Charlene Wang

Product Marketing and Growth perform different roles in a marketing team and need to be measured in different ways. Whereas Growth is often easier to quantify, concrete measurements that can be attributed to Product Marketing only become clearer as you get further down the funnel, once deals have been created and the effectiveness of positioning is easier to see on a case-by-case basis. However, Product Marketing does meaningfully contribute to every stage of the GTM journey.   At a high level, ...Read More

I like to start by defining what is Product Marketing, what we care about, and why it matters.   What is Product Marketing? Product Marketing lives and breathes everything surrounding our target audiences. We deeply understand and empathize with audiences internally and externally, creating differentiated positioning based on our products and messaging that resonates. Product Marketers are masters of storytelling, strategy, and structure. We quarterback across product, marketing, sales, and othe ...Read More

Different companies will define product marketing and sales ops / sales enablement in different ways. The distinction tends to run along a spectrum where on the one hand, Product Marketing will lead the creation of content that focuses on market positioning and differentiation, and on the other hand, Sales Ops will lead specific activities or content that helps translate that marketing positioning in a way that resonates with the experience of being in sales. For example, a Product Marketer may ...Read More

I’ve found that the biggest challenge with Product Marketing prioritization is that stakeholders from across the company lack visibility into what’s being requested across the company, how requests are prioritized, and what’s realistic for PMM to address with existing capacity. This lack of visibility often results in too many requests making it onto PMM’s plate and stakeholders feeling that PMM is either not delivering on their requests or doing a subpar job trying to keep all the plates spinni ...Read More

There's two parts to keeping all the above content up to date, including content creation and content delivery: Content Creation: This is all about capacity planning of the Product Marketing team on the capacity of the team to update content vs. the amount of content that needs to be updated. First, you need to define what content must be kept up-to-date and how frequently these updates need to happen. For example, some product marketing content needs to be updated frequently (e.g. information a ...Read More

This is a classic tension for many product marketers—getting to market fast vs. shipping a truly polished solution. This is an area that requires careful collaboration with product management and other GTM teams to toe a fine line. While there’s no perfect answer, here’s how I typically tackle it: Define “Minimum Viable Readiness”: Work with Product to outline the minimum acceptance criteria for a product’s first public release (e.g., performance benchmarks, stability, must-have features). At a ...Read More

Every marketing team operates differently, so the answer depends on the organization.   In general, Product Marketers own the core positioning of the company & products and are responsible for translating this into messaging that wins deals and market share. To do so, Product Marketers need to deeply understand target audiences, the buying process, competitors and the market, and the company and product(s). Product Marketing often sits in Marketing, sometimes in Product, and rarely in other ...Read More

To identify the right KPIs, I would first start by defining your overall company and GTM strategic objectives. For example, do you want to increase market share, launch a new product, penetrate a new market segment, accelerate pipeline velocity, etc.? What you need to do and which KPIs you need to measure will differ greatly depending on your overall goal. These KPIs may vary widely, potentially including messaging adoption & consistency rates, brand awareness, win rates, revenue generated, ...Read More

In this case, you would first want to enable your sales teams on the new persona, including what this persona generally "looks like", relevant pain points, and other information to help sales successfully reach these personas. You will have more a heavy lift in educating sales on how to successfully sell this product compared to a product that's built for the personas that your sales team is already used to targeting. Beyond sales enablement, new target personas will sometimes require a broader ...Read More

Sales enablement success should ultimately drive sales success, including the size & number of deals closed won and win rates. Leading sales enablement indicators of sales success include adoption of content, sales feedback, and feedback from prospects/customers as part of win/loss analysis. In particular, if messaging is done effectively and rolled out properly to the sales team, then the win/loss analysis should show that the messaging ultimately resonated with the prospect upon deal close ...Read More