Hila Segal

What is the role of product marketing, and why do you want to do the job. I care about not just what the answer is but also how candidates deliver it. Are they giving me a textbook answer or telling me a story about their proudest PMM experience or a project that significantly impacted the business or a day in their life as a PMM.

I would recommend considering a few tools for the enablement stack (but try not to get crazy here - focus on what your team absolutely needs depending on the maturity of the org): - Call recording to be able to listen to calls in a scalable and systematic way (like Gong, Salesloft, Zoom IQ) - Sales collateral platform to host all content in one central location, track usage, versioning, analytics, etc. (like Highspot, Showpad) - Competitive content platform for up-to-date information and competitor battle cards (like Klue, and Crayon)

Building diverse working relationships with different stakeholders across the organization is one of the most critical secret powers of a successful product marketer. Doing that not only gives you access to information and knowledge, but it will also help you collaborate more effectively on major projects. Here are the tops internal relationships you need to master: * Product managers - think about this relationship like a true marriage, and your children are the products you bring to market together (and raise them to become successful adults). Trust, honesty, and open communications are key to success here. * Growth & content marketers - these are your partners in driving demand for your products. Make sure they are educated and excited about new product capabilities and work with them to design high-impact campaigns. * Sellers and sales leaders - I don't believe you can be successful as a PMM if you're not engaged with the sales team regularly. Hear what's working and what's not, work with them on new tools to drive deal velocity, learn from them about the competition, and help them win. Invest here and build relationships from the individual rep level to the regional VPs and revenue leaders. * Customer success - If you're in SaaS, driving cross-sell and up-sell revenue from existing customers is as important as generating net new dollars from your product. Customer success are your partners in driving customer interest and engagement.

Advancing to a director level can happen as an individual contributor when the scope of the role is expanded, and more responsibility is given to you—for example, leading product marketing for a product line or multiple product lines. You can also step into a people manager role. No matter what path you choose, transitioning into a director role means graduating from product marketing execution into designing a strategic product marketing roadmap that aligns with company goals and the needs of the business. How to do that? * Ensure you have a good understanding of your company's strategic initiatives (for example, going up market or transitioning to recurring revenue models). * Develop a POV on how product marketing can help achieve corporate goals * Build product marketing priorities and OKRs, socialize them with marketing, product, and the GTM organization for visibility and buy-in.

Strong PMMs are good writers, know their product inside and out, experts of the competitive landscape, messaging geniuses and storytellers, BFFs with the sales team, GTM architects and excellent project managers. I like to think about a good PMM as a: * A psychologist who can develop a deep understanding of the fears, aspirations, hopes, and dreams of buyers and target personas. * An explorer seeking to learn more, discover more, and do more; bringing curiosity and some risk taking to product messaging and positioning. * A teacher who can inspire an audience with subject matter knowledge and possess excellent preparation and organization skills. * A conductor, leading cross-functional teams, unifying performers, and setting the tempo of product launches and other GTM initiatives. * An artist, who is creative and adventurous but also persistent and disciplined to deliver top results.

Today, there are so many fantastic resources and community groups, certainly more than when I started as a pmm. So I'll focus my answer on other ways you can continue to grow professionally: * Find a mentor. Identify a product marketer who's further on in their career than you and ask them to be your mentor. It doesn't have to be someone you know or have worked with in the past. Reach out and explain what you are trying to accomplish and what pmm skills you are looking to develop. Ideally, you want to find someone who works in your industry and has a career path similar to the one you're pursuing. Once you have a mentor, do the hard work and come prepared with topics, scenarios, and situations that you need guidance on. Your time with your mentor is the best opportunity to grow your PMM skill set and leadership skills, especially if you want to become a manager. * Become a mentor. I'm a firm believer that everyone has something to give, and that mentoring is as fulfilling to the mentor as it is for the mentee. Identify your PMM superpowers and offer younger product marketers the opportunity to learn from you. I guarantee you'll learn a ton from it, too - including how things are done in other companies, how to handle new situations you might not have dealt with before, how to provide meaningful coaching. You might be saying, "I'm still learning myself. What do I have to offer?" so I encourage you to dig deep and find what it is that you do well. I'm sure there are a few things you can think of. * Follow PMM stars on LinkedIn. In addition to all the slack channels, webinars, and AMAs, pay attention to what is organically shared by other PMMs. IMO, these are the real gems - daily experiences, POVs, best practices, and templates that are super impactful and you can quickly put into practice in your organization. (Btw, these are the folks you can later target as your potential mentors).

It's a great idea to get sales involved pre-launch. A really great idea! Here are some thoughts on how to do that: 1/ Find the innovative sellers on your team and give them early access to content, messaging, demo, etc. so they can start testing and provide feedback 2/ Start enabling and creating early excitement around a new product months before it officially GA. Sales all-hands, roadmap sessions, demo days, etc. 3/ Create a forum for sales to share market insights and what they are hearing from customers and prospects in the new product area

The role of a product marketer is very different in every company. Still, I believe you shape up the position in your organization - the strengths, interests, and passions you bring with you can expand the role beyond its initial job description. Whether you're a PMM at a global enterprise with thousands of employees or part of a lean and mean marketing team at a fast-growing start-up, you have to control your own destiny. The vast majority of learning and development happens not in formal training programs, but rather on the job—through developmental assignments. Identify the set of PMM skills that are important for you to develop - it can be more opportunities to actively pitch your product in sales cycles, running large quarterly launches, or sharpening your writing skills. From here, you have to continually look for new projects and ways to get yourself involved in a broad set of initiatives across the company. Take advantage of your connections in sales, enablement, GTM, product management, customer success, and devote at least 10-15% of your time to extra curricular activities. Coordinate this with your manager and make it part of your OKRs (objectives and key results).

Going upmarket is a company-wide initiative that goes well beyond just pricing. Your product needs to be optimized to support the next tier of buyers (for example more scale, APIs, supported languages, admin capabilities etc.). Your GTM engine needs to be recalibrated for selling up-market - from creating demand to qualifying pipeline and navigating enterprise deals for close. Your support and customer success playbooks must also be upgraded and developed for the new buying segment with more white-glove services, maturity, and value-creation models. You get the point, pivoting to go upmarket is a big deal for any company. Now as for pricing, are you looking at land and expand models - start with one business unit and grow into others, are you selling upmarket via channel partners or direct, are you selling a different product with a higher price tag or same product but more seats, APIs calls, data volume of whatever your monetization unit is? The answers to these questions should guide you if you need to completely change your pricing, or create an enterprise tier within your existing model.

1. Listen to sales/CS calls. As a team on 1 you can't be on every call but make it a weekly habit to listen to at least 5-10 calls (you can listen at 1.5 or 2x speed 😊). Be strategic about the calls you listen to - use keyword search or tagging for key topics of interest that are relevant to your business like competitors, pricing, implementation, ROI, etc. This will give you great insights into what your customers and prospects care about and how your team is responding. 2. Read G2 reviews. There's so much information shared in these reviews about what your customers like or don't like and what matters to them. You can also make it a fun activity with your CS team - once a quarter host a happy hour and each one reads a couple of reviews out loud (record it and you have a great video to share on social). 3. Follow NPS comments. If your team is running NPS surveys, comments left by your customers are also a great source of intel. You can btw, easily turn these comments into customer quotes that once approved can be used in your marketing content, social, sales deck, etc. As a marketing team of 1, you need to multiply yourself so this will allow you to kill 2 birds with one stone. 4. Set a goal for yourself to talk to at least x customers every quarter. It can be a formal interview or just listening in to a customer QBR.