Product Marketing Stakeholders

PMM is a highly collaborative role and I've found that if you define a DACI model: Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed, you can help remove some of that ambiguity upfront. A single approver (likely the CMO in this case) can broker any debates in order to make timely decisions. Then if someone in Marketing (be it PMM or Creative) is the single driver of brand, when UX/design is clearly identified as a contributor, they not only have a voice in the decision, but are executors of the brand strategy as well. That sense of shared ownership in the process goes a long way to fostering a s...

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

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

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

In my opinion the effectiveness of sales enablement should be measured by reducing the customer acquisition costs over time and reducing the time it takes to close a deal. Having these in-process KPIs that you can track month over month will help you demonstrate how your enablement activities are helping sellers meet their quotas. 

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

I think there's a similar question above on measuring KPIs. Please refer to it. But essentially I'll look at 2 parts  1. Whether sales has received the information * Attendance rates, Tests/Quizzes to capture main points, engagement rates during the training, feedback post the training and % of sales force trained 2. Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer * Adoption of product/recommendation  * Revenue growth attributed to the product  * No. of clients pitch to * Higher win-rates

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

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

Create a quiz or set up role playing for your sales team on their understanding of the product features, capabilities and messaging. When you set aside time to observe how your sales teams are understanding and consuming your sales enablement, you create a better relationship with the team, and know which reps may need more help in what areas. By watching how well the reps could talk through the key messages in a role play, or through their quiz answers, I know what was working and what wasn’t.

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

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

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

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

As an industry marketer I am mostly concerned around the sales cycle, ASP, win rate, content performance, and rep productivity. Good enablement, marketing, and content, should shorten sales cycles and drive how things are leveraged ie case studies, whitepapers, solution briefs, and blogs.   Often times good enablement will measure these variables continuously on a rolling basis and will work closely with industry and product marketers in understanding training gaps.

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

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

In establishing segments, it is critical to get cross-org alignment so that all functions are working off of the same definitions. Methodologies for defining segments can vary depending on how you plan to use them, so I would recommend investing heavily in the upfront phase of gathering requirements from all internal customers, establishing a shared understanding of how your segmentation will be used and getting buy-in on the methodology.   From there, research on the needs of those segments can take various forms depending on the type of question you are seeking to answer. I always start...

One thing worth adding to Laura's great reply is that "systematically influencing the product roadmap" can be viewed as an ongoing process. Once you have a set of segments and persona needs per Laura's playbook above, it's important to regularly reinforce this as the "single source of truth." As a critical internal product evangelizer and voice of the customer, it'll be on you to keep beating the drum. Two specific examples of what this can look like in action: * During quarterly/annual roadmap planning sessions, point out where the group's thinking does/doesn't align well to the ne...

There are a variety of low touch and high touch research methods we've used over time. Most recently what's been on my mind has been the value of Closed Won/Lost interviews for earlier stage products.  As companies scale they're likely to have existing products that have been in the market for a while (I think of these as graduate students or grown ups depending on how mature they are) and others that are new kids on the block (I think of these as toddlers or preschool children). Each of these requires a different degree and type of attention to make it successful. We've recently laun...

Research has to be an ongoing, continual process -- if you aren't continually talking to market experts, customers, and prospects, you lose credibility both with your sales organization and with your product organization.  True standardization is less critical than repetition and at-bats, and building the muscles to produce high quality results quickly. If you can do that well, you'll have earned a seat that the product leadership table to influence roadmap because it won't be "so-and-so the product marketer said so", but "this specific market research said so, and here's five quotes ...

During roadmapping, each product team articulates the "understand needs" for their product area and what we will do with the information to improve the product. This process is often led by the PMM.  From there, we work with the product team to document hypothesis to test based on information we need to know and detail the best approach to prove of disprove those hypothesis.  At that point, it's all about execution and pulling together what we learn in a compelling way.   With regard to systematically influencing roadmaps, I feel like this is an "always on" job. First, I try to bring the...

We establish multiple listening channels ranging from our field to direct customer conversations to engagements with analysts. The insights we receive from these channels allow us to then identify the general areas of opportunity which we then partner with engineering on researching further through qualitative and quantitative research. This allows us to priortize the highest areas of opportunity which get added to the product roadmap.  

