I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge
specifically is around balance.
A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND
What you can control?
This requires leadership buy-in from multiple groups — ideally they would
understand Marketing and Product Marketing (this is not always the case!)
Based on Your Goals, I would then identify metrics. Some examples below:
* GTM / Revenue Initiatives —> Before and After Analysis (ideally based on
something specific)
* Content —> Content Metrics
* Support —> NPS
Product Marketing Stakeholders
11 answers
VP of Marketing, Spekit • January 17
Hopefully I don't make this answer overly complex.
I think the more important question here is what are you actively working on?
Because product marketing can cover such a wide variety of activities and
tactics, we can't exactly tell you which metrics would be important.
Greg Hollander and Derek Pando both had great insights to share when they spoke
on a panel about the topic of prioritization in product marketing. The key
takeaway there is to know what the greater organizational goals are, and align
yourself where it makes the most sense for the impact you can have.
Example:
Your company has great awareness and lots of leads, but isn't closing enough
deals. In this case, there are lots of different factors that could be
contributing to the funnel leak (people entering but falling out). As a product
marketer it may fall to you to understand why this is happening and address the
problem.
For the sake of simplicity, let's say that you have great demo show rates but
don't convert these into customers at the rate that you think you should be.
Assuming that the prospect knows your pricing and terms ahead of time, this
likely points to your demos being bad. Bad could mean a lot of things so it will
require further analysis.
Are your sales people doing enough discovery? Are they talking about things that
actually matter to the prospect or are they just reciting from a script?
In this fantasy scenario, with the information that you've been given, it's
probably fair to assume that a good metric for you to track would be increase in
conversion rate.
General Partner, Unusual Ventures • January 22
Definitely echo the fact that Product marketing KPIs need to keep evolving with
the focus that the organization currently has.
At Amplitude, we have come up with some strong *impact* metrics that the PMM
function owns. Each metric is shared with a different team in the org:
* Product Launches: # of deals closed where we had atleast 1 newly launched
product add ons/packages purchased by customers. Our stretch goal for Q1 this
year is 50% of all deals. Sidenote: this is a shared metric with the Product
team and incentivizes them to work very closely with PMMs
* Thought Leadership: # of opportunities influenced by original (often gated)
content from the Product Marketing team. Shared metric with Marketing
* Enablement: ACV and Win Rate - this is shared with the Sales & team and is a
longer term, strategic metric. But in the near term, we track strategic deals
with specific account-based interventions that the PMM function is making and
their win rate
Would love to hear reactions to our frameworks from PMMs out there!
Chief Marketing Officer, Crayon • December 20
Agreed with the other answers about aligning impact with focus areas for the
business as a whole. Though I also like to have some consistent metrics to be
able to see some longer term trends.
There's a separate thread here that dives into PMM metrics:
https://sharebird.com/are-there-any-broad-metrics-you-guys-track-as-pmms
Some good points there about the combination of quantitative and qualitative
metrics, and even quantifying some of that qualitative feedback.
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Highspot • January 24
Full disclosure - I work for Highspot - but we do use our own platforrm and one
of the benefits of it is that we can see usage and buyer enagement analytics for
all of the content we create.
It's a quick and easy way for us to determine what's working, what is being used
(or valued) the most and also connect content performance with CRM data to
understand how content is driving sales velocity, conversion, and quota
performance.
Co-founder & CEO, Chameleon • February 4
Curious to know if there are any metrics that the Product Marketing function is
accountable for any metrics?
I know there is such a wide variety of jobs that Product Marketers do, but for
example, if trial conversion or adoption purely owned by the Product Marketing
function, or are all the metrics shared with other teams?
That's a great question. It depends a lot on the product of course. There are
some products that lend itself to a soft launch before we put any marketing
effort behind it in which case quantifying marketing impact is pretty
straightforward.
More generally, I'm a fan of PMM and PM co-owning several metrics. You can't
parse which side drove what share of the metric but if you have a good
partnership that shouldn't matter. And having that lens means a PMM should care
deeply about whether we're bringing the right product to market (or what could
we do to make it more successful). And conversely that means the PM should care
if we're positioning the product in a way they feel like can make the product
long term successful. The end goal is the product generally speaking hits its
OKR which should be the north star anyhow.
Chief Growth Officer, Verifiable • March 26
Recently PMM has been very involved with top-of-funnel marketing and campaigns,
so a lot of the typical metrics you might suspect in a campaign are ways we
measure success for these (Leads, MQLs, MQL>Opp conversion, Opportunities
generated).
For more middle & bottom of funnel content - we use a tool called Pathfactory
(content tracks of content) that allow for visibility into what content is being
sent out by sales, what is getting viewed, how much time spent on assets, and
having this link in with opportunities influenced in Salesforce, which gives us
a sense of revenue impact.
Separately, this quarter, we're focused heavily on partnering with Sales
Enablement to impact a very particular layer of the sales funnel where we were
seeing the highest levels of drop-off (early discovery/pain). In focusing on
this, we're working on additional tooling in SFDC to capture what is impactable
vs non-impactable reasons (impactable by SE/PMM training). Once breaking out the
impactable %, we're focusing our efforts this quarter on
activities/trainings/content that supports for early "Why Change" opening
perspective messaging (via slides or whiteboard), additional discovery
training/questions refinement, and a revised First Call Deck that provides more
wide-angle messaging beyond product features (cliche, but check out Andy Raskin
on Medium). The goal here is to zoom in on an early-stage in the Sales cycle
where we're experiencing dropoff and seeing opportunity and measure the
imporvement we're able to have here through a quantifiable metric.
Director of Product Marketing, Sourcegraph • June 4
While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing,
my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen,
or product depending on what you're working on. Ideally, you'll have explicitly
shared goals with one or more of the cross-functional teams you're working with.
This ensures everybody is optimizing for the same outcome. For a new product
launch, I'll typically have a shared adoption goal with product and/or an attach
rate goal (percentage of customers using the product/feature) with sales.
I'd also caution against only prioritizing work that can easily be attributed to
ROI. Product marketing is responsible for driving a lot of initiatives (naming
products, customer research, market research, etc.) that don't have an
immediately measurable impact on leads or pipeline - but that work is still
important.
Senior Director Product Marketing, Homebase • October 11
The question comes up a lot in product marketing. It is particularly challenging
when you are in a product marketing role or on projects that lean heavy into
influence or when your organization is stacked with channel owners. Simply put-
there is no one metric that suits all product marketing.
That said, at the outset of any project, it is critical to discuss what the
hypothesis or goal of the work is and how you intend to measure the success of
the outcome. Since product marketing is cross functional, I'd look to align
goals and outcomes around known or proxy metrics and I'd urge communication-
consistently + often around them.
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Klue • January 1
1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate
Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in
your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win
rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with
competitive content is driving you win rates up.
2. Influenced deals
Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating
custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help
on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM
so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an
additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are
influencing revenue.
3. Sales confidence
Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their
confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive
enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging.
