Anand Patel

Below are some key metrics we track, many already shared by David and Ellie, but I have bolded a few that are slightly different: Revenue of product line (or product portfolio) Average lead age or length of sale # of customer interactions Customer NPS Average win rate (win/loss ratio) The average lead age is an interesting one for enterprise B2B companies, as those sales cycles can take some time and have certain friction points. As product marketing, are you finding ways to resolve those fricti ...Read More

One of the things I have noticed during my time at various companies is that PMs may not get the opportunity to interact and engage with customers as much as they like. Too many times, they are very development focused, and roadmap is led by HiPPOs. If this is the case in your orginazation, I would make customer engagement and understanding the primary role for a PMM. You can then take that insight and knowledge and feed it back to the Product team, hopefully building a strong relationship.  Tha ...Read More

I like Zach's suggestion of finding a good mix but there can be times when a larger story just has more impact. At the end of the day, the key thing is to think in themes, and how those themes are going to drive value and impact for your customers. If a feature or item by itself will have large impact, then why wait to share the story? But if that feature has more impact when wrapped up as part of a larger story, then packaging it as such. I wrote an overview of this very topic here: https://med ...Read More

I've had to build out product marketing at both a large organization (4,000 employees) and a growing organization (150 employees), and I would say the biggest surprise/challenge is creating the right working relationships.  Product: Defining who owns what since PMs may have been managing many of the product marketing activities themselves. Another challenge is communication and visibility. It seems fairly obvious to bring in product marketing early into the development lifecycle but when a compa ...Read More

I completely agree with RJ. One of the biggest mistakes I have seen is determining launch KPIs without a full understanding of who your target audience/market is. I have a clear example of this where product marketing was brought in just a few weeks prior to launch of a product, and the leadership team had put together lofty sales goals based on our current portfolio (as this was an upsell product).  After spending some significant time understanding the benefits and value of the product, and le ...Read More

We tier releases for a reason—you can't scream about everything otherwise customers will shut you out. That being said, there is still a ton of value in communicating even smaller releases. Some ways to handle these tier 2 and 3 releases are: Include these in your external-facing release notes/changelog. You see a lot of companies have this live on their website somewhere, a dedicated landing page, within their help center, or sometimes in-app. As Erin mentioned, some of these features, especial ...Read More