It first starts with identifying who your target buyers are, and building a set of “persona packs” that establish a baseline of key information in understanding buyer needs and evaluation criteria. This is critical to have so that you can properly educate your sales teams to have more effective conversations with prospects. At a high level, they include: * Distinct buying roles that exist within an organization * Desired business outcomes driven by each role * Sample org charts within each function * Your products/solutions related to their business goals and objectives * Key customer...

You must first:  * Identify overall approach for alignment with brand and company priorities * Identify primary target segments for programs * Determine program-specific messaging * Communicate plans to stakeholders From there an Industry marketer must then define: * New market opportunities  * Define overall messaging & positioning & personas * Win / Loss analysis * Market segmentation and sizing * Competitive intel gathering + analysis From there you then execute on the measurement and reporting:  *  Training: Messaging by solution and sub-audience *  Messaging: Messaging ...

This one depends on company stage and maturity of the market.  At Cisco, we're incredibly mature, and I'm very fortunate to work alongside Sophia Danvers and her amazing Audience Marketing team. They eat industry intel for breakfast and turn it into not just persona insights, but messaging, content, and campaign ideas that keep our top industries growing, even 15 years later.  In earlier stages, this process is a lot more ad hoc, and really depends on how much time you can spend with customers and sales. When you're building, it's less a formal process than it is a habit or a practice...

The short answer is it depends. Let me explain...  Product Marketer in my opinion is like the CEO of a product. Just like a CEO, has to do whatever it takes to make the company (in this case product) successful. And should be measured on what is relevant and what matters in that specific year.  A PMMs OKRs depend on - What is the stage of the product lifecycle? Do you own all of product marketing or a specific PMM function? What are the business goals and objectives this year? So on and so forth.  Stage of product lifecycle If you are working on an early stage product, then perhap...

The short answer is it depends.  No, I am not being evasive. Let me explain...  Product Marketer in my opinion is like the CEO of a product. Just like a CEO, has to do whatever it takes to make the company (in this case product) successful. And should be measured on what is relevant and what matters in that specific year.  A PMMs OKRs depend on - What is the stage of the product lifecycle? Do you own all of product marketing or a specific PMM function? What are the business goals and objectives this year? So on and so forth.  Stage of product lifecycle If you are working on an ...

The short answer is it depends. Let me explain...  A product marketer, in my opinion, is like the CEO of a product. And just like a CEO, has to do whatever it takes to make the company (in this case product) successful. Hence, she/he should be measured on what is relevant and what matters in that specific year as well.  A PMMs OKRs depend on - What is the stage of the product lifecycle? Do you own all of product marketing or a specific PMM function? What are the business goals and objectives this year? So on and so forth.  Stage of product lifecycle If you are working on an early ...

Tricky question! To be honest, OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) are HIGHLY context- and business-specific, so there isn't such thing as "good OKRs for Product Marketing" in the abstract. You should be aligning PMM OKRs to the OKRs at the company level. And keep in mind that they are all about business transformation, not keeping the lights on. So they will involve stretch goals and should intersect and overlap with the OKRs of other teams across the org, not be strictly unique. On the other hand, there are plenty of good KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for PMM to track. For B2B and SaaS...

Product Marketing is about product and sales success so your OKRs should align with company, CMO and product OKRs. However, I think these 3 serve as a good  "PMM OKR template" 1. Build a POV and become the hub of market intelligence: Think of this as all PMM programs: Competitive intel, Voice of Customer, Analyst Relations,  2. Bridge the gap between product and sales: Product launches, sales enablement, technical and release marketing, Roadmaps, CABs 3. Win in your core market: Your ranking, Customer advocacy, SOV, Content hubs, Thought leadership, Pipegen, ACV, Website 

OKRs are really important to keeping teams focused on driving the most impact for the company. At a Product Marketing OKR level, it often depends on what the company goals are for that particular time period. If the company is going after a new market or focusing on customer retention, that's going to influence what a PMM's KR will be. Second, I think it's importnt to set a KR that you have direct influence or impact on. Sometimes, PMMs at Lyft share KRs with PMs, but ideally, there is a sub-KR that indicates whether a PMM's investment of resources is succeeding at supporting the overall...

