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Jeff Beckham

Jeff Beckham

Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing, Gem
I lead product marketing at Gem, which makes a SaaS product that can help you hire 5x faster. Previously at Mixpanel, Slack, BlueJeans, and Cisco Systems.

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Video: Adventures in Messaging S02E07: With Jeff Beckham, Head of Product Marketing at Mixpanel
This may sound like heresy, but there are times when speaking to high-level business value isn’t necessarily the best way to go. Like when your buyer isn’t responsible for those top-level business metrics. Or when messages like “reduce costs” or “increase revenue” are a dime a dozen in your space...more
Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
What's the best, most turnkey framework to use for building GTM presentations for multiple stakeholder groups?
I’m glad you asked, because I love building presentations! I realize I’m a total slide nerd, but here’s my process: 1. Align on the outcome you want from the presentation. Who are you trying to convince, and about what? Whether the audience is the sales team at SKO or execs at a busines...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
Where can PMM provide the most lift in the enterprise sales motion?
Every enterprise sales rep wants to sell more, faster. The most valuable PMMs I’ve worked with are experts on their product, market, customers, and competition. Individual sales reps don’t have time to track these things at the level of detail PMMs do, but require smart talking points to be succe...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
What has worked well (or has not worked) as far as positioning your product marketing team within a larger marketing org? What are some of the challenges you've faced collaborating with other teams and how have you overcome them?
I’ve found that most companies want the most capable people doing the most important work. If you prove your value as a PMM by making the team and company successful, bigger and better projects will naturally come your way. When it comes to positioning the PMM team within marketing, it ultimatel...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
What is your advice for creating and/or improving the product marketing process when joining a small but growing team? Particularly for a small company with no or little structure and an inexperienced management team?
Whenever I join a new team, my first objective is to earn trust – both within my department and with cross-functional partners. Without trust, advice from “the new guy” about how things should be done is usually unwelcome. To do that, start by identifying problems you can solve to make everyone’...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
What are the most important relationships to get right as a PMM?
Product and Sales are always the biggest, at least at B2B companies. The one that matters more depends on whether you’re in a product-led or sales-led organization. There’s no circumstance in which you can neglect one of the two, but when you need to make hard tradeoffs about where to spend time,...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
What are some ways product marketing can prove their value to product management?
It’s a good question, but also a loaded one! Product management needs to prove their value to the company too, right? The dynamic you’re describing is common though, unfortunately. I’ve lived it many times. The best working relationship comes when both sides have shared goals. If that’s not rea...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
How does your team divide up the responsibility between the PMM team and the Campaign team? How has that worked for the new products/new markets for existing products that company has wanted to go into, where the campaign team cannot just package up existing asset but needs to create a PoV?
The setup at my currrent company, Mixpanel, is one that I’ve seen be more and more common at businesses scaling up. We have two arms of marketing: product / content and growth (the “campaign team”). When the head of growth and I need to explain who does what, we like to simplify things to: PMM b...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
I just joined a new company, and their pitch decks are AWFUL and the sales teams are losing deals because of poor pitches. I'm working with a few key stakeholders to create better pitch decks, but several CSuite team members are apprehensive about trying something new because we'll be filing for IPO soon. They'd rather be consistently bad, then differently good. Any advice for how to get the Csuite team to see that trying a new pitch deck is worth it?
In these types of situations, I’ve found that data can be a useful persuasion tool, because it’s objective. Have you considered surfacing win rate numbers? Or an even more granular metric in the sales funnel, like a lack of deal progression from early to mid/late stages? If execs are expected to...more
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Jeff Beckham
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing
Working with Sales with Jeff Beckham, Head of Product & Content Marketing at Mixpanel
Working with Sales with Jeff Beckham, Head of Product & Content Marketing at Mixpanel
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Connect with Jeff on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beckhamjeff/ Join Jeff on Sharebird here: https://sharebird.com/profile/jeff-beckham Questions we cover in this episode: 1. Tell me about your career path to becoming a PMM?  2. So today we’re going to focus on working with sales an...more
Credentials & Highlights
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing at Gem
Product Marketing AMA Contributor
Lives In San Francisco
Work with Jeff
San francisco, CA