James Huddleston

The KPIs for PMM can definitely depend on the type of company or market you're selling into. Based on my SaaS background, I lean towards revenue-related metrics as PMMs need to show contribution to growth. To be specific there are two primary: Win Rate Pipeline Creation/Contribution Secondary: Product Adoption The reason I place a premium on win rate and pipeline contribution is PMM has such an important role in developing positioning and messaging that not only attracts potential customers, but ...Read More

The books that have had the biggest impact on me aren't always specific to messaging but provide greater clarity into the importance of storytelling and psychology. One of my favorites is Michael Lewis' "The Undoing Project". It really helped me understand the psychology that drives people to make the decisions they do and that while we'd like to think humans are rational and logical people, we actually make decisions primarily driven by emotion. That's why it's so important to frame messaging t ...Read More

I wouldn't necessarily avoid trying to identify contribution when sharing KPIs with other teams, but I'd caution not to get overly aggressive about seeking "credit" for those metrics either. PMM can be challenging because the work we do isn't always a 1:1 input to output of identifiable metrics that quantify our impact. What I would recommend is having very transparent conversations with key stakeholders and collaborators across the other departments with whom you might be sharing a KPI, let's s ...Read More

For me personally, I like to use a messaging framework to help consolidate my thoughts based on the research I’ve done. There are a lot of good messaging frameworks you can utilize but the one I start with is typically the one that answers the questions ‘for’, ‘who’, ‘provides’, ‘unlike’, and ‘only’. It helps me frame up the most important elements of the message. The next thing I do is go solicit feedback from people smarter than me. My final step is to test how simple and clear it is to unders ...Read More

One way I've found some success in rolling out to the field is using one of my better reps as a champion of the new messaging and having the "pitch" for the new messaging come from them. Instead of it feeling like the messaging is coming from marketing or product, if you can arm one of the most respected sales persons with the new messaging and have them roll it out through a presentation or role play with the field it might resonate and be internalized better. Some other ways I've found success ...Read More

This is a great question, because it hits on one of the most critical lessons I learned the hard way early in my marketing career. I used to spend hours and hours solo creating what I thought was the "perfect" story for a brand, product launch, or campaign. I spent time crafting every word, refining every message point, trying to make it flawless without any input from anyone else. Then when I felt it was ready, I’d take (what I thought was) the near final product to my stakeholders. I remember ...Read More

This is where your work on buyer personas is critical. If you’ve done your research and understand what makes a specific buyer persona tick, then you should be able to adjust your messaging accordingly based on their unique interests. I’d also say this is where partnership with your demand and digital counterparts is key because they can provide you insights on the right format of messaging for a unique audience. As an example, you might learn that a more technically literate audience is going t ...Read More

I'm not sure I can point to specific techniques exactly, but I firmly believe that people buy based on emotion. They then use things like business cases and pricing to justify and validate their decisions. That's why storytelling is so critical. To reach our buyer on an emotional level, we need to tell a compelling story that makes them sit up and listen. Here's the framework I use to structure these stories: • Start with the big picture shift: I begin with a major industry or market shift that' ...Read More

I find the most important KPIs relative to the launch of a new product to be: Product Adoption (how many existing and new customers start using/adopting the new product) Pipeline Creation/Contribution (how much pipeline did the new product launch generate in both $s and # of opportunities) There may be some additional KPIs that are important depending on the type of product and your go-to-market strategy as well. For instance if you're launching a product that users can sign up for directly or a ...Read More