Charlene Wang

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 create content that talks about how your company has designed product capabilities to addresses a specific pain point compared to other solutions on the market and why that product design provides more value to the customer. From there, Sales Ops / Sales Enablement may package the content into an e-Learning or sales training and also supplement the content with success stories from successful reps and conduct trainings on how to present the information and handle objections. Objection handling is an example of where there may be overlap and collaboration between PMM and Sales Ops. In some cases, Sales Ops may start creating the objection handling content but will likely need to circle back to Product Marketing for PMM's perspective on the content to address the objections. In some cases, PMM will start creating the objection handling content but will consult Sales Ops on the most effective way to teach that content to sales.

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 about new products and/or features that have come out in each release), whereas others can be updated less frequently (e.g. a broad assessment of the overall market or TAM). Once you've identified the cadence of updates and backed out the volume of work, then you can examine how much capacity the team has and align that capacity to tackle the highest priority updates. If there is not enough capacity, you can either reallocate the team to tackle only the higher priority updates or bring on additional team members if the priority content updates are not happening in a timely fashion. The key here is about prioritization -- not everything needs to be updated all the time. * Content Delivery: Once the required updates have been created by the team, then it's important to deliver this updated content as efficiently and quickly as possible. This is where having a good content management and delivery system is critical. Coupa uses a sales enablement system that we've internally named "The Vault", and this platform allows us to push out new content to the field in an organized way in real-time as product marketing content is updated in our internal file systems. What makes this system effective is its ability to manage versions, control access, and make it easy for the field to find the latest and greatest content at all times. Moreover, as a Product Marketer, I get to see real-time analytics on content usage to better target my efforts.

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, whereas Growth Marketers focus both on volume of leads and conversion from stage to stage, Product Marketers more directly impact conversion of leads. That said, a good Product Marketer should also understand what’s driving lead creation and be able to identify where positioning and messaging can be adjusted to support additional leads, e.g. through messaging on the website and other top of funnel assets. Having a solid win/loss analysis program to understand reasons for conversions is one of the most powerful measurement tools of a Product Marketer. Ideally a win/loss program should extend earlier in the pipeline, beyond even when deals are created (where many win/loss programs traditionally focus). Product Marketing teams should be able to understand wins and losses throughout the pipeline to identify what’s driving conversions across the board, create specific hypotheses around how different positioning or messaging can help, and test whether these hypotheses were correct. The impact of Product Marketing should ideally be quantified. However, measuring specific KPIs can be impractical, so more commonly impact is shown qualitatively. The challenge with measuring Product Marketing contribution is that it’s a combination of art and science. Demonstrating impact requires a strong understanding of how PMM orchestrates GTM strategy and the ability to highlight specific contributions. The best approaches I’ve seen involve a combination of explaining work that was done and why it was done, project-based outcomes that Product Marketing drove (e.g. number of case studies, improving conversions against competitors, driving adoption before and after campaigns, etc.), quantitative and qualitative feedback on messaging effectiveness, and partnering with Demand Gen and Sales to show collective revenue outcomes and specific contributions.

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. Before that even happens, product marketers should be able to see that the field has either downloaded or otherwise used the content (content adoption) and usually provided positive feedback on the content based on how their prospect conversations or current sales cycles are going. 

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 rethink of the go-to-market strategy. Is your messaging and content properly targeted to this audience? Has your Growth Marketing / Demand Gen team adequately generated leads from this new pool of buyers? Does the new target persona require additional aircover from brand and PR? Will targeting multiple personas create conflict within sales and are there ways to segment sales and/or sales channels to better manage this conflict? These are important questions that Product Marketing and Marketing more generally should consider as part of the new product launch.

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 other teams to drive a cohesive and winning approach to customers and the market. What does Product Marketing care about? Initially, we care about whether the messaging we provide to the organization and market is resonating. That includes looking at messaging adoption, clarity, and effectiveness. Ultimately, we care about whether we’re driving revenue and customer success for the business. We particularly monitor win rates to understand whether our positioning is effective. We also care about how messaging impacts lead generation, product adoption, and customer retention and upsell. Why does this matter? A strong Product Marketing function drives clear and consistent messaging and a GTM approach that’s more likely to win in the market.

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 functions. Usually, market research, positioning and core messaging, such as pitch decks and datasheets, are owned by the Product Marketing team, though responsibilities often extend beyond this. Product Marketing interacts with many other marketing teams, most commonly with Demand Generation (or Growth Marketing). Product Marketing often works closely with Demand Generation to provide input into campaign strategy and content. Content Strategy sometimes sits within Product Marketing but is more often a separate organization or a branch of Demand Generation that takes positioning from Product Marketing to come up with content to feed campaigns. In many organizations, Customer Marketing sits within Product Marketing to align customer advocacy more closely with core messaging, though this may also be a separate organization. Analyst Relations often sits within Product Marketing due to its close ties to market positioning and category creation, but can also be in a Corporate Marketing or Communications group that also includes PR. Team structures can vary greatly based on the type of GTM motion (product-led vs sales-led), the target audience (especially B2B vs. B2C companies), the size of company, whether companies have one product or multiple products, and more. Ultimately, a Product Marketing leader needs to collaborate cross-functionally and build the team in a way that best aligns to the organization's needs.

