Brittany Sudlow

Making the jump from presales into product marketing is very realistic! Here are some areas I would focus on Talk the PMM talk Study the frameworks: Get comfortable with messaging houses, value-matrix exercises, and persona message mapping, GTM plan, etc. Read some classics: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford for positioning, Crossing the Chasm for buyer journeys, and the Sharebird and Product Marketing Alliance blog for tactical how-tos. Get certified: A short course (e.g. Pragmatic Institute’s ...Read More

Great question, these are the areas I would focus on as someone who has spent my whole product marketing career to date, in SaaS.  Speak SaaS-ese fluently Get comfortable with the key metrics to track CAC, LTV, MRR/ARR, churn and ARR.  Know the key levers or channels to move those metrics. Learn the difference between sales-led and product led growth (plg) Play with some key tools Onboard yourself to a number of SaaS products, observe the differences between the products, their onboarding their ...Read More

I'm a big fan of both, so I'm glad people are thinking about them — though I'll admit I call it a "prep" before and a "retro" after, just to keep things a bit lighter than "postmortem" suggests. The real work happens in how you structure these conversations with stakeholders. At its core, you're trying to align with senior leadership, and that requires truly understanding three things upfront: your audience, the specific topic, and what decision actually needs to be made. Then you ruthlessly sim ...Read More

^Agree. For more tactial tips: LinkedIn has some great overview courses on Product Marketing that is included with LI Premium. There are also local meetup.com groups that are worth checking out. Building a network and conducting informational interviews is always helpful and good practice for customer interviews you'll conduct as a PMM. For practice or even a makeshift "portfolio" you could take a current company and build out a fake GTM plan or updated messaging for the site. Presenting this in ...Read More

Great question! Here are the areas I found to be the most helpful in standing out and making an impact at a startup. Customer Conversations: Get on Zoom or in-person frequently. Nothing beats direct feedback for sharpening your positioning, uncovering new use cases and spotting friction points before they become crises. Generalist & DG Mindset: PMM at this stage wears every hat—demand gen, content, field, product launches, partner co-marketing. Embrace the breadth: it’s your fastest path to ...Read More

If you want any kind of quantitative data, purchasing a tool is really the only way to achieve that. I recently evaluated all the sales enablment options and went with DocSend. You can track any content engagement to accounts in SalesForce which you can tie to eventual Closed Won and Closed Lost to track true ROI.  I agree with the above comments for qualitative evaluation. It's all about building good relationships with sales so they will be transparent and candid about what works and doesn't w ...Read More

Think of launching PMM like any other product—hook them, place it where they live, invite them in, then prove the value. For example: Lead with a knockout headline Treat your intro like an ad: short, benefit-driven, and impossible to ignore. Plant it in the right ecosystems Don’t just post in Marketing channels—share in Sales, CS, Product, Enablement, even the leadership Slack. Wherever key customer questions happen, PMM should be top of mind. Open the doors with Office Hours Set up a an office ...Read More

I’m sure you are well on your way to CMO! Here’s what I’d double-down on from a PMM POV Digital & growth marketing fluency (Demand Gen) Get really comfy with every campaign type (paid, SEO, email, ABM), the core metrics (CAC, LTV, MRR/ARR, churn) and how pipeline generation shifts between PLG and sales-led motions. This is the area I would go deepest on other marketing functions. 10 years ago CMOs usually came up from DG…that’s pivoting to PMM lately but still heavily DG focused.   Brand sav ...Read More

I would recommend starting small and going big, later. Startup phaseHonestly, I’d kick things off in a scrappy high-growth startup. When you’re figuring out which slice of marketing you love, there’s no substitute for: Wearing every hat – one day you’re in demand gen, the next you’re doing PR, then you're setting up a conference booth. Creative constraints from tiny budgets force you to test, learn and iterate very fast. Rapid visibility in a small company can help your successes get seen—and re ...Read More

Of course, the classic answer is sales, marketing, and product — and that's always true. But the nuance is that every organization is different, and you need to figure out where your actual bottlenecks are. If you're constantly running into data inconsistencies or hitting technical limitations, get closer to engineering. If your sales function is still relatively new, build a real relationship with sales ops — they'll unblock you faster than anyone. And if you're in an organization with a decent ...Read More