Elizabeth Brigham

Hi everyone! Great to be here with you today! Thanks for sending me so many thoughtful questions...digging in now! This is a tricky one as I've seen 3 different models in my recent career history: Mid-sized tech company where product marketing and demand gen were separate groups, yet connected at the hip Small start up where I ran all marketing functions and thus we were one :) Morningstar, where my team has both product marketing and demand generation responsibilities, although we do share pipe ...Read More

Hi all - great to be with you here today live from my home office and spinning vinyl on my turn table as I answer your questions! In terms of sweet messaging templates, I generally go back to the Crossing the Chasm standard mad libs version: For _________________________________________________ (target customer/audience member)• Who ________________________________________________ (statement of need or opportunity)• The _________________________________________________ (product name) • is a ____ ...Read More

I'm not sure I'm fully understanding the premise of the latter half of this question, so I will address the first part. For those interested in this question, if you can provide me more explanation around what you mean by "support revenue growth reactively," I'm happy to respond. On the former, how can product marketing own more of the funnel strategy. I'll highlight how we're working at Morningstar on my team in the three areas you laid out: Acquisition - Product marketing has a particularly st ...Read More

I'm a fan of the highlighter test method. We generally will take advantage of being present at an event (know this is challenging in today's environment) and take about 20 copies of two versions of our messaging, then sit down with clients/non-clients and ask them to highlight words that resonate with them, words they don't understand and words that don't resonate with them. Once they go through that exercise, we go back and ask them why they highlighted words in the ways that they did. We then ...Read More

The most important KPI is closed won business. If your sales team knows to whom, how, what and at what time to sell (e.g. when to walk away), you've done your job.  Other internal metrics to consider are: Managers' qualitative review/certification of sales ability to pitch and demo (the demo piece may vary based on the size of your business or product complexity) How often sales teams are using marketing materials in sales cycles, how clear they are to prospects and if any were critical to closi ...Read More

What has been challenging for me in the past is not having a ton of reference customers and/or data to back up messaging for a new product launch. This is a delicate balance between making sure that you have product-market fit before a major launch, having those reference customers with some data and wanting to wait before you have "enough." Depending on the market conditions, you may just need to ship and launch and then work to really target early adopters, get some good data validation and th ...Read More

Hmmm...I actually haven't had the experience of PMM not having budget to spend, so not sure I can really speak directly to this. I have worked at a start up where we basically have no budget at all, but that's another story on scrapiness. In general though, any time I've had to write a business case to get funding for an initiative, I typically follow this format: How will my initiative materially affect the business? Revenue growth? Cost efficiencies/economies of scale? Market expansion? Why am ...Read More

I find the root cause of this problem is a lack of trust. Everyone wants to get involved because either they don't feel like their voice will be heard otherwise or because they don't trust what has been delivered in the past. This is a tricky problem, but here's how I'd break it down: Product Marketing has a responsibility to clearly articulate and hold themselves accountable to delivering on their promise to the organization, full stop.  Spending time with, listening to (really listening to), a ...Read More

Stakeholder communications and management can vary widely in my experience working at start ups to some of the largest enterprises in the world (Disney). When you're working with a founder CEO who has a very specific vision for positioning and messaging, you want to make sure that you know all the history in the development of the company/product so you have empathy for her "why." However, I like to say that history is informative, but not prescriptive. You need to be aware of how your market, c ...Read More

I don't think you ever stop iterating on messaging as long as you're developing new aspects of your product. For a product launch, again, I would make sure that you've tested your messaging with somewhere between 5-20 clients and non-clients and then ship what comes out of those tests. Product marketers and product managers need to be in lock step with the roadmap and what rises to the level of changing messaging. Similarly, if there's a significant market event - m&a activity, new competito ...Read More