4. New product revenue
If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during
the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch.
A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your
team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of
that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that
your team is killing it.
7 answers
At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core
product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This
positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many
other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these
other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro”
that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample
demo from a sales rep. This is just one example, but we typically carry this
across departments to ensure messaging stays consistent.
Vice President Product Marketing / GTM, Wrike • April 9
Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products,
features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the
messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals
including product management and other marketers like communications/brand,
demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a
final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of
individual reps and saleas managers) and finally with sales/revenue
leadership.
We then roll-out at one of our weekly or bi-weekly all sales meetings and/or
share at the team lead meetings for more in depth Q&A and objection handling.
Typically, the messaging guide comes with supporting customer facing slides,
talk tracks, etc. We re-inforce through an on-line learning tool to make sure
folks internalize the messaging.
Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Heap • June 9
I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for
messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I
work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our
differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source
messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see
these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our
story. Other marketing teams extend that messaging into demand gen campaigns,
and our Sales teams pick up our pitch decks and marketing collateral to present
to prospects. Ensuring commercial team alignment is tricky because it's
fundamentally about dissemination (Confluence, newsletters, G-Drive, etc),
training (both live and on-demand), and repetition (going on sales calls and
using it over and over again). Messaging guides are a critical product marketing
deliverable - they are foundational -- but a series of hands-on training and
reinforcement on a per-deal-level are required to get a larger organization
on-board.
Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • August 22
In my view, the whole point of messaging guides is that they are shared as
widely and as openly in your organization as possible. We actually keep a
"launch tracker" document (google sheets file) that has the latest on every
launch we're planning. This document is publicly available and very widely
distributed. We link to the positioning guide for the new product or set of
features there. In addition, we've built really strong relationships with
counterparts in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, so we are regularly
communicating across a wide number of forums (team trainings, slack channels, in
person meetings with leadership, etc) and share or point to key documents like
messaging guides in these meetings. Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no
'silver bullet' to communicating to large audiences - having lots of channels
and repetition is really key.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is having your messaging guide be a
format that is really easily digestible. We use a format that actually
summarizes the goal of the campaign or launch really nicely upfront, then gets
into the messaging, and towards the bottom goes into more of the nitty gritty
research on the market, trends, competition, etc. We've gotten good feedback
that the format is pretty easy to consume, and I think that goes a long way in
getting the message out there.
Vice President of Product Marketing, Workato • September 28
One thing I try not to do is share content or messaging without walking the
person I want to get feedback from through the context and purpose live on a
call/zoom. Sending something over for feedback without the right context can be
disastrous...especially if they share with others and expand any
confusion/dissent to others.
I will typically walk them through a google slide or doc with what we're trying
to move towards and then offer them the opportunity to provide feedback live or
in the doc once they've had some time to think about it.
Always try to prove why the messaging you're recommending is the right approach
with proof points...these can be based on surveys, customer/analyst feedback,
A/B or some testing framework, market movement, etc.
If your internal teams see the context for why you're moving in a specific
direction and the proof points that support what you're trying to do then it
will go a long way in getting their support/alignment.
What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to
gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have
shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really
starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opinions works
well. If you are adding value to something that already exists, have 1:few
meetings to get specific feedback on voice, tone, choice of words, etc. Then,
share it more broadly at a team meeting. Then share it with all leaders in Rev
org. Then share it with C-level, backing up how much consensus you’ve already
built and the alignment that’s been established.
Director of Product Marketing & Lifecycle Marketing, Loom • December 2
We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is
to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging
guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks
through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms
in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more
than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding
material. We have a system to ensure everyone consumes the content.
How does this inform your core messaging, how do you enable sales to understand what makes you different/better, how do you know if it's working with your target buyers?
11 answers
VP of Marketing, NetSpring • December 9
There are many stakeholders when it comes to competitive intelligence and
aligning messaging and product strategy with competitive differentiation. I have
found an effective model where PMM is the the driver, although any of the
contributors could also drive. Regardless, it is a joint effort across at least
PMM, PM, Presales and Sales Enablement (some larger enterprises like IBM have
dedicated, centralized competitive program offices).
As the driver, PMM can focus on arming the sales team with up-to-date tools
(e.g. battle cards) to win, ensuring marketing can land us in competitive
evaluations, and ensuring the roadmap continues to reinforce our competitive
differention.
Head of Product Marketing, Ramp | Formerly Zendesk, ThoughtSpot, Oracle • June 22
Ideally, your brand positioning pillars are unique enough individually or in
combination with each other that competitive positioning is baked in.
Effectively enabling sales is about educating them on the landscape and
competitive buckets (read answer above re: putting all your competitors into
distinct categories you can more generically position against).
Then when it comes to your Tier 1 competitors, it's all about training the sales
team and making battlecard content super easy to find. Bring the energy, show
them a side-by-side demo if you can to give them confidence, and personalize
your competitive differentiation for each sales role (e.g. SDRs need a
one-liner, Senior AEs may need you to explain product differentiators). That,
combined with compelling assets, is a winning strategy.
You can measure effectiveness of competitive positioning at different stages of
the funnel. For example, if you have competitive landing pages you could A/B
test messaging changes to see if there's a lift in conversion. Further
down-funnel (this takes more time), you can do before-and-after analysis of
competitive win/loss rates.
I believe competitive research should always be part of the process when you
develop your core messaging, but it’s important to not get too hung up on your
competitors, you can easily lose sight of what your own customers care about.
(Also, who is to say that their messaging is better than others?)
I usually build a competitive positioning matrix where I will have at least 2
rows for each competitor: “We help you”, and “so you can” (But use what version
works best for you)--- and then go through competitor websites/content/materials
to gather what statements they use to answer each of those. This helps to look
at your competitors’ positioning in a more uniform way. Then add a column for
your company and your own statements - and in the simplest, easiest way this
should give you an idea of how you differentiate at a high level.
Enabling sales on competitive intel is a whole topic on its own, but here are a
few tips on how to do it effectively:
* Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point
people to.
* Share the links, and share it again, and again over time.
* Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep
detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into something more specific).
This can be in the form of battle cards or simple FAQs that you can publish
internally
* There are certain tools that allow you to publish information like this
within platforms like SFDC or slack - where people already look for
information
* Create short videos and see if people find it easier to listen than read
* It’s not always enough to just create these materials. It often helps to do
regular competitive readouts with the sales team so you can have a more
interactive conversation and help answer specific questions.
And here are few tips on how to test if it's resonating with your buyers
* Run test campaigns against your control messaging across different marketing
channels to see how it performs (Paid, Social, Email, website A/B tests,
Sales pitches, etc.)
* Talk to your sales team, run pilots, listen to gong calls, sit in on sales
calls, etc.
* Test in-product messaging
* Run quantitative studies, interviews, focus groups, etc
* Test it with analysts.
