Product Marketing Team

I think it depends on what sub-function of PMM you've excelled in (or are applying for). If more technically-oriented, I'd want to learn about a product launch that you've been a part of, walk through a set of messaging you've developed, and understand how you've worked closely with the product team. If more GTM-oriented, I'd love to see a deck you've built for the sales team, how you've thought about personas and market segmentation, and understand how you've supported the sales team in hitting their targets. If you're applying for a Head of PMM role, perhaps a view into all of the above and how you've led through that. Also, if this is you, we are hiring at Front :)

I would try to highlight anything that shows you have the key skills to be an effective product marketer. That definitely includes strong writing samples and case studies like you suggested, but also: * Presentations that show you can create a compelling narrative and convince an audience of your point * Detailed GTM launch plans with how you will or did measure success * Clear, convincing and well-supported messaging and positioning, like through a messaging source document (something we use at Zendesk for all of our major products and launches) or a presentation * Thorough competitive analyses that highlight where the opportunity is for that company and what value props they should use to differentiate Also, depending on what PMM role you’re interviewing for, like if it’s a Retail Solutions PMM let’s say, I’d suggest adding more to show you have knowledge or experience particularly relevant to Retail and that role if you have it. Lastly, just in case the above feels overwhelming and you don’t have a lot of great materials to put a portfolio together, don’t worry, I rarely see PMM portfolios and usually we just evaluate strong PMMs through the interviews, homework assignments, and recommendations.

Case studies and writing samples signal to me that you can do the job you are asked to do but they rarely make a candidate stand out (unless the content is really bad!) I do think long-form writing samples have their place - they should show that you can communicate well and that you can possess critical thinking skills. But what makes a great candidate stand out for me, far more than anything, is a strategic mindset and an ability to provide evidence of outcomes during the interview. I'd focus on this more than on the portfolio. I go into how to do this in more detail in other questions.

The trifecta of short-form published writing, long-form writing, and enablement materials always does the trick for me. If I can see the candidate has written a great feature-related blog post or one-pager, a positioning and differentiation narrative, and slides that cue up best practices, then I'm a happy hiring manager.

Please add the "why" behind why you chose to take on new initiatives. I often see marketer proposing solutions that are searching for a problem. So, always start with Why and how your work aligned with the company/marketing/PMM north start. Then mention the results.  Example: It's great that you wrote an e-book, but why did you do an e-book instead of a webinar? What was the outcome? How it helped the company drive certain goal.  Some guidelines on what to include:   1. Include different formats - media, writing, interactive  2. Balance long and short form - 1 pagers or inforgraphics and longer whitepapers 3. If the role asks for a specific thing, make sure that you give more than one sample. Example - for a technical marketing role, the hiring manager is trying to asses how well can you simplify technical jargon to drive sales in low maturity buyer but the hiring manage is also curious about the depth of technical knowledge - so, if you did release notes, add that,  4. Don't be afraid to add samples from your previous roles: No one was born as a PMM. so, you might have some work experience before moving to PMM. If you did something that's relevant, please add that. Hiring managers are looking for fresh ideas and the fresh ideas come from the intersection of different fields.  5. Public speaking examples: Public speaking is a core skill for PMMs. The sample doesn't have to be from a large event. Even if it was a webinar or an internal training, add that. 

Absolutely writing samples! I always ask for those. (As you can tell from my other answers, communication is something I care deeply about!)  Case studies, landing pages, pitch decks / other enablement assets, and messaging frameworks can also be great additions to a portfolio. Just make sure you can speak to the process of building those, because it's impossible to know just from looking at them how much was built by the candidate vs. a collaborator.  What really makes a candidate stand out, I've found, is a short 'about me' deck. I've seen some great decks that include:  * Work samples (including some commentary about the process of developing that work) * Some thoughts about their approach to product marketing  * A slide or two about their career and the highlights of their experience * Bonus: Something that tells me a little bit about who they are as a person outside of work (hobbies, things they're passionate about, etc.) Not only is this full of great insight into the candidate, but it's also a great example of how they position themselves. It's essentially a sales enablement asset, which should hopefully translate into how well they can do that for our company and products. 

