Eric Bensley

This is a fun one that I've spent many hours chatting about with folks. Positioning is more of a high level concept about where you fit into your target audiences head in a different way than anyone else, Messaging is more about how you say that position to the target audience. Let's take a made-up example: Let's say I market an organic dog food that has no processed ingredients and sustainable packaging. (there's an eating your own dogfood joke here but i digress) Positioning = The only dog foo ...Read More

There's no perfect way to do this. People hate when I say this but when it comes to messaging, I'm much more into qualitative feedback vs. quantitative. If you similarly hate me, feel free to move on. If not, here are a few qualitative measures I use: Can your sales team remember it and pitch it on calls? If you use call recording software with your team, take a listen. If your sales team is pitching it, it's working. If not, it's not. Do a webinar or event and ask for feedback after. Incentiviz ...Read More

Generally, this comes down to your company priorities. It is hard to do both well so here are a few questions you can ask to determine which approach is correct: What percentage of your new revenue comes from SMB vs Enterprise? How are your sellers organized SMB vs. Enterprise? What customer stories are more compelling to you target audience? Where are your competitors focused and where is there whitespace? Which target will help you get to your revenue goals faster? To make this decision, I wou ...Read More

Call me old school but I think positioning statements do this VERY well. Here's an exercise I've used and seen success with in building alignment on the "Why" of a company or brand. Create list of key stakeholders who have a say in your value prop (think like key sales leaders, product, marketing, etc) Create a meeting for the entire group to get together and work through the value prop. Assign homework in advance: everyone send you a completed version of the positioning statement for your compa ...Read More

I don't know if the skills change dramatically, and that prob feels counterintuitive. Of course, if you're going for an AI PMM role, you need to know the space in depth. And I'd say it's helpful to understand the AI space for most tech company PMM roles right now. That said, communication is communication. Gen AI tools can help you get to an MVP faster but the nuance of understanding the buyer, channel, and company goals is something only a human can grok. In a previous answer, I covered that go ...Read More

Communication is #1. This is what I look for in senior leaders regardless of focus area. If it's a core PMM, I want to see launch assets or customer-facing assets. If it's a GTM PMM, I want to see internal decks walking through how strategies were set up and sold to stakeholders. Here's what I look for in communication: -Is it concise? -Is it clear? -Is it compelling? Details matter here. I look for people that intentionally choose every work and image. The failproof way to learn this is work on ...Read More

I think it's very helpful. For those reading this that haven't read Clayton Christensen's work, here's a good summary of the concept of "jobs to be done". When we create messaging, we need to be focused on what problem we're solving. I'll give you an example of when I worked on GoToMeeting. This was early days and not many people used online meetings, way before Zoom. If you think about what job GoToMeeting was solving, many thought the problem was better collaboration. You get screen sharing an ...Read More

Sellers are coin operated by nature. They have to deliver $$$ to the business to be successful. I'm hesitant to say you want to change their behavior. I think a better way to say this is you need to align product knowledge and sales technique to their objective: hitting quota. How do you do that? Showcase account teams that are seeing success with deep product knowledge or a specific sales technique. I like videos most for these to really communicate the process and impact. Make it easier to use ...Read More

Ability to get stuff done while also driving strategy. To me, a PMM leader still needs to roll up their sleeves and driving a keynote deck, create foundational messaging for a team, get in front of customers. The messaging/positioning muscle atrophies fast. When interviewing potential leaders, I always probe into recent projects to understand how hands on they are, what they actually did vs directed, and if they have passion for the discipline. Good PMM leaders will always need to get hands on f ...Read More