Director of Product Marketing, Culture Amp • September 21
Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and
value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and
customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be
clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive
differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research,
analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and
really hone in on determining 1) What pain points are you solving for your
buyers and 2) What makes you the "only" one? (see onlyness test here )
A couple ways to know if your messaging and value proposition is landing with
your buyers
1. Market research messaging testing
2. A/B Test is through marketing channels (paid, email, website)
3. A/B Test it with SDRS in their outreach sequences
4. Present it to your customer advisory board (or similar) to see if it
resonates
5. Test it with Analysts
Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Productboard • December 14
Competitive differentiation is what forms your positioning and what you build
your messaging around. With how crowded every market category is now its
essential to nail your differentiation and then communicate it through your
messaging and the rest of the go-to-market.
Enabling sales effectively requires making the competitive information
actionable and easily digestible. Whether you’re creating battlecards, sharing
competitive updates in Slack, or leading a competitive play sales training
distill it down to the key points and bring it to life with examples with what
worked in deals.
Finally to test if your messaging is resonating you can:
* Test copy across competitive campaigns and landing pages
* Look at competitive win rates before and after competitive enablement
* Sit in on sales call or listen to call recordings to see how competitive
messaging points are resonating
* Ask industry analysts for feedback
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco Meraki | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 13
The answer here is in the question. My approach to differentiation starts with
understanding why the product or service you're responsible is uniquely suited
to a specific customer. And then focus on what makes you great, not what makes
others less good.
Too many companies (including a few I've worked with) focus too much on the
question of "how do we compete against X competitor?" This creates a
backwards-looking mentality and you're always in reactive mode. I will say it's
my favorite thing to compete against someone who's more concerned about me than
I am about them... they can chase my message all day, and all I have to do is
worry about making customers wildly successful. Way more fun.
How do you know if it's working? If sales are up, win rates are strong, average
deal size is up, and the competition is starting to talk about you more? It's
working.
Vice President, Product Marketing, AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart • July 7
Competitive positioning is a key component of defining core messaging. If we sit
down and come up with copy on how to best describe our offerings, a key step is
to compare that against how competitors describe themselves. You’ll likely be
hit with an unpleasant surprise that about half your copy has already been used
directly or indirectly by competitors. Some words might be well-adapted lexicons
that prospects associate competitors with. Developing your positioning and
messaging without this key insight would lead to bad outcomes.
I always try to find words we can “own” in the prospect’s mind when associating
the value to our products and brand. These words should be unique from the
competitor’s identity and still be aligned with the prospect’s language. We try
to stay away from feature differentiators and focus on how we help customers
solve the problem in a better way.
The most effective forms of training for sales are role play sessions combined
with learning materials as everyone learns and retains information differently.
Salespeople in different segments (SMB, MM, Enterprise) may need different forms
of enablement to drive meaningful results.
Testing your messaging with potential target buyers from interviews or tools
like Wynter is the best way to confirm if your positioning is on-target.
Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this
topic I'd encourage you to read.
But to your question, most will try to differentiate off features. In most cases
this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is
really difficult to truly differentiate in this case.
There are some tactical things you can pursue to drive differentiation:
* Social Proof
* Lean-in to aspects of your solution that customers rave about! I've seen this
be everythign from the sales team/process, to customer support team,
implementation, education, and more. I call all those out just to say it's
important to think outside our product as well.
* Competitive content - while it's tactical, if you have a comparison page it
enables you to tell a story about how your different -- and not just about
features.
* Brand - This is the ultimate differentiation, but it's not an overnight fix.
Consider what's unique about the attributes of your company, and lean-in to
building your brand around that which will give prospects a clear view of
your company.
Beyond the above, it's really about storytelling and messaging. Instead of just
thinking about how your product is different from compeition, think about the
changes your prospects are experecing in their day-to-day and tell a compelling
story around that -- and then educate them on how to win, with your product.
Market Intelligence Lead, Airtable • September 19
Our competitive differentiation is central to our overall company/product
positioning. They're almost the same thing. We have a high-level view of our
position in the market vs other categories of tools, and a deeper view of the
specific capabilities that make us unique.
Enabling sales is a constant function of updating self-serve resources,
delivering training, and sharing major intel. good luck!
VP Global Head of Product Marketing, Shopify • November 15
With messaging, the one thing that I always push my team to think about is
what’s unique to Shopify that no one else can own. Can someone slap their brand
on top and say the same things? If so, the messaging and positioning is not good
enough. We want to ensure that we are sharing what is most valuable to our
business and that no one else can claim.
Vice President of Product Marketing, GitLab • January 31
I have a few lenses that I look through for competitive differentiation:
1. The Positioning Canvas -- I mentioned this in an earlier question, but it's
worth repeating the effectiveness of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome
positioning canvas (must reading for any Product Marketer). With this
methodology, you and your team will go through an exercise of defining
'competitive alternative' -- the task here is to identify what customers would
use if you did not exist AND to look inwards at what unique attributes you have
that your competitors do not. Highly recommend using this as part of your
competitive differentiation exercise.
2. Company Strategy -- Many people think competitive differentiation is limited
to product. It's not. I like to look at competitive differentiation through a
combination of (1) product strategy, (2) GTM strategy, and (3) operational
strategy. Often, you can find -- or create -- differentiation in one or multiple
of these areas. One way I've put it all together is to develop a 'Buyer
Consideration Attribute' map and workshop strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis
competition on the most important attributes. <-- Informed by Blue Ocean
Strategy (another must read)
Once you have a good thesis on competitive differentiation, it's time to
document it and enable as many relevant teams as possible. Not just sales.
Product management and engineering needs these insights to inform their roadmap.
Marketing needs these insights both for messaging strategy and in determining
other GTM elements like channel, audiences, and more. And then, yes, Sales and
customer success needs easy-to-understand and easy-to-take action enablement so
they have 20/20 vision of who they will be up against in deals and so they know
how to navigate conversations....and win deals.
10 answers
Product Marketing, Cohere | Formerly Adobe, Box, Google • April 2
There are probably three major questions to answer when operationalizing a GTM
plan: What is the governance? Meaning who is in charge? What is the division of
labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)?
When do you scale?
There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a
launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes
online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and
across the enterprise. This type of GTM implementation makes sense in a
low-risk, high-resilience situation.
In a test-and-scale model, the innovations come online in pockets and pilots.
Pilot learnings inspire changes to the plan, and the finalized plan is rolled
out in waves. The test-and-scale model makes sense for implementing a
commercialization strategy when external and internal resilience is low. It also
makes sense when resilience is high but risk is also high.
And, last you need a framework.
In either scaling framework, what is the cadence of activities over the course
of the implementation? I've used a 4-step process successfully:
1) Act on the plan
2) Measure the actions’ results
3) Share and discuss the results
4) Adjust the plan
Director of Product Marketing, HubSpot | Formerly Early hire @ Automattic (WordPress.com, WordPress VIP) • April 7
One of the biggest risks of operationalizing a GTM plan is the lack of a common
understanding of the time it takes to do good marketing work, internally.
