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Product Marketing

What metric, goal or KPI can you put on providing competitive intelligence to the company or product teams?

I work in a company that measures the impact of all projects, but admittedly this is a difficult area to track. Would love to any suggestions/thoughts.

10 answers

Marie Francis

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Workday • October 24

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...

Head of Product Marketing, SendBird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 22

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...

VP of Product Marketing, Quickbase • August 12

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...

Ambika Aggarwal

Director of Product Marketing, Culture Amp • September 22

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."

Amey Kanade

Product Marketing at Fire TV (Smart TVs), Amazon • February 17

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...

Grant Shirk

Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 8

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...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • August 4

Love this question! I'd think about it in terms of outcomes, and effectiveness. So I'd look at metrics like: * Competitive Win Rates * Usage - To be clear, I like to look at this through the lens of whether the usage of a particular piece of competitive content is impacting the sales cycle and not just pure usage of content. * Product Feedback/Usage * Retention Depending on the size and stage of your company, you may also have things like: * Competitive SEO - If you use a tool lke SEMRush then you'll be able to track competitive search positions and rankings compare...

Alex McDonnell

Market Intelligence Lead, Airtable • September 19

For the Sales side, you can look at: - competitive win/loss rates - win rates of deals that used competitive support or resources vs. did not - ultimately, market share over time But for the Product teams or overall company distribution of intelligence, it's tough, because it's not as close to a specific outcome. May need to look at more qualitative measures like positive feedback from your Product teams, saying that your CI helped them make a specific decision faster or more confidently. Good luck!

Andrew McCotter-Bicknell

Head of Competitive Intelligence, ClickUp • October 16

Competitive win rate is a great north star goal. But it can be challenging to accurately impact that in a positive way in a short amount of time. A couple other KPIs I've used in the past and that I recommend: 1. Competitor confidence (from the sales team) 2. Project-based contribution If you can increase the confidence of your sales team when it comes to competitors, you can infer that it will positively impact your competitive win rate. So every 6 month, I send a survey to my entire sales team and ask them to fill it out. Here's what it looks like: 1. Name 2. Team (e.g. XDR, Ac...

Adrienne Joselow

Director of Product Marketing, HubSpot • December 1

Competitive win rate! This requires reps to record (and for your CRM to have a field for) competitor (existing -rip and replace - or exploring - head to head). This is the most direct way to see if you are moving the needle against your core competitors. Secondary metrics may include things like analyst and review site achievement (i.e. G2 ranking) or traffic and search relevance for comparrison pages (i.e. a competitive landing page). This answer is highly dependent on which data exists in your CRM - if competitor is not trackable, secondary metrics are a good proxy / directional indicator.

Product Marketing

As a PMM charged with balancing both self-serve and enterprise customers of the same product, what are the nuances between the two?

2 answers

Head of Growth Marketing, Clockwise • July 29

Great question—thanks for asking! One thing to get out of the way first: Most products will have both users and buyers and those users and buyers can live across self-serve and enterprise. Users: Individuals that get value from your product (either actively or passively) but don’t have the power or need to purchase. Buyers: Get value from your product and also have the power to purchase–buyers can exist both in self-serve and enterprise plans. Now to get into the nuances… Customers, no matter whether they live in self-serve or enterprise, need to be led to value in your product, i...

Jenna Crane

Senior Director of Product Marketing, Klaviyo | Formerly Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • October 17

I know this situation well; it's the same here at Klaviyo! First, you need to understand the composition of both audiences. Are the self-serve customers smaller businesses that don't need to talk to sales to feel comfortable using the product? Are at least some of them actually enterprise customers poking around in the product before they talk to sales? Is this a product-led company that makes it easy for end users at enterprise companies to self-serve? Maybe a combination of the above? With that in mind, there are some core differences and some potential differences. The core d...

Product Marketing

What do self-serve product marketers spend their time doing, given that they don't have sales enablement responsibilities?

Where does all that time get repurposed in self-serve PMM? What are some of the big categories of work where you over-invest in self-serve vs. traditional B2B PMM?

6 answers

Christy Roach

Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17

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...

Head of Growth Marketing, Clockwise • July 29

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...

Anna Wiggins

Sr. Director Product Marketing, BlueVine • January 17

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 ...

Claire Maynard

Marketing, Magical • February 8

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...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7

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...

Jenna Crane

Senior Director of Product Marketing, Klaviyo | Formerly Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • October 17

Even in sales-enabled businesses, sales enablement is just one aspect of product marketing responsibilities. The bulk of the work is consistent across both self-serve and sales-enabled product marketing teams, such as: * Owning positioning and launch of new products and features * Building, maintaining, and enabling the company on foundational insights: Messaging, competitive intelligence, customer/buyer journeys, personas, proof points, etc. * Creating content that drives revenue and retention: Website content, webinars, demo videos, etc. * Working with Product to shape the r...

Product Marketing

What are the key differences between enterprise PMM and mid-market?

2 answers

Mandy Schafer

Group Product Marketing Manager- Enterprise, Miro • June 11

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. ...