Product Marketing OKRs are really important to keeping teams focused on driving the most impact for the company. At a Product Marketing OKR level, it often depends on what the company goals are for that particular time period. If the company is going after a new market or focusing on customer retention, that's going to influence what a PMM's KR will be. Second, I think it's importnt to set a KR that you have direct influence or impact on. Sometimes, PMMs at Lyft share KRs with PMs, but ideally, there is a sub-KR that indicates whether a PMM's investment of resources is succeeding at supp...

In general, product marketing OKRs can become quite vague and hard to measure. However, the product marketing OKRs I’ve seen that are easier to measure are: 1) Successful and ontime product launches. This means the product launch was able to happen on time with all cross functional teams trained up prior to the product launch so there were no surprises. 2) Completed messaging maps/documents for a target segment or new feature. 3) Completed research around target customer segments and who to go after next. 4) Updated pricing model or structure for new features.

If you are looking for key Product Marketing metrics to determine success, here are some ideas: * For a mature product: new users, adoption (usage), active users, daily active users, monthly active users, retention, net retention, pipeline, revenue, deal size, win rate, close rate, velocity * For a very immature product: # of early customers, # of customer demos, # of trial signups, adoption (usage) * For going after a new buyer: # of new relevant titles added to the database, # of wins in a new vertical The key is to determine what the objective is given where the product ...

Good Product Marketing OKRs really depend on the business and what the company is trying to achieve. For example, if there's no unified launch process, you may set an objective to develop a launch program. Or another example: you're starting to lose deals to a specific competitor. You may kick off a competitive program to mitigate losses on competitive deals. It really depends on the business. For product launches: * Did I reach my intended audience for this launch? How many people engaged with our launch materials? Read the blog post? Watched the video? Engaged with the landing pa...

Great question! I think about this one a lot...First off, it’s important to callout that there is no perfect org structure :)  In general, you have to identify what you’re optimizing towards and what structure will give you the highest chance to get there. For Eats PMM, we’ve always kept a fairly tight PMM to PM relationship, so we map PMMs directly to their Product counterparts.  Product is broken down by audience - ie., Consumer, Restaurant, Delivery Person so we have leads within each audience and typically, sub-groups within that focus on either Growth (getting users from 0 → 1 tr...

This all comes down to how is the rest of the business organized. If you're organizing in a way that's incongrous to everyone else in the org, you will not be setup for success. With smaller nimble teams it's likely just based on bandwith and who has room to take things on. With larger teams, or as a team is being built out, it's best to align with your core cross-functional partners such as Product. There is usually overlap with PMMs working with 2-3 PMs. I've organized teams by product area in the past which aligned well to how Product was organized. 

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 ...

The structure of the PMM team is usually a function of the size of the company and it’s GTM model. The “typical” SaaS PMM team has a set of Core PMMs that are focused on product, and usually a sister PMM team in the form of Industry/Solutions Marketing that is focused on solutions for specific verticals or segments. At Atlassian, since we have a flywheel model, PMMs have a lot more focus on activities that deal with acquisition (self-serve), cross-sell, and upsell. So while our PMM teams are organized by product (e.g. Jira, Confluence, etc.) individual PMMs on a product team can focus on c...

The PMM team structure depends on the size of the company, how technical the product is, and the GTM model. * Company Size: As the company grows and scales, PMM tends to fall under the Marketing org and they may segmented by Core Product PMMs where they focus on the overall messaging and positioning, Industry/Solution PMMs that focus use cases for those specific industries ,and solution areas, and there may be PMMs that will focus solely on sales enablement, competitive intelligence, or pricing. For smaller companies, PMM teams will play a more 'full stack' PMM role. For...

Our team is structured by audience type and discipline. We have one part of the team focused on our end users and prospects, another part of the team is focused on our partners, and a third on market research and market strategy. That said, I strongly believe it's important for PMM teams at hypergrowth companies to be nimble in terms of their structure and be willing to redefine roles and responsibilities as company strategy and the needs of the business shift over time.

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to consider new roles based on mapping skills to company needs. If the largest TAM is in a vertical that is specialized, perhaps you'll need an industry PMM. If the biggest gap in company need is relative to product launch materials, maybe you need someone focused on building a great bill of materials. Etc. 