Marketing shouldn't slow down product; but at the same time, the more time and
advance notice marketing has, the more we're able to enrich, adapt, and
customize a GTM plan appropriately. A GTM playbook is a best-case scenario and a
guideline which has to be adapted rapidly and practically to the lead time
available.
The marketing team for WordPress.com is relatively new (around 5 years old for a
product almost 15 years old), and speed is very important to product development
and serving millions of existing customers. Our engineering teams are pushing to
production several times or even dozens of times a day, and so we have to work
together to make sure we give sufficient time to amplify the great work they're
doing with existing and prospective customers.
Ideally we're involved as soon as it's known the product team is preparing a
feature or change for launch, so we can identify the channels, messaging, and
timing needed to market the work as soon as it's ready to ship to production.
We don't use formal documents like a market requirements document, but I've
documented and communicated top elements of that process the engineering team
should be thinking about when they're preparing a feature for development, and
it's an exercise they can go through at kickoff instead of when the feature is
ready to test or launch. We can partner with them to identify any gaps, or help
answer those questions, and then come up with a realistic GTM strategy with the
time available.
Here's an excerpt of the exercise I shared internally:
We’re building a feature or product to solve a problem or do a job for
customers, and then tell as many of the right customers as possible that we’ve
solved it for them.
- What product or feature is being developed? Focus on user perception and usage
– features, needs, usability, methods of usage. How does it apply to customers
of the entire family of Automattic products?
- Who are the target customers? What user behavior, demographics, or other
attributes do they have? How might they be different? Does this apply to current
or prospective customers, or both? A subset of customers?
- Why are customers likely to want this product/feature? (aka: what problem does
this solve for the user? Why would they ‘hire’ it to do a job?)
- When will the product be available? How much detail can you share about the
timing? Can you include any ballpark dates or checkpoint dates which could be
helpful for those involved to know about?
- Any pricing-related information? Is the feature being added to a plan? Does it
replace a paid feature, lower a plan price, or change the potential revenue from
a sign-up?
Vice President Product Marketing / GTM, Wrike • April 8
I'll answer this from the aspect of a GTM plan for pricing and packaging
changes. The top 3 areas to identify and mitigate risk around include:
1) RISK: Did you get the Price/Packaging right?
* Does the price and what's included in the packaging resonate with the buyer?
* Is the price point in the ball park of what the customer is looking for and
relative to alternative solutions?
MITIGATION PLAN: Get input from customers, prospects, analysts and advisors in
advance of the change and GTM roll-out.
2) RISK: Are your revenue teams (sales, CS, renewals, etc.) properly enabled?
MITIGATION PLAN: Make sure that you have all the mesasging, positioning and
sales tools ready for the teams. Ensure that you have enablement/training time
setup with all the teams. Certify them on the new packaging/pitch/pricing. Makes
sure they are ready for objection handling and questions from customers and
prospects.
3) RISK: Impact to existing customers (vs. net new)
MITIGATION: Map all of your existing customers to new packaging and understand
difference in existing pricing and new pricing. Ensure that you have a plan for
the timing of when existing customers will go to the new packaging? Will they
transition immediately, or wait for renewals? Will you let existing customers
grandfather on the old packaging and/or pricing? Are there contractual
limitations on what you can change?
Product Marketing at Fire TV (Smart TVs), Amazon • April 21
Great question. There could be many reasons why a GTM plan is deemed risky.
Perhaps because a lot is hinging on a product launch, or a risky marketing
campaign and the riskiest of all - you as a PMM are not completely on board with
the product. (The later should not happen but it has happened to many us, I
assume)
IMO, the key is to
1. Over-communicate: Define a DRI, make sure every stakeholder is involved,
follow a decision-making model such as the one I mentioned above (RACI model).
2. Plan plan plan: Have a mitigation plan B ready if your original plan fails,
or perhaps even a Plan C if Plan B fails. For a recent launch campaign we did on
Indiegogo, we had Plan Bs for every major marketing activity.
Head of Product Marketing - Security, Integrations, Mobile, Salesforce • April 4
1. Making assumptions about pricing and not vetting them with sales VERY early
in the process
2. Assuming that its a 'handoff' to sales enablement vs in reality its an
ongoing partnership where PMM needs to lean in quite a bit to help
3. Not factoring in global requirements VERY early on and discovering late in
the game that its not just a 'localization' issue that will handled by the
'local' teams
4. Not factoring in migration or EOL requirements and just focusing on the new,
shiny products. Customers have more heartburn about migrations than
marketers account for. Be ready for that, and factor that heavily into
operationalization
Director of Product Marketing, Matterport • May 3
This is a great question because, as every PMM knows, each launch holds a
surprise hiccup. If you can mitigate as much risk as possible before that time
comes, then you’ll be successful in solving those last minute snafus.
Assuming your marketing brief and GTM plan are finalized and approved, a
successful GTM execution comes down to organization, stakeholder alignment and
(the hardest one!) seeing around corners.
Here are the riskiest components in each of those categories and how to mitigate
that risk:
1. Lack of organization:
* Misaligned plans
* Losing track of documents and creative files
* Overly tight timelines
* Rehashing previous conversations
How to mitigate: Keep a source of truth document (or spreadsheet, my personal
favorite) where you track every single launch component, including status and
timeline, meeting notes, resources, channel plans and assets, launch day tick
tock and more.
2. Missing stakeholder alignment:
* Vague R&R
* Lack of resourcing
* Unclear expectation-setting
How to mitigate: Bring your cross-functional and marketing partners along for
the journey by pulling them in at key strategic milestones when you’re creating
your plan, then holding regular status meetings up until launch through to a
post-mortem.
3. Not seeing around corners:
* Lack of familiarity with the deployment tech
* Broken user journeys
* 11th hour feedback
How to mitigate: This one tends to be company-specific, so ask your colleagues
about unexpected day-of discoveries on previous launches and then prepare for
those specific scenarios. Also, it never hurts to build a buffer into your
timeline and have an extra set of eyes on the creative before it goes out the
door.
Vice President of Product Marketing, GitLab • July 12
Operationalizing a go-to-market strategy is not for the faint of heart. There’s
a lot that happens between writing the doc (see narrative above) or slides and
executing the strategy in the market. Here’s my list of the riskiest elements
and how I solve for them.
First, team alignment. In my experience, aligning the team is the trickiest
element because the amount of stakeholder voices expands seemingly exponentially
the closer you are to launching your GTM activities. This is just as true for
the early stage pre-product market fit startup as it is for the hyper-growth,
more mature company. My solution for this is constant cascading communications.
The job of the Product Marketer is often to ensure that everyone is rowing in
the same direction, so make sure that you are communicating often and bringing
people into the process early.
Like the above question about GTM plan fundamentals, I find that writing out the
GTM plan in narrative form is extremely helpful, both for clarity of thought and
as a handbook for new people joining the GTM process. I also find that
consistent adoption of OKRs is a great way to help ensure the alignment of
activities. Like many companies, we use OKRs at GitLab as a way to align our
team activities with the company strategy and with each other. The process of
creating, debating, calling out dependencies, and tracking progress is, itself,
a way to create clarity on both what we are trying to achieve in our GTM
strategy, how we will accomplish it, and who will take ownership of which roles
and responsibilities.