I've mentioned this framework in other answers, but I believe that great product marketers are great researchers, storytellers, and project managers. A standout product marketing portfolio would include work that helps you cover these critical bases. I've added below some examples of things that could help you stand out in each area. Research: * A summary of a research project you ran and how the insights were used * An example of a research question + interview questions you used in customer calls * An overview of a beta process you helped run, how many customers you talked to, and the outcomes that your insights helped solidify * An example of how you incorporated insights from industry experts or reports into a launch Storytelling: *  Core messaging + the landing page you built to distill the message * A product blog post you wrote to support a launch + outcomes * A video tutorial or webinar that you helped write or execute * A product announcement email + outcomes Project management: * A project plan that you used + the outcomes of the project * A product launch plan that you used + the outcomes * A hefty asset + a description of the team you coordinated to ship it * A cross-functional project timeline and breakdown + how you'd do it better

The great candidate stands out at every stage of the interview process, highlighting her & his value prop 😊 PMM portfolio is one more channel to show how you can help the company. Some practical things you can add to your PMM portfolio (copied from my other answer): * Messaging: key messaging on the products you worked on * GTM: links to your past launches (landing pages) * GTM: launch brief which you can share * Content: links to case studies you have prepared * Sales enablement: sales presentations, personas, sales emails * Your content (articles)

I am a big fan of writing examples.  * Writing crisp customer-facing content (blog posts, data sheets, whitepapers, product pages, etc.) is essential for any Product Marketer. * I must also add that the cross-functional nature of a PMM's job makes internal writing also very important. Clear, concise writing (GTM plans, memos, messages, 1-pagers, etc.) to get the point across succinctly to multiple stakeholders, drives alignment, and reduces duplicated efforts. Besides, I firmly believe that writing is the exercise of organizing your thoughts, answering your own questions, and articulating a straightforward story to the audience. In other words, writing is thinking. So, as much as possible, I ask people for their writing examples in interviews, etc., and I also try to write publicly, something that has benefitted me through connections.

If you don't have the opportunity to manage an entire new product launch, you'll have to get creative. See if there is an opportunity to own a specific piece of a launch someone else is managing or even manage a smaller feature launch. I'd also look for opportunities work with the product team, even if it's not on a specific launch. Big bonus points if you work with the product team on research or roadmap prioritization elements.  Let's say none of those opportunities are available - you can still focus your time on cultivating the skills that make a great product launch PMM. Beyond the tactics, the skills and experience I look for when hiring product launch PMMs include the following and I think you can work on these in a variety of different projects: * Someone that really knows how to work with product teams and understands how they work * Can manage a broad range of stakeholders * Strong and bold storyteller  * Project management skills

The biggest thing for newer PMMs is to learn and understand what strong PMM looks like, even if you haven't experienced it yet. Meaning, being able to answer an interview question with: "While I haven't had experience in this particular area, the way I might approach this situation in the future is... x, y, z."  In addition for interviewing, not only articulating what you've worked on specifically but how it fit into the larger PMM strategy (even if you didn't contribute to creating the plan, that's okay). When I help with interviewing, I'm much more interested in whether the person in front of me has that type of growth mindset. It's really easy to teach PMM skills; it's really hard to teach someone how to learn on their own. 

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 

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. 

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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. 

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.  

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. 

