Josh Colter

Buyer Personas should be formatted to be easily digestable and convey key insights that help teams in your org operate more effectively. The ideal format can vary by situation, organization, insights communicated, and even business model. For example, demographic info about age and gender might be helpful in B2C but is probably counterproductive noice for B2B selling. I personally use a single summary slide with 5 supporting slides. Then I linked these slide to a google doc with categorized cust ...Read More

Mike's answer is spot on. It's not uncommon for companies to have a poor strategy or fit within their marketplace and then expect marketing to sprinkle magical growth hacker dust on it make the problem go away. To help alleviate this trend, marketers need to do two things: be good at math and speak the truth.   Math represents Derek's response (also very insightful). Product marketing can fall into a grey, undefinied space between departments. So it's incumbant upon you to connect your actions t ...Read More

Include your sales team from the beginning and you'll largely remove this problem from the root. Orient yourself around what's in it for the sales team and they'll sit up and start to take notice. I meet with the leaders of sales and SDR teams each week to surface problems that they're having and review pipeline metrics. Then we design problem statement together which our marketing team uses in an agile fashion to determine backlog and prioritization of projects. When I share the finalized conte ...Read More

Bring them market insights, not feature requests. I share recorded interviews and sales calls with the product team to help them understand our customers. Also, I hunt down helpful analysis of the larger market landscape and distribute widely across the org on a regular basis.  Remember where they're coming from - product people usually want to know where to focus their time with the least risk of throwing away work or winding up with the pressure of trying to build for competing priorities. The ...Read More

Apply agile sprint thinking to launches. You can do this by creating themes just like agile has a sprint (my team is moving to quarterly message themes). These themes encapsulate at a high level the features that the product team is working on.   This approach has a couple of benefits. First, your product folks should appreciate agile, which will make them more likely to buy in and maybe meet a few more of those deadlines. Second, you get to execute a launch with some flexibility. Communicating ...Read More

Product is comprised of people. And so it should be clear upfront that you need to start with a foundation of trust with the people in product. Take them out to coffee. Ask about what motivates them personally. What do they want to accomplish? Who do they read/follow for inspiration and growth? OK, let's assume you've built trust by listening. Now make yourself helpful to them as a conduit to information and outside sources that help inform them. Frame your job in terms of informing product abou ...Read More