James Winter

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 ear ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 recomm ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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, an ...Read More