Assuming you were hired for this role, I think that this type of conversation should ideally happen before you accept the job. Asking a question like "what vision does the CMO, Founder, CEO, executive team, etc. have for this role?" Even just digging into the job description and asking for more detail. If their perception is something wildly different than yours, you might not want to take the job.  But that doesn't really answer your question... So, if you find yourself in this position as a new PMM, I would start an internal campaign to educate your CEO, for example, on what PMM should look like. At Uberflip, we created a presentation for our executive team, outlining the role of PMM. We leveraged a bunch of content from the Pragmatic Institute at the time, to highlight the strategic jobs PMMs should be responsible for.  We just started to raise our hand for some of the more strategic jobs in an effort to show how we could help impact the business in a more strategic way. The true way to change your CEO's mind is to show them what kind of impact your can have when you devote your time to real PMM work.   All that said, you want to make sure your priorities match the CEOs. If you're off paving the way for Product Marketing and letting other projects that they deem important falls through the cracks, you won't be the PMM for long. 

This question is great and so very relevant. I've been companies where leadership has had 3 very different thoughts on the PMM org.  1. PMM IS AMAZING 2. What the heck is PMM and why am I paying their salaries?  3. Eh, PMM exists but I don't care much about what they do. << my least favorite of them all, believe it or not.  PMM is amazing: This of course is an easy one! Keep doing great things and the leadership team will advocate for you. Communicate to them often on progress. Partner wherever necessary. You'll be the ones they call when they need help with events, messaging, content, knowledge -- anything, really!  What the heck is PMM: I actually like this group too, I see them as a challenge. How do I get them to "like" PMM? I show them what we're worth. How do we contribute to their business goals? How do we make our business better? How do we help customers? How do we help sales and PM and all the stakeholders that the PMM org works with on a daily basis?  PMM exists but I don't care: I initially thought I'd like these types since it's more like I can do what I want when I want and not worry about getting a report to a leader or justifying budget --- but I came to realize that's BAD. The joy is very short-lived. I want to turn these folks into PMM advocates because spinning my wheels creating content for nothing isn't helping me or my team. Show them your value, just like the #2 folks. Here's why you need PMM. Here's where my content feeds into your integrated marketing plan, CMO. Here's how I'm contributing to revenue, CEO. Here's how I'm driving customer adoption and renewing licenisng, CRO.  Find an ally on the leadership team, find a mentor that is a senior leader or reports to one. Getting yourself seen and heard will ignite something in the non-believers when you show them the value of PMM -- which can be shown in a lot of areas! 

Such a great question! And sadly, a common challenge for product marketing. I've found even when a company hires its first product marketer, not everyone is aware or on the same page. I have struggled with this very same thing at multiple companies and have found creating a team charter to help.  You can check out how I tackled that here: https://medium.com/@julie.ef.brown/how-to-write-a-product-marketing-charter-916d91e53a65  The critical components are: * Define what PMM is (and can even say what it is not) * Set goals * List out roles/responsibilities * Get buy-in/approval from leadership * Continually share and educate the organization on what PMM is to help manage expectations

The end game is for customers to choose your solutions and brand over the competition, so the most meaningful KPI is your win rate against against different competitors when you encounter them in deals. To measure that, you need to make sure your sales team is documenting who they encounter in each opportunity.  As a personal KPI, you could provide a quarterly or even monthly analysis and update with actionable insights and recommendations regarding competition. In my experience, a lot of real-time and one-off competitive intel gets lost. Product development cadence and process is just different than marketing and sales. Documentation and timely injection of information are really important when introducing insights from the marketplace into product development. You can also set some goals across the customer journey--admittedly, some of these are boxes to check as opposed to metrics to measure. Top of Funnel: Including competitive differentiation in your primary brand messaging and properties (websites, marketing campaigns, social, etc., wherever you think prospects are gaining awareness and familiarity with you). You can measure your SEO and web performance against close competitors. Middle of Funnel: Including competitive differentiation in the materials, campaigns and other plays used to get prospects engaged with you and especially in product education materials. Bottom of Funnel: Enabling the sales team with battlecards, objection handling, rip-and-replace customer stories, and updating sales materials to reflect what has been learned. 

