James Winter

One thing I'd add that's very tactical to the great stuff that David has already laid out: Find your allies. Talk to everyone within the org that you can and assemble a shortlist of people who have good understandings of things like the customers, the tech etc... Befriend a good sales rep, the best sales reps in complex sales cycles are often product marketers in disguise. If they've been there for a bit they have a ton of knowledge that has never ever been documented or made sense of and they can accelerate your understanding immensely. 

INTERNAL TRAINING MATERIALS/DECK Education should always be a big part of launching the product. The first thing you need to accomplish is getting the sales team to actually care about whatever it is that you're launching. Try not to make this overly academic, make sure you're getting the point across as to what the opportunity is for the sales person to make money. BETA/EARLY ADOPTER CASE STUDIES I always try to avoid launching products without a couple of well produced case studies from early adopters/beta users. LEAVE BEHIND MATERIALS Could be a deck, a one pager, something that you can leave with the customer after pitching. RELEVANT PERSONAS This may not always be relevant, but if you're going after a new segment, decision maker, user etc.. It's important for the sales team to be able to conceptualize and empathize with the person they're going to be selling to. VIDEO I'm a huge believer in video. Video content gets more engagement than any other type of content. You can get more information across in a well produced two minute video than you can often do more damage with a two minute video than a long ebook or whitepaper. WEB CONTENT Gotta have a good representation on the product page! There are of course more, but I agree with Steve that it's better to wait a little after the product launches to see where the needs are. For example, 

To be honest I've never really seen one. The SF Product Marketing Meetup is the closest thing I've seen - https://www.meetup.com/product-marketing

Pat and Sean did a great job answering with some more tactical approaches so I'll be brief with a couple tips. There are purpose built tools like Inkling that can be a great way to enable massive sales teams, but they require a ton of investment to do well. Webinars and quizzes are things that work well remotely. Salespeople are competitive so use that to your advantage. If you have a massive sales team, you should also have the budget to get some outside help to help train them. I’d recommend hiring a professional services firm to make sure the training doesn’t consume all of your time.

Some random thoughts in no particular order: * The importance of prioritization and how to say no: you will be under constant barrage for requests from all angles: the ceo, sales, CMO etc... These requests will range from the silly to the idiotic and you will never be effective if you don't have the ability to figure out how to TACTFULLY push back on requests and make clear prioritizations * Spending more time with customers: However much time you're spending with customers, it's not enough. * How to inspire: Often times in product marketing you will be the first and only person to realize some sort of important thing: this product is really not that exciting and we shouldn't spend a long time launching it, our positioning isn't really resonating with our customers etc... It's not enough to point these things out and be right, you have to be able to bring people along with you and get them as fired up as you are. * Segmentation: Segmentation is hard, requires a lot of research and collaboration, and can be divisive to some people. It's also one of the most important things you can possibly do at the beginning of any role in product marketing. Learn how to meaningfully segment your customers and develop a framework that will align the company in how to talk to them, target them, and inspire action. * Targeted positioning: I learned this one very early on as a devout student of Crossing the Chasm but it's still the thing that 9/10 startups struggle with the most. You are not everything to everyone, just because anyone can buy your product it doesn't mean they should all be treated equally. Take a stand. Create targeted messaging, don't let your fear of alienating a few people that will never buy your product dilute the impact to your best segment.

I'll touch on a few of the slightly less obvious ones: Curiosity: I think curiosity is one of the most important traits you can have in product marketing. The role is often ambiguously defined and many times it will fall on product marketing to discover where the most effective areas to spend their time are. Empathy: If, like me, you subscribe to the idea that product marketing is primarily a customer centric function, that means that you must be able to quickly and effectively grasp things that are important to the customer. Internal Communication: Product marketing should be in constant communication with everyone from sales, the marketing, team, and in some cases even the CEO. If you aren't doing a good job of communicating important information to the rest of your team, how can you expect it to reach your customers? Project Management: For lack of a better analogy, product marketers are quarterbacks. They are involved with a huge number of projects and it can be difficult to keep things straight. I'd advise all product marketers to develop a good system to keep them on track and organized. I use Asana.

Salesforce is my #1 in B2B. just overall content is amazing. very customer oriented

Hopefully I don't make this answer overly complex. I think the more important question here is what are you actively working on? Because product marketing can cover such a wide variety of activities and tactics, we can't exactly tell you which metrics would be important. Greg Hollander and Derek Pando both had great insights to share when they spoke on a panel about the topic of prioritization in product marketing. The key takeaway there is to know what the greater organizational goals are, and align yourself where it makes the most sense for the impact you can have. Example: Your company has great awareness and lots of leads, but isn't closing enough deals. In this case, there are lots of different factors that could be contributing to the funnel leak (people entering but falling out). As a product marketer it may fall to you to understand why this is happening and address the problem. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that you have great demo show rates but don't convert these into customers at the rate that you think you should be. Assuming that the prospect knows your pricing and terms ahead of time, this likely points to your demos being bad. Bad could mean a lot of things so it will require further analysis. Are your sales people doing enough discovery? Are they talking about things that actually matter to the prospect or are they just reciting from a script? In this fantasy scenario, with the information that you've been given, it's probably fair to assume that a good metric for you to track would be increase in conversion rate.

I think this has been asked elsewhere already but I use Docsend and love it. 

More tactically, here's a sample template originally from Salesforce that I use for training sales on demos. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzSot4wxOi-VUk5TZTlwdVMyQ2M/view?usp=sharing