at Fire TV (Smart TVs) at Amazon
Another great question, thanks! I have been in a few roles where my job was to
provide market data, competitive intelligence etc to other teams (CEO, Product,
Sales etc) within the org. These teams would use this information to make
strategic decisions, use them in sales presentations, etc but to put a common
metric on providing competitive intelligence was hard. So we would send a
quarterly survey to other teams within the org to participate in an anoynmous
survey asking them about the usefulness of the competitive intelligence my team
was providing. Think of it as a CSAT or a NPS survey t...more
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few.
It's great to see companies putting more emphasis on measuring this. It's
definitely a challenge, but if competitive investments aren't measured, it's
less likely they'll be appreciated or incorporated into key processes.
The ideal measure of competitive intelligence is win rate. Measured on a
quarterly basis (and at the close of a quarter) it can indicate if the
organization is competing more effectively in qualified opportunities. It's
important to note that like most PMM metrics, win rate is complex and can be
influenced by many factors: sales training, market factors, product deliver...more
2 answers
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
You are already one step ahead about narrowing down your next move to product
marketing - congratulations!
1. Product marketing roles and responsibilities are different with every
company. I'd encourage you to start talking to your target company PMMs and
your current company PMMs to get a better sense of their day-to-day.
2. Start aligning your current projects to map to the PMM responsibilities. For
example: see if there is an opportunity to partner with your organization's
PMM team on a common project. If you are from the Sales organization,
partner with PMM to p...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
I wrote a post a while back about getting a job in Product Marketing that is still relevant and helpful. Overall though, think about your transferrable skills. Whether that's project leadership, storytelling, market intelligence and how it can apply to the job description of the PMM role you're looking at.
Everyone wants to see experience, but if you don't yet have formal product marketing experience think about volunteering for a project to build that muscle (and ensure you like doing the work).
5 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing at Airtable
You’re right that as a self-serve PMM, you’re no longer as focused on sales
enablement as many B2B product marketers are. Here are some of the big areas my
team is focused on that might be a bit different than a sales enablement focused
PMM role.
* Acquisition: My team is very focused on how we can help prospective customers
understand the value of Airtable, what it can do for them, and why they
should use it. We get a ton of website traffic, and our performance marketing
team does a great job targeting users, but PMM should have a role in making
sure we have the right messag...more
Head of Growth Marketing at Clockwise
Great question! I’ve sat in product marketing roles at both consumer/product-led
companies and B2B companies so I’ve seen both.
In a B2B setting, product marketing is making its impact on revenue and user
growth by enabling Sales. Well, in a self-serve world, your end goal is the same
but the methods by which you do that are different.
Let’s take monetization and generating revenue as an example. With B2B, you’re
arming the Sales team with killer decks with just the right sizzle and proof
points to close the deal. In self-serve, you’re still trying to “sell” your
users but you’re doin...more
Sr. Director Product Marketing at BlueVine
SIMILAR TO MY EARLIER ANSWER, PRODUCT MARKETERS WHO WORK ON SELF-SERVE PRODUCTS
ARE MAINLY FOCUSED ON COMMUNICATING WITH CUSTOMERS AT SCALE - SINCE THIS MODEL
RELIES ON BROAD-BASED CHANNELS TO INTEREST, EDUCATE, AND RETAIN CUSTOMERS. YOUR
WEBSITE, PRODUCT UI, AND RESOURCE CENTER WILL BE DOING A LOT OF HEAVY LIFTING TO
ACCOMPLISH THESE GOALS AND YOU’LL BE INVESTING IN CONTEXTUAL PRODUCT EDUCATION,
DEMOS, WALKTHROUGHS, RESOURCE GUIDES, AND EMAIL JOURNEYS.
ALSO, IN A SALES/ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT DRIVEN ORG, PRODUCT FEEDBACK, AND FEATURE
REQUESTS COME VIA INFORMAL CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN CUSTOMERS ...more
Marketing at Magical
In my eyes, much of the time you spend and core fundamentals and
responsibilities are the same. As a PMM for self-serve and sales-led motions,
you need to be an expert on the product, customer, and market. Doing this well
involves time with customers (and non-customers!), analyzing data, partnering
with product teams, and so on. Where you spend the rest of your time will depend
on the GTM motion (or combination of motions) you've decided are best for your
product/company.
See my answer to: 'How does self-serve product impact product marketing
function?'
Speaking from the Atlassian perspec...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
In most B2B settings, Product Marketing, or a distinct Enablement team (if your
organization has one), spends a lot of time driving revenue and user growth
through enabling Sales and CS. Whereas, in self-serve or consumer-facing teams,
this time spend enabling should be redirected to users directly and
communicating with them through all the channels you're utilizing -- email,
in-app, SMS, etc.
In self-serve, you're directly selling to your customers, and also educating
them on the value of your product/solution as well. Consider balancing these and
working with your grwoth team (if you...more
2 answers
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
Congratulations on figuring out what you want to do next! Project management
skills are invaluable to any function, particularly in PMM. The reason being
PMMs are often handling multiple cross-functional projects at the same time.
Here's what I would do:
* Shadow PMMs in your organization to understand closely their day-to-day roles
and responsibilities. Develop a better understanding of what you like in what
they do -- this will help you anchor your PMM role.
* Ask for an "extra credit project" from a PMM. This will help you get a much
closer look and can be resume-worthy. Th...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
Yes! It's absolutely possible. A few ways you can think of the transition:
* Look at some PMM job descriptions and think about transferrable skills. If
you've worked as a Project Manager, then it's likely you've led
cross-functional initiatives, so lean into that.