Ultimately, the change in win rate against that particular competitor before vs. after your CI project.  There are sub goals and metrics to unpack here:  * QoQ change in the competitor features & functions, and messaging * The pace at which your product team is able to ship against new intel * PM survey results on the usefulness of your CI program This may be a controversial statement, but after seeing CI programs run out of Product, PMM, and Ops at different companies, I think the actual research work belongs in Product -- they're the true owners of what's being scoped and built, and should be invested in delivering a better product. PMM can stil own the pricing/packaging/messaging piece.

This really depends on the actual goal of a CI program, but here are a few ideas: For the sales team: * Competitive win rates (pre and post intel) * Sales confidence on competitive pitching (This is something you can measure using surveys at a regular cadence like quarterly) For the product team: * Feature parity if that is what you are focused on * Competitive differentiation - if you really need a metric you can create a percentage scale and see how that changes over time For the marketing team * If you have competitive materials or webpages - measure engagement and conversions

1. Sales confidence - While not a metric measured in SFDC, you can work with enablement to craft a pre and post sales confidence metric to assess how confident reps feel in navigating competitive conversations.  2. Competitive win rate - You're likely already measuring win rate, but competitive win rate will give you a direct KPI to measure the improvment in closing competitive deals.  3. [ Product specific] Reduction in lost deals due to product capabilities - To measure this metric you'll need to be tracking lost reason and have a drop-down for reps to choose "product gap." 

Another great question, thanks! I have been in a few roles where my job was to provide market data, competitive intelligence etc to other teams (CEO, Product, Sales etc) within the org. These teams would use this information to make strategic decisions, use them in sales presentations, etc but to put a common metric on providing competitive intelligence was hard. So we would send a quarterly survey to other teams within the org to participate in an anoynmous survey asking them about the usefulness of the competitive intelligence my team was providing. Think of it as a CSAT or a NPS survey to measure if they found your services helpful, will they come back to you etc.

It's great to see companies putting more emphasis on measuring this. It's definitely a challenge, but if competitive investments aren't measured, it's less likely they'll be appreciated or incorporated into key processes. The ideal measure of competitive intelligence is win rate. Measured on a quarterly basis (and at the close of a quarter) it can indicate if the organization is competing more effectively in qualified opportunities. It's important to note that like most PMM metrics, win rate is complex and can be influenced by many factors: sales training, market factors, product delivery, etc. But, when measured consistently you can see lift over time. The counterbalance to this is that it's directly connected to the company's top line. Higher win rates drives more revenue drives more investment in sales, marketing, and product. Also, by tying this to opporunities, it gives you any necessary leverage to get competitor data directly into CRM. "Oh, you want to know if we're improving our win rate against Competitor X? Well, there are only 5 opportunities tagged with that data out of 1,000 open opps. I need every opportunity tagged with competition by the time we get to Stage 3 to know how to prioritize this." Depending on your market and stage, you can get more specific. Win rates in a given segement, or versus a specific competitor or tier of competitor. 

Love this question! I'd think about it in terms of outcomes, and effectiveness.  So I'd look at metrics like: * Competitive Win Rates * Usage - To be clear, I like to look at this through the lens of whether the usage of a particular piece of competitive content is impacting the sales cycle and not just pure usage of content.  * Product Feedback/Usage * Retention Depending on the size and stage of your company, you may also have things like: * Competitive SEO - If you use a tool lke SEMRush then you'll be able to track competitive search positions and rankings compared to where you are, and how it's trending over time. * Brand / SOV - This is very high-level, but if you work for a company that is well-known or intently focused on building brand it's a metric that is likely tracked.  Since you mentioned your company tracks every project I think this can also depend on the maturity of your CI program. But work backwards and start with the outcome you're trying to drive, and then determine what needs to be measured to achieve that objective.

