Jon Rooney

For longer sales cycles, the product marketing team should be creating assets and programs that rally stakeholders, enable champions and fend off competitors during Request For Proposal (RFP) bakeoffs to help drive early opportunities to close. Long sales cycles frequently involve RFPs heavily influenced by third-party artifacts like Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves that map out critical capabilities, functional requirements and other vectors of consideration. The PMM team should create and own a "golden" response ready to go with core messaging, up-to-date product capabilities a...

The short answer is socialize constantly - it's an "always on" function for internal alignment and awareness. Ideally, any PMM KPIs will clearly map to both top-level company goals (revenue, net retention, product usage) and a shared understanding of "who does what"/"how a bill becomes a law" for your company's GTM motion. If your business is a fast-twitch, bottoms-up, Product Led Growth motion - it needs to be really clear what the PMM team is doing to drive triggers for acquisition, activation and maturity. In this case, the feedback will come in quickly as to what's working and what's no...

Awesome question - I think there are two buckets that make up the "worst" KPIs for PMMs to commit to achieving: KPIs that simply track task completion and KPIs on which PMMs have no direct impact.  KPIs that track task completion are so tempting because they're straight-forward and, thus, we've all taken them. A binary "complete/not complete" for stuff like messaging briefs, First Call Decks (FCDs), analyst presentations and RFP response docs is important to track, but they're not KPIs. If you can show if/when/how they're working and contributing to revenue, product adoption, etc. you're...

For new senior PMM hires (like Sr. Director/Director team leads), I think of 30-60-90 plans to follow a basic flow: assess (30 days), design (60 days), run (90 days).  During the "assess" phase, a senior PMM has to listen, observe and learn as much as possible: meet the team and figure out the current state of how basic stuff (sales decks, product launches, campaign content/strategy, analyst relations) gets done. Learn the product cold, not just the demos but how to actually use it. Watch how teams (whether PMMs or PMs or Sales Engineers) demo the product - how consistent are those? How ...

As a product marketer, especially as you grow in role and become more senior, measurement of success moves beyond tasks and deliverables to align lock-step with the other GTM functions like sales, customer success and growth/demand generation. Especially once a company has established product-market fit and developed a repeatable GTM motion to scale the business (whether it's product-led-growth (PLG) or traditional direct sales), making sure there's a clear understanding of both the top-level GTM goals (revenue growth, net retention, addressing new use cases and buying centers) and the role...

Product marketing performance should absolutely be measured, and both the outcomes and measurement parameters should be well-understood from the start to avoid a whole lot of folks running around doing stuff without a clear sense of "why?" and "how do we know if it's going well?". Every industry and business is going to be slightly different, but any PMM metrics and measurement should ladder up logically to the top 3-4 company objectives or goals - like grow revenue by X%, boost net customer retention by Y% or enter Z market with a compelling, credible offering. Once you have the top 3-4 co...

Certainly Sharebird, which is always good for a wander around Q&A's and other content. There are a few podcasts I really like, like Product Marketing Insider, the Product Marketing Experts and Product Marketing Life. There's some good stuff in Forrester's Sirius Decisions about Industry Marketing but it's also helpful to follow certain influential folks in an industry, even if they're not marketers, to soak in the language and topics that matter. Especially at senior levels, industries are smaller than we think they are from a people perspective - all the IT architects in the big banks know...

Metrics around awareness and demand in a given industry. For awareness, web traffic and enagement, press coverage and customer reference stories are key. If there are industry associations and trade publications, there are no shortage of lists and awards that tend to lay out the landscape. If your company is in the mix there, you're doing the right things. For demand, marketing-driven and marketing-influenced pipeline from programs targeting an industry whether the products or verticalized or horizontal. What's your penetration in the top 10 commercial banks or top 10 online retailers etc? ...

Once there's not only product market fit (which almost all companies prematurely declare victory around - sorry but it's totally true) but also determination and commitment that a given industry or industies are the decided way to GTM. If products are horizontal and sales teams are horizontal then having just the marketers aligned vertically spells trouble. An industry-first approach has to be resourced beyond marketing, dabbling's not going to get anyone anywhere.  

Generally, I'd say two things: 1) having enough familiarity and understanding of an industry to know how to craft a message that lands with a given audience and avoid missing the mark by either being vaguely horizontal or not speaking an industry's language. Every industry has their own tone, lexicon and tribal knowledge that need to be understood to connect with that audience. A great PMM can have the use cases, feature set, benefits and competitive landscape down cold and still not sould like they "get" a given industry, lessening the effect your story has on customers. 2) Unlike PMM, ind...