Second, data data data. A key success factor is ensuring that everyone on the
go-to-market team (marketing, sales, customer success…everyone) is using the
same data, is following the same KPIs, and is looking at the same dashboards.
Third, the market is not a constant – just as you are evolving and
operationalizing your GTM, so are your competitors. It’s like when you look at a
star in the sky, you are really seeing the light that emanated in the past. So
too is the case with your GTM plan that was based on where your competition was
at a previous point in time. My solution: tight feedback loops throughout the
GTM team. This is an area that small companies have an advantage - since their
teams are small, they can more easily have all the people in the room or zoom
giving feedback on every aspect of the GTM process. While easier in a small
company, tight feedback loops can work at scale if they are engineered into the
process. I once rolled out a new positioning strategy in the market and learned
that it was ineffective (see metrics answer above). While it was a bummer that
the original positioning wasn’t effective, I was proud of the team for
developing this insight quickly, rapidly rolling it back, and then iterating
based on what we learned.
Group Manager, Product Marketing, Lyra Health • August 3
Almost every launch has something unexpected arise not matter how much you plan.
To me, the riskiest items are the ones that might be harder to change or adjust
post-launch.
1. Making sure there is product market fit is make or break. By that I mean,
the buyer you've identified has a clear pain point and the product that was
build addresses that pain point. I've seen launches across different
companies struggle because a product was built before fully understanding
the buyer need.
2. Lack of alignment on decision makers can derail a launch plan. If decisions
makers and decisions that have been made aren't clearly communicated, you
could accidentally move forward with the wrong GTM plan without even
knowing. I've used the RACI matrix structure to define rolls as well as
RAPID. It's not a very sexy topic, but can be highly effective.
3. Pricing is another risky item. If you don't properly research and test your
pricing, your product could be underpriced (losing you money), overpriced
(causing adoption issues), or could even have the wrong pricing model.
Head of Solutions Marketing, Iterable • January 5
The biggest risk I typically see in GTM strategies is that it doesnt work.
Somewhere, something was missed, or the messaging, product, etc. doesnt resonate
with prospects and customers. '
I have found that your webiste is a great place to experiment to ensure this
doesnt happen. It has historical data to anaylze various aspects of your GTM
strategy including verticals, personas, messaging, sales motions, customer
marketing, etc.
Training the org is another big risk. If there is a new revenue-driving feature
that CS/CSMs/SEs dont know how to technically talk about or sell, that new
feature will fall flat.
Senior Director Product Marketing, Crossbeam | Formerly 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • January 23
The most risky operationalizations in a GTM strategy to me are spray and pray
(homogenous) campaigns, broad (not segmented nor sophisticated/suppressed, not
segmented (targeted) and not timely (saturated). Basically, if you are not
intentional with your outreach that is a huge risk and you'll end up as noise,
spam, or worse - blacklisted (and that is a huge risk).
7 answers
Chief Marketing Officer, Instacart • December 8
I start by developing a Go-To-Market strategy that identifies the business
objective of the launch campaign and articulates the in-focus audience. Once I
know what I need to accomplish and who I'm talking to, then I can think about
the best channels to land that message. The channels should be tailored to the
behavior of your users, so that you can meet them in the right place, at the
right moment, with the right message. If you are unsure of which channels are
most appropriate, Journey Mapping can be a helpful tool to identify those key
moments and media. Once you have a proposed strategy, it is helpful to vet it
with channel owners to make sure they are aligned and to get any additional
insights they have to offer around how to most effectively leverage their
channel.
Vice President of Product Marketing, GitLab • July 28
Identifying and prioritizing channels to reach your target audience is key to
any product launch. Typically, my channel goal is to surround the audience with
a repeated, salient, and consistent message.
Depending on the business objective (note to product marketers: clarify the
business objective of your product launch first), the goal of a launch can be
different from product to product. At times, the business needs to build
awareness of your product in order to drive consideration and usage -- this is
the most frequent objective. At other times, however, the business wants a
product launch to drive a different corporate-level objective, such as positive
sentiment or consideration for a broader solution.
The first step of any product launch channel strategy is to identify your target
audience(s) and, based on a deep understanding of them, identify the best ways
to reach them. From this starting point, you can begin stitching together a
channel strategy.
People’s social and professional networks and media behaviors are complex, so we
try our best to develop a comprehensive understanding of our target audience.
Beyond their title, who is this person? What keeps them up at night? Where do
they learn, get, and share information? What terms do they use when they search
for a product similar to yours? How do they engage with channels such as email?
Be sure to have a truthful answer for each of these questions -- as a cautionary
tale, an IT executive recently told my team that he deletes ALL marketing emails
at the beginning and end of his day. Ouch.
For product launches, my team typically weaves together a mixture of ‘owned &
operated’ (e.g. email, website), earned (e.g. press, analysts), social media,
and paid channels with core content that can be integrated into each channel. We
prioritize the channels that have the greatest likelihood of reaching our
audience and motivating them to make the purchase consideration and decision
journey.
Laying all of these considerations out is part of the fun of creating a cohesive
channel strategy.
VP, Product Marketing, Chargebee • January 19
In my answer to the “not all launches are created equal” question, I laid out
some options for communications channels to pursue based on the tier that you
assign a given launch. (This best applies to B2B SaaS organizations, since
that’s the sector in which I’ve spent my entire career.)
As far as demand generation or running paid campaigns goes, I don’t have
personal expertise in those areas, so I can’t provide insight into how to choose
advertising channels. But, the best thing you can do as a PMM if you don’t own
that function is to give the people who do own it as much information as
possible so they can make some decisions: all your persona research, your SWOT
analysis, ideas for keywords to research, your competitor list, etc.
Director of Product Marketing & Lifecycle Marketing, Loom • August 25
One question to start with is – is the goal to target existing customers or
attract new ones (or both)? Then figure out where that audience is and how you
can most effectively reach them.
Another is resourcing and scope - what can you pull off in the timeframe you
have, and prioritize from there.
Another would be, do you want to experiment with new channels (and do you have
the resources/risk appetite/budget)? For example, we have an upcoming launch and
we're looking into new social channels: Instagram and TikTok. But we've made it
a P1-2 priority. We're focused on the channels we know are effective for us and
will make a game-time decision on TikTok if we have the bandwidth.
Director of Product Marketing & Demand Generation, ESO | Formerly Fortive • October 18
Successfully launching a product these days is an undertaking that requires
careful consideration and planning. A lot of factors go into deciding which
channels to use for your launch campaign, but there are some key questions you
need to ask yourself first:
* What are the goals of my campaign?
* Who do I want to reach with this campaign?
* Where can I find them?
* How much time and money do I have available for my marketing efforts?