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

Competitive win rate is a great north star goal. But it can be challenging to accurately impact that in a positive way in a short amount of time. A couple other KPIs I've used in the past and that I recommend: 1. Competitor confidence (from the sales team) 2. Project-based contribution If you can increase the confidence of your sales team when it comes to competitors, you can infer that it will positively impact your competitive win rate. So every 6 month, I send a survey to my entire sales team and ask them to fill it out. Here's what it looks like: 1. Name 2. Team (e.g. XDR, Account Executive, Customer Success, etc.) 3. How long have you worked at *company*? 4. How confident are you competing against Competitor X? (1 - 5) 5. How confident are you competing against Competitor Y? (1 - 5) 6. How confident are you competing against Competitor Z? (1 - 5) 7. How often do you use competitive collateral like battlecards, one-pagers, etc.? 8. How impactful has our competitive collateral and training been for you? 9. What would help you win more competitive deals? (open text field) If I've done my job, the answers to 4 - 6 should go up over time, and the answers to 7 and 8 should be "very often" :-) I can't tell you how helpful this has been for me in guiding what I work on with my programs.  And then in terms of project-based contributions, try to find big projects happening in your company. This could be a website revamp, launching a big new product, revamping employee onboarding, etc. Figure out a way to get involved. If you're revamping the website, maybe look into advising on compare landing pages. If you're launching a new product, make sure the team is equipped with what the landscape offers that's similar. You get the idea. All of these things positively contribute to how your organization goes to market.

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

Terrific question! A few metrics that are key to competitive intel: Competitive Intel 101 Metrics 1. Sales engagement -- Is your sales team using the competitive content that your team is developing? If you use a sales enablement platform (we use Highspot), getting this data is much easier. Set your OKRs on increasing sales engagement with this type of content. 2. Sales satisfaction -- This is a more qualitative measure, but very important. Find out whether your sales team feels more confident in the conversations they have with prospects and existing customers. If you want a more quantitative measure, consider sending an NPS specific to your competitive intel to your sales team on a quarterly or bi-annual basis. Advanced Competitive Intel Metrics 3. Impact on sales success -- Once you've established your foundation with #1#1 and #2,#2, you can take it to the next level by measuring the impact of competitive intel content on closed/won and accelerating the sales cycle. You can do this most effectively if your sales team uses an enablement platform that associates content with sales engagements. 4. Impact on product roadmap & GTM strategy -- At its best, competitive intel can influence product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. I recommend qualitative measures to gauge success. Look at the degree to which company strategy is informed by your competitive insights. Last KPI: Great competitive intel makes a product marketer an MVP across the company. Count how many high-fives you get from sales, product, customer success, and marketing. If the number is going up-and-to-the-right, you're doing something right.

Terrific question! A few metrics that are key to competitive intel: Competitive Intel 101 Metrics 1. Sales engagement -- Is your sales team using the competitive content that your team is developing? If you use a sales enablement platform (we use Highspot), getting this data is much easier. Set your OKRs on increasing sales engagement with this type of content. 2. Sales satisfaction -- This is a more qualitative measure, but very important. Find out whether your sales team feels more confident in the conversations they have with prospects and existing customers. If you want a more quantitative measure, consider sending an NPS specific to your competitive intel to your sales team on a quarterly or bi-annual basis. Advanced Competitive Intel Metrics 3. Impact on sales success -- Once you've established your foundation with #1#1 and #2,#2, you can take it to the next level by measuring the impact of competitive intel content on closed/won and accelerating the sales cycle. You can do this most effectively if your sales team uses an enablement platform that associates content with sales engagements. 4. Impact on product roadmap & GTM strategy -- At its best, competitive intel can influence product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. I recommend qualitative measures to gauge success. Look at the degree to which company strategy is informed by your competitive insights. Last KPI: Great competitive intel makes a product marketer an MVP across the company. Count how many high-fives you get from sales, product, customer success, and marketing. If the number is going up-and-to-the-right, you're doing something right.

