Ambika Aggarwal

Here's what I like to put into a positioning doc: 1. What market are we in ? How big is this market (TAM)? What's our serviceable obtainable market (SOM) ? 2. What does the competitve landscape look like? 2. Who are our customers? (buyer personas) 3. What challenges do they face? (key pain points) 4. What is our solution? (description of your offering) 5. How do we solve their problems? (solution/benefit statement) 6. What makes us unique (differentiators) From what it sounds like you'll need a positioning doc and a Go-to-market plan which will also incude your marketing and sales plan ( marketing mix, channel partnerships, sales plays etc). 

This is a great question and one that generally takes refinement over time based on feedback from sales. Here's what you can do to make sure your competitive intel is beneficial and leveraged by your sales team: 1. Conduct in-depth Win/Loss research - identify the key lost and won reasons that come up from your deals from the notes that reps are inputting into salesforce but also from win/loss interviews. You can hire a win/loss vendor to do this. I've personally worked with Clozd and Primary Intel and they've been great in accelerating these competitive insights. 2. Survey reps, listen to calls or simply talk to reps to find out what the most common objections are per competitor - remember to take a per competitor approach here since objections vary across the board. 3. Find reps who have successfully closed deals with those competitors and listen to their Gong calls and reach out to them to find out what worked and how they handled objections. Gathering all this intel together, craft together a "Swords" and "Shields" playbook that outlines your "Swords" - what reps should LEAD with as competitive strengths against that particulary competitor accompanied by proof points and case studies, and "Shields" - how reps can handle objections with talk tracks, proof points and case studies. When you roll this out make sure you highlight the fact that the playbook was crafted based on data and direct feedback from them on what objections they're struggling with most. 

The goal of competitive positioning is to own a space in the market that's yours by focusing on differentiated value. In order to fully be able to answer the question of what your differentiated value is or should be, you'll need to do some analysis. The following are key buckets that you'll need to dive into: 1. Market Analysis/ Profile: Market Size, Market Trends, Market Competitors, Market lifecycle stage 2. Segmentation& Personas -Determine your segmentation strategy and create a detailed buyer persona profile that represents a target buyer in that particular segment 3. Competitive Analysis - Direct, Indirect, Future competitors 4. SWOT Analysis - Synthesize the information above and create a SWOT analyze to highlight strenghs, weaknesses, opportunities, threats 5. Bring it all together into a value proposition that serves as the basis for your competitive positioning (think about things like product leadership, operational execellence, customer intimacy as value drivers)

You'll want to create materials that you can package up and disseminate via a central hub like Highspot, Seismic, Showpad, Confluence etc. When you roll this out make sure you lead with "what's it in for them?" (faster deal cycles, higher ACV, etc) It depends on who you're trying to enable (AEs, AMs, technical sales engineering) but typical effective competitive positioning materials include: 1. Battlecards 2. Swords and Shields (offensive/defensive plays) supported by customer stories and proof points 3. Product differentiation deep dive (but be careful not to turn this into a feature comparison as we don't want reps to feel like they need to get down into individual feature wars) 4. Enablement session that also highlights a handful of reps who have had success closing deals against key competitors Also, make sure you instill a regular cadence around disseminating competitive positioning and intel. Creating a slack channel can also help crowdsource reps who are closing competitive deals and elevating their talk tracks and best practices to the rest of the team.

Being able to craft a compelling narrative for your product or solution that is targeted, differentiated, and drives urgency is one of the core skillsets of a PMM at any level. As you get more senior the scope of that narrative changes. Instead of covering one solution area or one particular audience, you might be covering multiple areas and audiences. At the director and above level you are likely covering the entire platform narrative and ensuring cohesion with the solutions/ICP level narratives. In terms of the day to day work, this looks like the following 1. Talking to customers 2. Listening to Gong calls 3. Analyzing competitors messaging 4. Crafting messaging frameworks 5. Empowering your marketing teams with the right messaging for campaigns 6. Creating sales assets (pitch decks, 1 pagers, outbound sequences)

As the Head of PMM for a startup that didn't have Product Marketing, you have three goals as your onboarding 1) Build a solid understanding of your industry, product, and target market 2) Get to know your stakeholders and their priorities 3) Establish the role of PMM in supporting the company's strategy and goals. Build a solid understanding of your industry, product and target market As a PMM you need to bring a strong perspective on your industry, your customers needs, and quickly translate that into differentiated messaging and GTM strategy. In your first 30-60 days you should talk to sales and CS, listen to Gong calls, talk to analysts and read review sites and market research reports to understand the competitive landscape as well. Get to know your team, stakeholders & their priorities Very quickly you'll need to start executing and gaining some small wins. You can only do that once you truly understand what your stakeholders priorities are and where you (and eventually your team) can partner with them. Key stakeholders to pay special attention to are Head of Marketing, Head of Product, Head of Sales, and Head of CS. Establish the role of PMM in supporting the company's strategy & goals Towards the end of your 30/60/90 you should be socializing your team's charter, goals, priorities for the upcoming quarter or half of year. This is an area to showcase the company what Product Marketing should look like and how strategic and critical of a role it truly is.

Product Marketing org structure varies depending on the size, stage of growth, and nature of your product (i.e multiple product, persona, ICP). Ultimately you want to make sure you have enough coverage and the right skillset to cover the key pillars of Product Marketing (product launches, pipe gen, sales enablement, competitive intel, pricing and packaging). Here's a model that I've seen work really well: 1. Core PMMs - These are product marketing managers who align very closely with Product Management. They cover either a particular product in a multi-product organization or a grouping of capabilities (i.e AI). You'll want core PMMs to be adept at partnering with product and bringing them market, customer, and competitive insights to influence the product roadmap. You'll also want your core PMMs to have some GTM launch experience. 2. Solutions PMMs - These are PMMS who cover GTM for a particular segment, industry or persona. They go really deep on their particular segment and craft solutions focused messaging, integrated campaigns, sales collateral etc. Their closest partners are growth marketing, sales, and CS and they tend to be exceptional storytellers, skilled at messaging & positioning, and well versed in demand gen strategies. 3. Specialized PMMs - Pricing and packaging often lives in product marketing and requires a specific skillset, as does competitive intel. Often times sales enablement can also live under PMM in a smaller organization but as the organization grows the enablement org will typically sit under the sales team.

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." 

In my experience it makes sense to reevaluate your customer segmentation in conjunction with your annual or half year planning in the context of your broader business goals (i.e is your business trying to move upmarket? downmarket? are there new personas or industries you're trying to target) There can also be major company milestones like new product launches or M&A that warrant you to evaluate your customer segmentation. Additionally, if you're looking at segments for your campaigns and pipe-gen efforts and you're running targeted campaigns against certain segments and cohorts, you'll want to evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns at the segment level to determine effectiveness and any changes you want to make.

I love this question because it's SO important to get early signals and validation that your messaging is headed in the right direction. Here are a few things I like to do: 1. Once you have landed on a few value props and benefits you want to test out, run it by the person in your organization who represents the key buyer you're trying to go after (i.e if you sell to HR, run it by your Chief People officer) 2. Test your messaging through focus groups made up of prospects and customers 3. Test your messaging through a customer advisory board (CAB) if you have one 4. And lastly, we have been using Wynter.com to test our messaging (headlines, landing pages, or buyer interviews) and it's been really helpful. 5. You can also run some paid ad tests with specific messages to see which ones perform better but this may take slightly longer to set up and run.