The product team ultimately wants to be successful and launch products that will help the company achieve better outcomes. Most teams are happy to give you a seat at the table if you can bring valuable insights that they didn't previously have. Great Product Marketers often dive deep into the market, competitors, buyer personas, buying process, analyst community, voice of the customer, etc. The product team generally won't have the capacity or direct exposure to all of these areas to have a very informed perspective on all of these audiences. If you can pull together valuable insights and present them clearly to show where the product roadmap should be adjusted and how this can help achieve better outcomes, most teams would welcome the input. I would start by picking one area where you can provide an easily actionable recommendation that will help the product team achieve a quick win. I would make it easy for the team to incorporate your suggestion into the roadmap and measure how this helped improve the outcome of a launch. Try to get a few quick wins that you can point to and then build momentum with the product team over time. As you show over time how you've helped everyone drive better outcomes, the product team should become more willing and eager to involve you early and often in the planning process.

Great competitive analysis comes from access to the right information, meaningful insights into the data, and addressing the needs of sales in real-time. From an information access perspective, it's important to find the right sources of information first and to do this efficiently. This should come from figuring out both what you can easily access from sources available to you (perhaps online research and analyst perspectives) and where it makes sense to put in th effort to dig out further information (for example, finding former customers or industry experts who can provide specific information, such as pricing). This information finding step is key and can be very time consuming if not properly defined -- what are the most important things that you need to understand about your competitors? Once you've defined what this is, then you can better identify how to effectively target getting that information quickly. Uncovering meaningful insights is easier to control by yourself since this usually just involves your approach to analyzing data. I highly suggest again thinking through what are the key questions that you need to answer to help sales win. From there, I really try to take an 80/20 approach to getting to those answers as quickly as possible (i.e., what activities can I do that only require 20% of my time but drive 80% of the impact for questions that really matter to the sales team). For example, you may discover that the key thing that sales needs to win is convince customers that your competitor is too expensive. In that case, try to conduct a quick analysis to communicate that you and your competitors are charging an order of magnitude difference in prices (e.g. their total cost is around tens of thousands of dollars, wheres yours is thousands of dollars). In this example, you don't need to put in the significant extra work to get down to exact numbers if orders of magnitude is plenty. Finally, you want to address the needs of sales in real-time. This starts with understanding what's happening in a sales process -- I like to both ask a couple of reps how prospect conversations went and to selectively sit in on or review recordings for one or two prospect conversations to see firsthand what customers are brigning up. Another way to get to this information is to run a great win/loss analysis program. Understanding the actual needs of sales in a prospect conversation will be key to helping you properly target both what information you need and which insights you have to drive from your dta. Good luck with this! Product Marketing is often a lightly staffed function that supports so many critical needs across the organization, and I can certainly empathize :)

Product documentation can be owned by several teams, most commonly split between a documentation team, product marketing, and product management. Who manages each piece of content depends on the primary function of that content: * Documentation Team: This team is dedicated to educating customers on how to use or implement product capabilities. They provide a standard set of detailed information on what each feature does, intended behavior, configurations, and other information to help internal support teams, partners, and customers use the product. Example documentation includes feature-specific descriptive articles on a knowledge base, information on release timelines and capabilities, educational videos teaching users how a feature behaves, etc. * Product Marketing: Product Marketing is primarily concerned with positioning capabilities ultimately to drive sales and/or renewals. Product Marketing will create documentation that's meant to describe the value of the product and communicate how capabilities are differentiated in the market. This documentation is usually at a higher-level than those provided by a Documentation or Product Management team and is targeted towards supporting sales teams, account managers (sometimes customer success managers), prospects, and decision makers at customer accounts to help articulate the value of the product. Example documentation includes product datasheets, videos/content to generate buzz about differentiated capabilities, positioning and messaging content and FAQs, etc. * Product Management: Product Management is primarily focused on releasing valuable capabilities and driving adoption of features and often works with the Documentation team to document new features at they get released. When customers need more technical, specific, or sensitive information than the Documentation team generally provides, Product Management will step in to create these documents and/or supplement articles from Documentation. At some companies, Product Management will also manage and monitor a community portal where customers can post questions and feature requests. Example documentation include product information guides to help internal teams across customer support and go-to-market understand new features, FAQs / whitepapers on commonly requested product-specific topics (such as privacy and data security), internal and sometimes external product wikis, etc.