Examine the materials and get honest feedback. If the smaller region needs more than your bigger regions then something may be off. Maybe things need to be changed, but a smaller region should not be more work than a bigger one. You will need to make trade-off decisions on what you build for a local market based on their success, and incentivize them to think that way. Find a great local agency, or agencies that help in the region. Take the time to vet them and help you build content. Some can even be in person consultants to the region if you need it. Build a network of local champions. Any product that resonates relies on the local community whether it be troubleshooting boards, feedback via social media. If your product is B2B, you definitely need something more formal. Find a very active salesperson who may be interested in product marketing or customer service representative that is sharp to help pitch in. This is the beauty of start-ups and smaller companies, you can find people who will want to pitch in and help land information better. You can even pitch it as an “extra project” for performance review perks. That person can be a defacto link and help scale and customize the work from global, and the region will feel more supported. If the local champion is successful, then you already have your business case as well as your first hire in that market. Leverage any employee at the company with knowledge of the market. Hopefully, you will have people staffed in that market and you can lean on for information, but if not put out a slack/post/email and take down note of employees who have worked in other markets and if they have language fluency. Use those people for copy gut checks if possible. Don’t ask them to do the translations - hire a contractor or something for that - but they can read it and let you know if any language is awkward or if the terms are off.

I talked above about regional nuances, and how understanding those aspects of a region are crucial, but that doesn’t mean a huge shift in strategy is needed for every region. I think that if you build a strategy made from a modular set of parts, you can then deploy those parts across regions without the overhead of creating each piece from scratch.

Change Management: As you grow the team, you will have to restructure and assign new responsibilities to individuals. This can be tough when you are going from a do-it-all mindset to functional expertise. While making such a change, it could feel like you are taking away the responsibilities from individuals. It is important that you are able to articulate the reasons and define a growth path for all roles as you make the change. Additionally, change management requires communication with stakeholders. If change is not communicated, stakeholders and the team will either start executing based on the older model or the team will get frustrated because they are getting asked about workstreams they are no longer responsible for. Communicating priorities and responsibilities: As the team grows, it is important to align the team on priorities. It is growing to be harder and harder to oversee individual projects and workstreams. If everyone on the team knows the priorities, goals, and DACIs well, things can get streamlined across projects. Internal Promotions vs External talent: As you grow the team, you want to reward the employees who have worked hard, who understand the culture, and who have the relationships. However, it is equally important to bring external talent to learn and uplevel the work. As you grow the team, you will need people managers, and promoting internally vs. hiring externally will be a sensitive decision  

The hardest part in growth and scale is the balance between process, oversight and autonomy. A 5 person team is well aligned, you know what everyone is working on, and easily collaborate on projects. A 20 person team, not as easy. The first step once you get past a team of 7 is to start thinking about team structure and leadership structure. The team I get to serve has 6 pillars: messaging & positioning, partner marketing, customer marketing, product evangelism, market intelligence, activation and launch. Each of these pillars has a leader. In some cases it's a team of one. Other functions have more. But this approach lets me look at all of our goals and objectives and attack them accordingly. It also creates a structure that can scale and grow easily. As we continue to grow industry marketing and regional marketing could be pillars that might get added. Structure, leadership at each level is the key to growing and scaling. 

The biggest challenge for me is scaling my management style as the team has grown. It’s not easy! I want to be a manager who’s responsive to the needs of my direct reports, wherever they are on their career journey. More-tenured people need a sounding board, and reassurance in their plans, whereas less-tenured people might crave more instruction. I love balancing that and helping them set the groundwork for the next stage of their careers. For managers that also means that the bigger your team gets, the less you‘re able to dive into the details. You need to build a team that’s strong enough to handle those details so you can focus more on strategy and less on execution. But that takes a whole lot of trust: They have to believe in your plan, and you have to believe in their capabilities.

