Jennifer Kay Corridon

As a Product Marketing Manager , effectively communicating and sharing competitor analysis with your team and stakeholders is crucial for aligning everyone on the competitive landscape and informing strategic decision-making. Here are some recommendations for how to approach this: 1. Clearly articulate the purpose and benefits: Start by clearly explaining why conducting competitor analysis is important for the success of the product or business. Highlight the potential benefits, such as identifying market opportunities, staying ahead of industry trends, and making informed strategic decisions. Emphasize that competitor analysis is not about copying competitors but rather understanding the competitive landscape to differentiate and improve your own offerings. 2. Provide actionable insights: Focus on delivering actionable insights from the competitor analysis. Instead of overwhelming stakeholders with a barrage of data, distill the information into key takeaways and recommendations that stakeholders can act upon. Frame the insights in a way that directly addresses their pain points, challenges, or opportunities. Show how the analysis can inform marketing campaigns, product positioning, pricing strategies, or feature development. 3. Demonstrate evidence-based findings: Use data and evidence to support your analysis and conclusions. Include market research, customer feedback, and competitive intelligence that back up your claims. This helps build credibility and instills confidence in the findings. Visualize the data in charts or graphs to make it easier for stakeholders to grasp and interpret the information. 4. Showcase competitive advantages and risks: Highlight how the competitor analysis helps uncover your unique competitive advantages and areas where you may be at a disadvantage. Clearly communicate how this knowledge can guide decision-making and enable your team to leverage strengths and mitigate risks. This approach demonstrates the value of the analysis in shaping strategies that lead to a competitive edge. 5. Encourage participation and collaboration: Engage stakeholders throughout the process by actively seeking their input and involving them in discussions. Encourage team members to share their own observations, experiences, or knowledge about competitors. This fosters a sense of ownership and collaboration, making stakeholders feel more invested in the analysis and more likely to support the resulting strategies. 6. Address concerns and objections: Be prepared to address any concerns or objections that stakeholders may have. Address their concerns by explaining the methodology, data sources, and analysis techniques used. 7. Follow up with actionable next steps: After presenting the competitor analysis, provide clear next steps and recommendations. Outline how the findings will be incorporated into actionable plans, such as product roadmaps, marketing campaigns, or sales strategies. This demonstrates that the analysis is not just a standalone exercise but a foundation for actionable outcomes.

Every company and every growth stage is different so the evaluative framework you utilize needs some flexibility. I recommend that your framework is developed in tandem with your partner stakeholders early on and is communicated often. A reliable framework includes a clear organizing principal, inputs, outputs/ impact, measurements, and timelines. As a first product marketer, I'd also advocate including a line item for dependencies and cross functional asks. Once you start building momentum in an organization, the asks come in quickly and from multiple directions. Your framework will allow you better yield management and help you organize and prioritize where you dedicate your efforts.

I think a universal experience among product marketers is that the role and contribution of product marketing is highly dependent on the company or organization that you are working for/ applying to- size, focus, where the pmm's sit in the organization, all are influencing factors. To that end, before the hiring process even begins, I spend a lot of time getting clarity on the purpose + goals + focus of the role and the outcomes that need to be achieved. It's from there that I start to create a framework of interview questions that will align and assess to the top needs and then I'll develop a pretty robust conversation and interview track from there. That said, here are the big three that I always come back to: - How do you as a candidate define the role of product marketing? When you think about your last couple of roles, what has product marketing been responsible for owning, and why do you think that was the same or different in the organizations you worked for? -Tell me about your current customers. What do I need to know about them in order to successfully market to them? -What are you wanting to learn or unlock for yourself in your next role.

The short answer is this is highly dependent and should be greatly influenced by the product and the company that you are part of. This is the dilemma of all things product marketing, there is no one size fits all nor silver bullet answer. I've had equal success with pod models, where a product marketer is embedded with a cross functional teams to work on a particular product or vertical as I have had with creating teams solely focused on bringing products to market. I advocate begining by assessing the individual strengths and professional interests of your team. I'd also work with your partners on product to understand the same and work together to map resources towards goals. At the end of the day a successful product marketing team is going to be comprised of individuals who are excited and engaged by the work they do and the team they work with.