* Highlight an internal communication and enablement you've done as a part of
project leadership, and how you measured success.
* Share any writing you've done to communicate results of a project.
* Since you're in Marketing Opersations, you hopefully had the opportunity to
get to know the technologies your compan...more
11 answers
Director, Product and Solutions Marketing at Hopin
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...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart
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...more
Director of Product Marketing at Sourcegraph
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...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at Momentive
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 ...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at Momentive
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.
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
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...more
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
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.
VP, Product Marketing at ClickUp | Formerly Momentive, Gainsight, Marketo
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...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at Gong.io
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!
Head of Product Marketing at Ethos | Formerly Meta, Microsoft
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...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
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 ...more
15 answers
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex at Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com
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...more
Vice President of Product Marketing at HackerOne
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?...more
Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Brex
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...more
Vice President, Marketing at Glassdoor
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...more
Head of Product Marketing at Calendly
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 ...more
Head of Product & Partner Marketing at Qualia
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...more
Head of Product Marketing at Prove
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.
Director of Product Marketing at dbt Labs
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...more
Head of Product Marketing, Core Product at Gusto
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 ...more
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
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.
Director of Product Marketing at Sentry
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...more
Sr. Director, Security Product Marketing at Microsoft
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...more
Director of Product Marketing at Sentry
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...more
VP, Industry Solutions at Okta
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 ...more
Director of Product Marketing & Demand Generation at ESO | Formerly Fortive
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...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
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...more
2 answers
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
Obviously, the target personas are different which informs the messaging,
positioning, pricing, and packaging strategy.
* But at a high level, in SMB, the user and the decision-maker are usually the
same person. This means the ROI of a solution or feature is extremely
important and needs to be highlighted more in the messaging.
* SMBs are also really big on word of mouth, so use that tactic to your
advantage -- a referral program is a great example.
* Leverage your customers as much as you can in your marketing mix for SMBs.
* Website is a great lead channel for SMBs, so m...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
Great question. I think there's a number of different things in these motions -
but fundamentally SMB is more of a "one to many" motion, whereas enterprise is a
more ABM-centric motion.
Given the team structure question here, this means that Solutions Marketing in
SMB/Mid-Market thinks about and works with our Demadn Gen team in marketing
around campaigns and positioning, content, and offerings, that can appeal
broadly to a specific trend, iniative, or vertical. Whereas with Enterprise it
applies to a specific company and going deeply into strategy and solutions.
Product Marketing ove...more
6 answers
Director, PMM - Support & Platform at Intercom
In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we
cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including
competitive research, buyer/persona/market research, GTM strategy, positioning
and messaging, enablement, launch planning etc.
Our team sits in marketing and reports into a Senior Director of PMM. Our team
structure has shifted several times in the time I've been here, based on changes
to the company strategy, product team structure and where we most need to focus
resources. Currently, we're split into 3 'groups' based primarily around p...more
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing at Airtable
Airtable’s product marketing team has a bit of a unique structure in that we
don’t have one “Head of Product Marketing”, we have two. Myself (Self-Serve PMM
lead) and my counterpart (Enterprise PMM lead) are responsible for the two sides
of our business and both report into our CMO. The other thing to note is that
product marketing is a fairly nascent function at Airtable. The company has seen
really impressive growth and success over the last few years with only a few
dedicated marketing folks - which was one of the things that was most attractive
to me when I was interviewing. Because PMM...more
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform at Atlassian
The structure of any team needs to be driven by the success criteria for that
team. At Atlassian, we typically look at KPIs like # of paid users and pipeline
(MQLs) for PMM. Enterprise-focused PMM teams typically have a couple more things
they need to solve for: Sales enablement, and account-based programs (which can
vary from events to ABM campaigns to EDR programs). Currently, my team is a mix
of core PMM who own the GTM for specific products, as well as “horizontal” PMMs
who own programs (like campaigns, enablement, content) that stripe across all
products.
The structure of the team wil...more
VP Product Marketing at Box
A lot of it depends on the types of products you're marketing. Some teams can be
easily organized into solution-based pods, so if you have a lot of products in
your portfolio, you might have product marketers who focus on individual
products reporting up to a solutions marketer, who represents a broader
category.
At Box, our products are more horizontal, so we have a team of product-focused
marketers who work closely with the product and engineering teams, and then a
team of solutions marketers who work more closely with the go-to-market teams
like sales and customer success. These team...more
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
My team is responsible for product messaging & positioning for Salesforce's core
solutions for small businesses across our high-growth industries and customer &
community marketing initiatives. On my team:
* One PMM per key Salesforce solution for SMBs
* One PMM leading our high-growth SMB Industry verticals
* One PMM leading our customer and community marketing initiatives
* One technical PMM
This helps us align team members with the right revenue goals, balances the work
on the team while creating individual growth paths for each team member. Its all
about the revenue for us and...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
Team structure is always a hot topic in product marketing, and there's a lot of
different ways of doing it. The product marketing team at Iterable recently
re-organized into 5 groups: Release Marketing, Solutions Marketing, Pricing &
Packaging, Platform Marketing, and Market Intelligence.
Each group has a specific charter and KPIs that align up to company initiatives
and OKRs as well. Briefly, the mission of each team is:
* Release Marketing: Tell Iterable's innovation story, and effectively
communicate launches to the market through our launch strategy.
* Solutions Marketing: Tell...more