It does depend somewhat on where you are in your growth and how broad your portfolio is, but i think along 3 'north star' metric dimensions: * Business KPI, that PMM indirectly influence: SQLs, Win Rate - ideally PMM tracks the trend over time rather than the absolute to seperate the signal from the noise * Activity KPI: are we shipping what we committed to ship, and are we doing it on time, with quality * Leverage KPI: is what PMM produce being used. I try to move beyond content downloads or views and push for utilisation e.g. are our enablement assets connected to opptys and driving pipe

Great question - Because I am so focused on Industry Marketing right now, I have it divided between Product Marketing KPIs and Industry Marketing KPIs:  For Product Marketing:  * Conversions NARR  * Attachment rates - new logo and cross selling * Product ASP - the sales price, keep a close eye on this Industry marketers on the other hand look at: * Industry/Segment NARR * Gross Pipeline * Win/close rates

1. Revenue - this should specificially be marketing contributed or influenced.  2. Retention - this is typically a percentage and the target number will be dependent on the maturity of your prodcut line. Its also possible to see this target exceed 100% if you are increasing your price on your product or if you are focused on upsell / account expansion based on your marketing strategy.  3. Net promoter score - or any other key indicator of cusotmer satisfaction. If all three of these things are positive, you’ve likely got happy customers, and I’m happy if the customers are happy!

It depends on seniority level of hire, but typically I look for experience in a customer-centric role: marketing or customer success in SaaS (B2B a plus). Key attributes for me are: detail oriented/technical prowess, storytelling/written abilities, empathy, collaborative, curious, systems mindset and high level of owernship/autonomy.  You can suss out traits like these by choosing a short take home assignment upfront as a screening assessment. Ask the candidate to "teach you something" (anything, not necessary tech-specific). The process of teaching will tease out most of the above and also show (v. tell) their skill level + fit for your business. Other questions could be: * Tell me about a complex solution you marketed - how did you ensure the internal team and customers understood the value and got excitement from the offering? * How do you prioritize competing projects across teams? * How do you measure success of your programs? * How do you stay up to date on industry trends?

Storytelling is the biggest trait is look for. I want all of my product marketers to be able to tell stories that anyone can follow that inspire action. Everyone I interview is asked to provide a writing sample so I can see if they’ve got “it.” The next trait is problem solving: In every interview I ask the same question: Tell me about a go-to-market that failed. I don’t care so much about the “why” of the failure; I want to know how you determined it was off track, and what you did about it to get back on track. And third is collaboration. How does someone build relationships? How can they earn a seat at the table with a diverse group of stakeholders? If they aren’t able to collaborate, it isn’t a role for them. You have to want to be the glue that holds a team together.

Cultural nuances are a real thing. Get comfortable with not having the same amount of high touch, but bear in mind that the regional differences do matter. In the UK words that we would spell with a Z (materialize) are spelled with an S (materialise). These innocuous differences do matter. In a former role we sold a platform that managed entitlements, and that literally had no direct translation in French.  In many Nordic countries gifting isn't just frowned upon, it's against the law. So my biggest learnings are that you need to understand everything about doing business in a region, not just whether your solution has potential demand.

Biggest learnings on scaling a business globally: * etablish product market fit in core market first.  * beta/pilot core PMF offering in new markets before going big on strategy/execution. listen/learn and adjust to market reactions (in terms of positioning/messaging) and enable team from there. * messaging is not one-size-fits all - test your way to what good looks like. * decentralize PMM to support global efforts. 

The most important thing is understanding that regions work at different paces—the rate of acceleration between role types and career progression. And it’s also important to understand the hierarchies of every region: While it might be OK in the US, for example, to get direct answers from team members of every level, when you work with teams overseas, sometimes it’s best to start with the leadership. And small gestures can go a long way toward building international teams—international-friendly meeting times and virtual group events go a long way. On a business level, you have to build a market strategy around regional nuances: What compels a client to act? How is that different from other regions? How can we adapt proven strategies to specific areas? Awareness and responsiveness are crucial.