These are just a few of the many considerations you'll need to make before
diving in.
I start by thinking about the goal of the campaign and who I'm talking to. Then
I think about which channels to use to reach them.
You should make sure that you are using the right channels for your customers.
This will help you meet them with a compelling message in a place they’ll
actually see it. If you're not sure which channels are most appropriate, talk to
some customers to find out what they need in different moments.
Finally, discuss your plan with other people. They can tell you if they agree or
have more advice on how to do it.
Vice President, Industry and Product Marketing, RingCentral • October 18
Audience. Know your audience. It's cliche. I'm still going to say it again -
KNOW your audience. What/who influences them? Where do they get their
information? What does the buying journey look like?
Prioritization comes down to your goals and any testing you've already done.
This is more of an integrated marketing / campaign question, but an awareness
play is very different from a mid to bottom funnel play.
Ah-ha moment: Sometimes, the reality is, the budget dictates the channels.
That's okay too. Shoot for shareability!
Senior Director Product Marketing, Crossbeam | Formerly 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • January 23
Try applying elements of the “t-shirt sizing” product methodology within your
tiering process.
For background, t-shirt sizing helps you map effort to impact. Typically, a team
assigns points or t-shirt sizes ( i.e., XS to XXL) to represent a task’s
relative effort/market impact. This helps illuminate team capacity, scope,
impact, and ownership around projects.
To parallelize this practice for product marketing, start by consulting your
product manager with these standard questions (or tweak to your heart's desire):
Does this feature/product…
1. Provide something our competitors don’t?
2. Solve a new buyer pain point?
3. Solve a new use case for an existing customer?
4. Introduce new functionality that changes customer workflows?
5. Improves functionality or performance of an existing customer workflow?
6. Change the User Interface (UI)?
7. Add new internal tasks/support requirements?
For each question, apply a 0 (False) or 1 (True), then calculate the total to
automate your corresponding launch tier:
Tier 1: 6-7 points.
- These are typically big launches that involve innovative, net new
functionality that increases market share, domain authority and acquisition.
Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack
announcement with positioning brief, external - email announcement, in-app post,
social promotion, website update, sales/cs outreach template, blog post,
explainer video/tour, pr/ar, newsletter, and co-marketing campaign if relevant,
website update.
Tier 2: 4-5 points.
- These are typically medium launches with functionality that improves product
market fit/net promoter score, retention and expansion. Communication channels
should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with
positioning brief, external - email announcement, cs/sales outreach template,
in-app post, social, embedded tour, newsletter update, slide update, website
update, help doc update.
Tier 3: 2-3 points.
- These are typically small launches with functionality that maintains market
position, parity, and performance.
Tier 4: 0-1 points. Communication channels should include but are not limited
to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - cs/sales
outreach template, targeted email announcement, newsletter, help docs update.
- These are typically your soft/quiet launches that don’t require broad
messaging/awareness. (Pixel changes). Communicaiton channels should include but
are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, cs
outreach comm if relevant, help doc update.
Channels will also change per targeted launch outcome: awareness, activation,
adoption, advocacy.
I suppose with executive level comms, it's more obvious, but how do you manage work that's in-flight that requires as many as 5 PMs, in addition to analysts, designers, marketers, and more? How do you keep people "in the loop" at the right level of fidelity without opening up a can of worms and adding complexity? A DACI model is great, but has its limits.
2 answers
Head of Product Marketing - Security, Integrations, Mobile, Salesforce • December 10
Not necessarily. The goal is to ensure that for whatever initiative (launch,
pricing, campaign etc) youre leading, the north star is clear, expectations from
each member (or group) are clear, and the communication is very clear. The only
group that usually 'needs' their own reskinned decks and docs are senior
leadership. They usally get packaged updates that are much more streamlined with
a focus on updates, risks and asks.
If you have other stakeholders that are asking for their own format, Id
encourage you sit down with them ask why. Its a huge burden on you to make
multiple documents, so the best approach is to figure out a middle ground.
A few tips:
* Before starting the project, get everyone's buy in on their role in the
project. Use a RACI if that's the culture, or at least a simple document
saying if someone is in the 'working team', 'approval team',
informed/consulted team etc. This will ensure expectation management up
front. If someone comes up later saying 'why wasnt I involved' you can show
them the paper trail to explain no malintent
* Drive home this divison of responsibility in your kickoff call (as in HAVE a
kickoff call for sure)
* Ensure that everyone involved is on the recurring meeting invite, Slack
channel, Teams group, whatever you use for comms and accountability
* If you have a top down culture, explicitly build in meeting cadences for
review, approval, stakeholder feedback and call it what it is. Dont assume
that people will know things, or pay attention 'offline'
* Over communicate -- pre-meeting, agendas, status boards, recapss. Call out
what's stakeholder relevant, whats not
No easy way to do this, but its a lot of cat herding that if done well can drive
massive organizational alignment.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Part of our jobs as PMMs is to drive alignment across teams of diverse
stakeholders, all of which speak different languages, care about different
things, and want to be approached in a specific way. When it comes to key
strategic projects, I believe that tailoring your approach to meet the needs of
your stakeholders is critical to achieve maximum success and collaboration!
This could be as simple as reframing certain elements of a master deck/doc
you’ve created for a key strategic project. Depending on who you’re
communicating with, identify how you can adjust your project updates to ensure
those particular stakeholders find your work important and valuable. For
example, marketing may care more about how you helped them generate more high
quality leads vs product may care more about product/feature adoption. No matter
who it is you're communicating with, identify their key measures of success and
think about how you can align your outcomes to their objectives.
4 answers
Director of Product Marketing & Demand Generation, ESO | Formerly Fortive • August 18
Building a launch process from scratch is a big lift, but early work like
identifying all stakeholders will set you up for success once things get
rolling. I frame product launches as "commercialization" to anchor my thinking.
To expand beyond a single word, this means we're making a new product or
component available for people to buy. To identify the stakeholders required to
accomplish that goal, rely on your customer's process as they go from problem
awareness to activation and support. This approach gets bonus from me for
creating a customer-centric mindset early in the launch process. Some high-level
questions to start thinking about this:
* How will customers and prospects become aware of the new offering?
* How will customers and prospects express interest in the new offering?
* How will customers buy the new offering?
* How do customers get set up and trained on the new offering?
* How will customers get help with the new offering once they are using it?
Pro Tip: When you land on your initial stakeholder group, ask the team "Who else
needs to know". This simple question helped me resolve a few gaps in the past
that would have caused major issues downstream.
Regarding changing stakeholders, the level of effort from different teams and
functions will naturally shift over the course of a launch. Letting people
check-in and check-out has led to dropped balls and miscommunications more times
than I can count. Stakeholders should have enough invested in the entire
commercialization effort that they want to be aware of the work going on. You
can have information radiators for update communications to leaders, but silent
observers don't add much value to launch project meetings.
Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Google • December 20
The best way to identify the stakeholders is to identify the success metric for
the launch, and then figure out who is directly responsible for hitting that
metric. Typically your product manager is a stakeholder, but often you'll have a
customer success/sales organization involved and also engineering. Stakeholders
are also up and down the leadership chain so be sure to include the leaders of
those who are directly responsible.
Stakeholder changes are inevitable so I tend to learn on documentation to help
smooth over the transitions when they happen. Do you have your messaging and
positioning documents ready? Your marketing strategy? If so, anyone new coming
into the launch will immediately be able to understand your plan and you won't
need to spend lots of time ramping them up.
Vice President Product and Customer Marketing, Highspot • August 9
Product Launch is where all the magic happens. So many stakeholders have both
vested interests and points of view of how the launch should be executed, but
only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the product, go-to-market team,
and the external market, so is best positioned to champion the process.
We've broken our launch into four phases where the first and last stages have
the most stakeholders present, and the middle two have the fewest.
What we've had success with understand that some roles just need to be informed
when the launch kicks off. This can be a wide range of stakeholders who just
need to be informed on just the facts - what are we launching, when are we
launching it, what are the goals of the launch and what behaviors do we need to
change to achieve our goals. The Phase 1 work here is about strategizing - where
you need the business goals and objectives understood to really land your
launch. Here is a great time to confirm who needs/wants to be a part of the
execution "crew" through the next 2 phases.
With the kickoff in the rearview mirror, we narrow the audience to the people
who have to go do the majority of the work to drive the launch, and we rely on
our partners in Product Management, Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Sales
Enablement, and Customer Success - teams that need to make sure the go-to-market
team is ready to market, sell and support the change. A lot of the Phase 2 work
here is about planning what to do and when to do it, and creating the content
and context to equip, train and coach your teams.
Finally, there's the launch, when you can "push the button" on getting all the
things you created to market. There it's effective to bring the same
stakeholders you informed in Phase 1 back to the table to share learnings and
close the loop.
We continue to iterate our launch motion, but it's becoming a strength for us as
we've earned the trust of partner teams over the last 18 months.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Product launches take a village to execute successfully! Start by defining your
launch goals and plan. This will make it easier to identify your stakeholders,
which can include individuals or groups that will be involved in the launch
execution and/or impacted by the outcome of the launch.
At Zendesk, we use a tiering system to determine the level of effort required to
support a product launch and the stakeholders that will need to be involved. For
example:
* A tier 1 launch is typically reserved for brand new product offerings that
will have a major impact on our customers or the business. A tier 1 launch
would span many different stakeholders across product (e.g. product managers,
engineering, pricing, etc), core marketing (campaigns, events, PR, SEO,
brand, etc.) and GTM (enablement, pre/post solutions consultants, partners,
etc.).
* A tier 3 launch may be a smaller update to an existing product with minimal
impact. As opposed to a tier 1 launch, a tier 3 launch would require less
stakeholder involvement. We may pull in the web team for website updates,
docs team for release note updates, email marketing, etc.
As with most product launches, things are constantly changing! Involve your
stakeholders early and often, and make sure to get their buy-in on the launch
goals and the role they will play. Proactively and constantly communicating with
your stakeholders makes it much easier to pivot if necessary as things change or
challenges arise.
5 answers
Product Marketing SME, AWS, Amazon • February 9
Great question! This is a common scenario for growing organizations. As a
smaller PMM team, you'll have to work to set project priorities. This is not an
easy tasks, but what helps is being transparent and communicative with your
teams across Product, Sales, Marketing and others.
For growing organizations, work with your Sales Department to understand their
biggest pain points and align on where you as a PMM can best support. Prioritize
the feedback and the work you're able to take on vs what you might have to
revist or commit to later. This conversation seems obvious, but keep having it.
Set up recurring touchpoints (even if for 15min) to hold each party accountable
to what was committed.
Finally - Be consistent and meet your deadlines. This is important when building
a fostering trust across the organization. Trust is fundamental to establishing
strong relationships. When working with your stakeholders be clear about
expectations, deadlines, roadblocks, and deliverables.
Director of Product Marketing, Ironclad • June 29
Anchor on the highest priority for the company, versus any one team. One of the
hardest but also most liberating things about product marketing is that we are
an inherently flexible function. Our skillsets are diverse, so we can quickly
get into formation behind whatever is most important and strategic to the
company at any given point in time. This is our greatest strength (and, if
handled poorly, our greatest weakness), so don't let it go to waste! If the most
important initiative at the company is revenue, make yourself indispensable to
sales by holding your team to sales targets. If it is building a revolutionary
product, prioritize product. Whatever you do, do not try to be everything to
everyone. That just results in a lot of "RAM" (random acts of marketing) that
don't make clear to anyone what you're actually good for.
Director, Product Marketing, Amplitude • January 26
You have to align on what priorities you are working on and when. I even suggest
having a sort of PMM roadmap. If you can get that agreed to at the leadership
level then it will be a lot easier to have conversations with your stakeholders
across teams.
There are always going to be firedrills you have to jump on, but by driving
alignment and visibility at the leadership level you can make sure those are the
exception not the rule.
Vice President Product and Customer Marketing, Highspot • August 9
While it might be easy to find industry standards on the number of PMMs per
stakeholder team, I find the better marker to be the number of products in the
portfolio, segments served, geographies, or even industries. Small teams can
pack a mighty punch if swim lanes are clear and roles and responsibilities are
understood. For example, a PMM team of 3 with respective focuses on core product
marketing (use cases, value props, enablement, release/launch, pricing, etc.)
audience/portfolio marketing (segment, geo, new biz/customer, etc.), and
competitive (differentiation, dispositioning, strategy) can serve a growing set
of stakeholders effectively, and as the team proves value, will scale with the
rest of the organization.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
PMM sits at the intersection of these various stakeholder teams and keeps them
aligned. No matter how big or small your company is, you likely have similar
stakeholders that you need to manage and communicate with. To be effective,
product marketing needs to have a voice across the company.
I’ve always found it valuable to forge trusting relationships with someone in
sales leadership, product leadership, etc. Make sure you’re communicating with
them on a regular basis. With product, catch up regularly on upcoming releases,
voice of customer, strategic launches, etc. With sales, review performance, key
customer wins, strategic campaigns, etc. Having a regular cadence with these
teams while bringing them valuable insights and a unique POV will ensure PMM has
a seat at the table.
4 answers
VP, Product, Barracuda Networks • August 8
This is going to vary widely by organization, and you'll find Jr. PMMs doing the
same work in one organization that a director or even VP would in another.
That said, as a general rule, the more junior PMMs typically take on more
tactical work. This can take many forms, but content creation, ghostwriting,
babysitting the demand gen team and refreshing existing collateral are all at
the top of the list.
At the other end of the spectrum, more senior folks are likely to be out of the
office - evangelizing the company, meeting customers, influencing analysts and
training senior sales people. They will spend more time interfacing with the
executive team, both on portfolio messaging and corporate messaging and brand.
