Chris Haberle

Earn exec trust and alignment. If an organization has never had product marketing before, they still have been doing some of the core product marketing activities. They have words to describe the offering, there are pricing tiers established, etc. This also means that they may feel like their messaging is great because they did it. You coming in and saying "here is why your messaging is broken..." may not land the way hope it will. Before you join: * Figure out why they haven't had PMM thus far. The work has probably been done by a co-founder. Really ask difficult questions in the interview process that help you parse whether the exec team understands PMM and wants to level-up, or if they are looking to just offload work and will want to review everything. * Understand who has built trust and how. Does the CMO have a long tenure and believe strongly in the PMM function? You're probably in good stead. Is there a new (or no) CMO? Ask deeper questions to others in the interview process that have a long tenure and how they built trust. First 30 days: * In many cases, the quickest way to put points on the board is to help sales. If the company has lacked a PMM function, you can probably bet that enablement is the wild west. Doing something as simple as organizing enablement into a single structured repo will earn you some sales friends. Go talk to them as much as possible...they will happily tell you all the enablement things that need fixing. Prioritize those and fix the most impactful. * Be quick to show a strategic plan on what you are doing, why, and some estimated timelines. Ask for feedback from sales and product and overcommunicate to the exec team. You need to show them that you recognize the issues, that you know how to fix them, and (VERY IMPORTANT) that they cannot be fixed overnight. 30-90 days * Ship ship ship. Execute against that plan, particularly on the tactical sales help. * For big high level messaging, do not do this alone or it will fail. Gather data through customer, sales, and exec conversations. Walk the exec team through the data and reasons for any new messaging options you are choosing. Give them a chance to absorb that and give feedback. While getting messaging right is incredibly important, it is probably even more important at this point to continue to earn exec trust and alignment to give future you permission to operate more boldly and autonomously.

Back when Microsoft released Windows 7 in the late 00's, they ran a campaign that had different people saying different things, but the suffix was always "...and Windows 7 was my idea". I'm certain there were a ton of internal egos hurt from the folks that actually built Windows 7 but the point was to land collective ownership rather than individual brilliance. So, the very short answer here is, you gotta bring people along to get adoption and give people ownership. "I'm a seller/co-founder/engineer, and this product messaging was my idea." Others have provided great ways to succeed, so i'll give you the best ways to fail at this: 1/ Give in to pressure to launch too fast: If you are reading this, you certainly have been told to just hurry up and put words on the page. Resist. You will fail and nobody will adopt your messaging. Write a draft you feel great about. Run it by influential people (sellers, CSMs, leadership) to get early feedback before you are trying to get it "approved". Pressure test it in low-risk sales calls. Use 3P testing sites. Pushed to go faster? Talk about all the hours that will be wasted and deals you will lose by launching messaging that you have no idea if your ICP resonates with. 2/ Keep your ego at the center: Messaging is core to your job, right? Stand tall, you know better than anyone how to do this! All correct, but not focused on the right outcome. You want the messaging to resonate and be pitched across segments, sales calls, analyst briefings, web, etc, right? Put your ego aside. Get buy in. Do the internal tour. Your KPIs will thank you soon. 3/ Launch once and don't measure: We love launches, right? The repetition can get rote, but it takes the repetition and signs of success for folks to get behind it. Listen to sales calls... bonus points if you have a tool that helps you set up trackers and aggregate data. I recently launched messaging and showed up to our sellers with proof that the sellers that have adopted were winning deals at a magnitude higher than the ones that had not. You don't need to believe that my words are the best words, but the win/loss data doesn't lie.