I've done it in so many different ways! Few quick pointers:  * The most important thing is to ensure every team member has a good swim lane and growth path.  * Take your revenue goal and slice that evenly across the team to see what makes the most sense — product line, segment, or objective.  * If you have a big product organization, try aligning your team with leaders. This will help you ensure PM-PMM alignment for a stronger product strategy.  * If you have several SKUs/product lines, it might be worthwhile to have a person or a team dedicated to overall messaging and nar...

I author a Product Marketing Playbook at the start of each year and use it in every interaction with my team, peers, and executive leaders. It clearly lays out what Product Marketing does for the business and more importantly, what we don't do. That extra step is really important because our discipline is still widely misunderstood. We cannot assume that everyone knows what Product Marketers do, so the best advice I've ever received is to tell your stakeholders in no uncertain terms what you're focused on, how you can help them, and what value you're bringing to the table. I develop my annu...

One of the best alignment tools we rolled out in the last two years was a messaging source document. This document includes overview / background on the market, description of the thing we are launching or marketing, details of the audience and related personas, etc. This document can be used by various teams and is owned and kept up to date by product marketing.

A variety of tools can be helpful in getting stakeholders aligned on the marketing strategy – the key to them all is that they are based on data and customer insights. When you are articulating your strategy, provide links to supporting research, personas, shopper journey’s, etc. These should articulate who your target customers are, what they care most about, how to influence them during the purchase or upsell process, and how they interact with your product. By highlighting the key takeaways and linking to deeper dives, you have handy tools right at your fingertips to resolve differences ...

I find that the development of a Go-to-Market Playbook is a really good exercise. While it may feel antiquated in a digital world, writing down your positioning statement, value proposition, unique selling position, personas, competitors, ideal customer profile, competitors, customer stories, and buyer journey maps allows you to facilitate conversations throughout the business. It's likely that other groups in your business are working on pieces of these things but only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the PRODUCT and of the MARKET, and without that context, those teams are likel...

If you say yes to everything, there's no way you're giong to avoid burnout. Be guided by your OKRs. If nobody set OKRs for you, set them for yourselfand align on them with leadership from Sales, Product, and Marketing. Help them understand that you have to say no to protect your yes. And let them know that everytime you request something, you have to give up something else. If they are part of the prioritization process, they are likely to defend your decisions to others.

It's hard and it's an area I am still working through. So much is asked of PMM and there's a natural desire as a connecting function to say "yes" to everything so in order to prove our value. The reality is if everything is important, nothing is important, so a Product Marketing superpower to develop is one that can gauge and asses what projects and deliverables will drive the most impact for the business, and prioritize accordingly. Having executive leadership partner with Product Marketing on this is helpful, and what they'll need to prioritize decisions is the end-to-end view of what's h...

I think that depends on your company goals. At HoneyBook we've identified a specific segment that has the best product-market fit, so we're solely focusing on that segment. Therefore it makes more sense for us to split the work by feature (product line) and by user lifecycle stage. But I think that what's most important is to understand what are your company's priorities and organize your team in a way that supports those priorities. If you work for a startup, these may change year over year, so you have to stay flexible.

I've seen organizational structures of all types over the last 10 years and have grown to appreciate a function with clear roles and responsibilities. The most common configuration (and the one I've had the most success with) is where I can have a leader for Core Solutions (your revenue generating products and SKUs), a leader looking after the Portfolio (someone who thinks about how to bring the portfolio to different audiences), a leader looking after Pricing and Packaging (who can work with your finance, product, and revenue teams to maximize profitability), a leader looking after Compete...

Friction with stakeholders definitely comes with our jobs. While it can be stressful, frustrating and evening maddening, ultimately I think it also makes us better PMMs. That's my biggest suggestion for how to approach these situations. Ask yourself what can you learn from their pushback? A few years ago I had a sales leader tell me on sales leadership meeting that our play for a specific competitor was completely broken and he was instructing his team not run it anymore. Obviously having this brought up in front of a group sales leaders is about as unideal of a situation as I can imagine,...

So much of Product Marketing is about information and invisible influence. The challenge is that while Product Marketing doesn't own Product, Marketing, Sales, or Services - we are expected to serve these teams with equal rigor and depth. It's what makes our function both fun and challenging, and there is no shortage of stakeholders to manage at any one given moment. As best as possible, you need to be diplomatic.  I've learned that so much about relationship management is about setting clear and specific expectations about what you will do and what you won't do. Unspoken expectations ar...