The fundamental goal of building a strong position in the market remains the same between B2C and B2B: to understand the needs of your target audience and position your products or services as the best solution to meet those needs. And to move your customer to next action. In terms of tools and data, both B2C and B2B companies use similar market research techniques such as surveys, focus groups, and data analytics to gain insights into their target audience. However, B2B companies also rely on industry-specific research and data to understand the needs and pain points of businesses in a particular sector. Generally speaking, B2C (business-to-consumer) companies tend to focus more on consumer behavior and trends, as well as advertising and marketing campaigns that appeal to individual customers. They often rely on consumer data such as demographic and psychographic information to understand their target audience and tailor their products and messaging accordingly.

1. Develop a Competitive Playbook: Create a comprehensive competitive playbook that outlines key information about each competitor, their offerings, strengths, weaknesses, and positioning. This playbook should serve as a go-to resource for your sales team, providing them with the necessary insights to understand the competitive landscape. 2. Conduct Competitive Training Sessions: Organize regular training sessions to educate your sales team on competitive positioning. These sessions should cover information from the competitive playbook and emphasize the unique value propositions, differentiators, and messaging that set your product apart. 3. Provide Battle Cards: Prepare concise battle cards or cheat sheets that highlight the key points of differentiation for each competitor. These cards should include common objections raised by customers and suggested responses or counterpoints to address them. T 4. Provide Regular Competitive Updates: Keep your sales team informed about changes in the competitive landscape. Share regular updates on competitor product releases, new features, pricing changes, or market trends that may impact the positioning of your product. This can be done through email newsletters, internal communications, or dedicated meetings. 5. Organize Competitor Battle Workshops: Conduct workshops or collaborative sessions where the sales team collectively strategizes on how to tackle specific competitors. Encourage the team to share their experiences, best practices, and success stories in dealing with different competitors. These workshops foster a sense of camaraderie and provide a platform for knowledge exchange among the sales team. 6. Gather Feedback from the Sales Team: Actively seek feedback from your sales team regarding their experiences in competitive situations. Listen to their challenges, understand their needs, and address any gaps in the competitive positioning materials or training.

The question comes up a lot in product marketing. It is particularly challenging when you are in a product marketing role or on projects that lean heavy into influence or when your organization is stacked with channel owners. Simply put- there is no one metric that suits all product marketing. That said, at the outset of any project, it is critical to discuss what the hypothesis or goal of the work is and how you intend to measure the success of the outcome. Since product marketing is cross functional, I'd look to align goals and outcomes around known or proxy metrics and I'd urge communication- consistently + often around them.

B2C product marketing is a critical aspect of many companies' business strategies, particularly those in the consumer goods, retail, and e-commerce industries. Often in these organizations, the marketing team is going to be comprised of bigger teams of functional specialists or channel experts such as email or performance marketing. It can be more expensive to acquire new customers in the B2C market in a very short sales cycle, which means that marketers need to be more targeted in their advertising and marketing campaigns. B2C pricing is generally simple and the focus of the pmm involves creating clear, compelling pricing strategies that appeal to consumers. B2B marketing typically involves a longer sales cycle and requires the ability to nurture leads over time. There are a lot of different stakeholders or decision-makers in a big sales cycle and your message needs to land and resonate across. Also, B2B pricing is often more complex, involving negotiations and customized packages, upsells and crosssells.

If the product marketing team is placed within the marketing department, they may be more focused on the promotion and positioning of products rather than on the development of the product itself. In this case, their ability to influence the product roadmap may be limited as they may not have a direct line of communication with the product development team. When the product marketing team is placed within the product department, they may have a more direct influence on the product roadmap as they are more closely aligned with the product and engineering team. This can be beneficial as the pmm can provide insights into the market and customer needs that can inform product development decisions.

The ability to effectively build cross-functional relationships is really important in product marketing and understanding the role that each functional area plays in making a product successful. I'd put into this bucket knowing how each team measures their contribution (KPI's), what their processes and pain points are, as well as who and what their stakeholders care most about. I'd also include investing the time to learn their communication style. Just as a pmm spends time getting to understand the customer, I'd recommend doing the same to know your cross-functional partners. So much of pmm is about building bridges between different groups and offerings that this interpersonal piece is often overlooked in skills development.