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.
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.
A few other things to consider:
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.
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."
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).
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.