Liz Gonzalez

Director of Product Marketing - Global Enterprise, Zendesk • August 22

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...

Product Marketing

What can I include in my marketing portfolio to standout from the crowd as a product marketing candidate.

I'm new to Product Marketing. In the interviews that I've done, I am being asked to present a marketing portfolio.

11 answers

Sharadhi (Gadagkar) Patel

Director, Product and Solutions Marketing, Hopin • June 1

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...

Jasmine Anderson Taylor

Senior Director, Product Marketing, Instacart • June 2

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...

Andy Schumeister

Director of Product Marketing, Sourcegraph • June 8

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...

Vice President, Product Marketing, Momentive • June 30

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 ...

Rekha Srivatsan

VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 27

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...

Director of Enterprise Product Marketing, Amplitude • October 5

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.

Mike Berger

VP, Product Marketing, ClickUp | Formerly Momentive, Gainsight, Marketo • November 11

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...

Julien Sauvage

VP, Corporate and Product Marketing, Clari • December 6

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, Ethos Life | Formerly Meta, Microsoft • February 14

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...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7

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 ...

Lisa Dziuba

Head of Product Marketing, LottieFiles | Formerly WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold) • July 29

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).

Product Marketing

How do you drive alignment across the exec team on messaging

16 answers

Ajit Ghuman

Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex, Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com • September 9

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...

April Rassa

Product Marketing, Cohere | Formerly Adobe, Box, Google • September 28

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?...

Aliza Edelstein

Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Brex • December 2

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...

Eric Petitt

Vice President, Marketing, Glassdoor • March 17

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...

Jeff Hardison

Head of Product Marketing, Calendly • August 10

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 ...

Priyanka Srinivasan

Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • August 22

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...

Leandro Margulis

Head of Product Marketing, Prove • September 7

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.

Lauren Craigie

Director of Product Marketing, dbt Labs • September 14

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...

Head of Product Marketing, Core Product, Gusto • September 30

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 ...

Director of Enterprise Product Marketing, Amplitude • October 5

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.

Malli Vangala

Sr. Director, Security Product Marketing, Microsoft • October 5

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...

Rahul Chhabria

Director of Product Marketing, Sentry • October 6

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...

Christiana Rattazzi

VP, Industry & Solutions Marketing, Okta • November 1

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 ...

Chris Glanzman

Director of Product Marketing & Demand Generation, ESO | Formerly Fortive • November 2

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...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7

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...

Tracy Montour

Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 28

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.

Product Marketing

How would you approach this product marketing interview assignment?

I interviewed earlier this year and did well except for this assignment. I'm hoping to better prepare for similar situations. Here's the quest: As mentioned, the next part of this process is to complete a brief assignment. The purpose of this assignment is just to see your methodology get some insight into your approach to tasks. For this assignment, I'd like for you to create a high-level go-to-market plan and strategy for our flagship product our event marketing platform. Our company traditionally has targeted enterprise b2b companies. I'd like you to come up with high-level messaging, define who the target audience is, and then detail your strategy for informing the market about our event platform and getting more leads. Please identify which channels you would use, and what you would need for this go-to-market launch. Please keep your response under 2 pages

7 answers

Vice President, Product Marketing, Momentive • June 30

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...

Grant Shirk

Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • July 6

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...

Zachary Reiss-Davis

Head of Industry/Audience Marketing; Director of Product Marketing, Procore Technologies • July 13

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 ...

Rekha Srivatsan

VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 26

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 ...

Jeff Hardison

Head of Product Marketing, Calendly • August 10

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, Amplitude • October 5

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...

Tracy Montour

Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 28

I often find these assignments are about your approach to problem solving, positioning, and alignment rather than the work you actually produce. This is how I evaluate candidates. To me, it's all about their approach, rather than their output. You can't be expected to be an expert on the product or target audience before you even join an organization. I would recommend "showing your work" and helping the interviewing team understand your approach, as well as how you would measure success if you were to join the team.

Product Marketing

What should I include in my product marketing budget?

I already have things like Customer Visits, a Sales Enablement / Content Management tool, SKO, pricing model consulting.

8 answers

Director of Enterprise Product Marketing, Amplitude • November 12

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.

Grant Shirk

Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • July 6

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 ...

Liz Tassey (she/her)

VP of Marketing, Blueocean.ai • July 8

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...

Rajendran Nair

Vice President Product Marketing, Medallia • July 20

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...

Rekha Srivatsan

VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 26

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...

Akshay Kerkar

Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform, Atlassian • August 4

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 :)

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7

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 ...

Molly Friederich

Director of Product Marketing, SnorkelAI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • May 25

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.

Product Marketing

It seems like people in product marketing come from all different departments, yet it can be hard to interview & make that functional transfer breaking into product marketing. What tips would you share with someone who is looking to breaking into product marketing?

2 answers

Rekha Srivatsan

VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 26

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...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7

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).

Product Marketing

I've been working as Project Manager for Marketing Operations for almost 3 years now,I want to break into Product Marketing Management,is it possible, and if so how can a pivot and what skill sets from my current career translate well within the role

2 answers

Rekha Srivatsan

VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 27

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...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7

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...