Your head of PMM will also spend a lot of time hiring, mentoring and training
the PMM team. I've spent as much as 75-80% of my time doing that at various
points in my career.
Product Lead (fmr Head of Product Marketing), Square • November 16
This very much depends on the company and individual team lead vision so I will
just chime in with what it is like at Square.
In general, PMMs at Square cover a wide range of responsibilities regardless of
level. These responsibilities include:
1. Develop product or feature launch/ GTM strategy and plans, including
positioning and messaging
2. Quarterback marketing and sales partners (e.g., paid marketing, SEO, content
marketing, lead generation) to execute GTM and growth plans
3. Lead customer research and collaborate with PMs on product strategy and
roadmap
4. Lead pricing and packaging recommendations
Square is a multi-product company, so our junior PMMs tend to focus on one
product to learn how to excel at the role. Senior PMMs start to cover more
products. Additionally, junior PMMs are empowered on tactical executions, but
important, strategic decisions like tent pole product launch strategies and
pricing decisions are led by senior PMMs. As a team lead, I focus more of my
time building and coaching my team, elevating the reputation of the function
within our company, and weighing in heavily on product and business unit
strategies.
Another avenue that some companies take, is the TYPE of PMM you are. So you can
be a product marketer, a solution marketing, a segment marketer, a vertical
marketer - these all still fall under the role of Product Marketing, but rather
than focusing specifically on tacitical to strategy, they're also segmented more
granularly on their individual focus. So a vertical PMM, may focus on everything
across the portfolio, that relates to the banking industry, and tailors
messaging, GTM motions, and enablement for that specific vertical.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
This can certainly vary depending on the company! Here are some examples of
areas that would be owned by different product marketing levels based on my
experience:
Messaging & Positioning
* PMM: Crafts messaging and positioning at capability/feature level with some
coaching
* Sr. PMM: Drives messaging and positioning at the product/feature level and
coaches others on product/feature level positioning
* Director: Drives messaging and positioning at the category level and ensures
alignment across teams
Sales enablement
* PMM: Creates materials and conducts enablement sessions on sales fundamentals
(e.g. first call deck, demos)
* Sr. PMM: Orchestrates enablement initiatives and programs at the product
level or across multiple features. Identifies opportunities to increase
pipeline by collaborating directly with reps and sales leadership.
* Director: A mix of strategic/tactical partner to sales leadership for their
functional area. Ensures execution of sales-facing content and training.
GTM strategy & execution
* PMM: Plays a specific role in building GTM strategy and execution for area of
focus (e.g. buyer, competitors)
* Sr. PMM: Drives GTM strategy work across multiple products, features, or
initiatives (e.g. pricing, narrative). Makes recommendations to optimize
methodologies and processes.
* Director: Ensures the success of the development of GTM strategy and
responsible for their teams’ execution of GTM programs. Considers the
portfolio strategy (e.g. where a particular launch strategy fits in amongst
other launches). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and
processes.
It can sometimes be a struggle for those on the executive team, or in higher leadership roles, to see the value that product marketing is bringing to the business - especially if they do not have regular interaction. How do you build visibility for you and/or your team, and clearly communicate the achievements and activities throughout the year?
4 answers
Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • August 12
I love this question. I’ll step away from PMM for a minute and say - regardless
of what function you’re in at a company, you should be championing yourself and
your team constantly. People who ‘get ahead’ in business not only create value,
they make sure others know that they create value.
What makes PMM hard is that you don’t own a number -- there’s no clear
attribution. You can’t say “at the end of Q2 we grew revenue by X% YoY” in the
way a sales or DG team can. So you need to constantly be talking about what you
are delivering and how you are partnering with teams who do own numbers.
What are the channels for communication in your business? At Gainsight, Slack is
a major channel. I post often to our Sales channel about projects we’re working
on, things we’ve delivered, and I give kudos to others. I do so in a very clear
and consistent way.
Another idea is asking for your team to be a part of regular weekly business
reviews with the Exec team (or asking to be featured one week) if they exist.
There’s always some kind of exec alignment session that happens every week or
month - find it at figure out who owns it and how to get on it.
Also - this is part of your manager’s job (to both trumpet your work and figure
out the right forums to do so) so ask them directly how you can get more
visibility for you or your team’s work.
Director of Product Marketing, Twilio • March 13
Marketing your accomplishments is critical! It is epecially important to align
leadership expectations with reality since product marketing roles and
responsiblities can vary greatly from business to business or even across
products/BUs.
My team and I address this in a few ways. First, we share quarterly email
updates with a broad distribution list. These emails include our topline
priorities, related initiatives, shoutouts to our key stakeholders (since most
of what we do is collaborative), learnings and pivots, as well as a link to an
archive doc with all of our previous updates for easy reference. I also ensure
my direct leadership is aware of our goals and accomplishments so they can know
what we're focused on and can speak up when given the opportunity in higher
level meetings. Finally, not leadership specific, but we are active on team
slack channels sharing key activities across sales, marketing, and product teams
in real time.
VP, Marketing, Observable | Formerly Figma, Abstract • January 11
Tying your work to tangible outcomes, specifically those related to product
growth and revenue, and socializing it has worked well for me. Here's my
approach:
Have a revenue-first mindset. Businesses exist to make money. One of the first
questions I ask myself about any launch is "how can we leverage this to drive
revenue?" Before getting strategic or tactical, I explore the different angles
we could position or message the launch to drive revenue. Releases small,
medium, and large have the potential for revenue impact.
Work backwards. When setting launch goals, I work backwards from the company
goals, and map the connection so I know where tactical efforts and outcomes
ladder up. This trail is helpful when communicating the value of your work,
especially at the executive level.
Map your tactics to the growth framework of choice (flywheel, funnel...). This
has worked really for me when presenting GTM plans and running reviews.
Organizing your tactics into a strategic framework helps folks see all of the
areas Product Marketing touches, understand what areas your work is contributing
to and how it all works together.
Socialize wins and learnings. Beating your own drum brings visibility to your
work while also increasing morale (wins) and knowledge (learnings) across the
company.
Celebrate others. Spread the love and it will come back around to you. Word of
mouth is a great internal marketing tool. I've found that when you celebrate and
champion the work of others, they are more inclined to do it for you — which
increases your visbility throughout the organization.
Group Product Marketing Manager, Zendesk • January 12
Great question. At Zendesk, we do a lot of monthly/quarterly syncs with product
leadership, sales leadership, marketing leadership, etc to discuss top programs
and communicate achievements. Quarterly business reviews are another great way
to share top wins and learnings. We also leverage supplemental channels like
Slack, company/team all hands and our GTM newsletter.
This can vary by company. To determine what works best for you and your team,
you’ll need to figure out a way to speak the same language of the people that
you’re trying to communicate with. Take the time to understand the priorities of
your key stakeholders and executives so you can align your outcomes to their
measures of success. Identify their communication preferences so you can
establish a communication approach that best meets their needs. When you’ve
taken these steps, it’s much easier to build visibility and communicate
achievements in a way that resonates with your audience.