Julie Brown

I browse a number of different resources from here on Sharebird, AIPMM, Pragmatic, SiriusDecisions (Forrester), Crayon's blog, Medium (includes a number of different publications I recommend following such as Product Marketing Community, Women in Product, Project Product, The Product Launch, etc.) LinkedIn, Facebook (great Product groups here to join like Women in Product & Product Marketing Masters), and Twitter. So many PMMs have treasure troves of workflows, frameworks, and best practices they share on various blogs and social platforms.

There is a product conference (Project Product) in the Midwest specifically for product marketing and product management professionals and uniting the two together. The second annual event is March 10-11, 2020. Day 1 is a full-day conference and day 2 is a half-day with interactive workshops. https://projectproduct.com/

Such a great question! And sadly, a common challenge for product marketing. I've found even when a company hires its first product marketer, not everyone is aware or on the same page. I have struggled with this very same thing at multiple companies and have found creating a team charter to help. 

You can check out how I tackled that here: https://medium.com/@julie.ef.brown/how-to-write-a-product-marketing-charter-916d91e53a65 

The critical components are:

• Define what PMM is (and can even say what it is not)
• Set goals
• List out roles/responsibilities
• Get buy-in/approval from leadership
• Continually share and educate the organization on what PMM is to help manage expectations

Great question!

I've used one of those vendors in the past and have evaluated various others. I have found a number of reasons why these tools are extremely helpful:

1. They save so much time vs. manually searching through Google (setting up Google Alerts) or scrolling through social media. It is nearly impossible to do your day-to-day PMM work plus keep tabs on your competitors. Having an app that automatically gives you daily updates is a true time saver. I would estimate it saved the PMM team 5-8 hours each week in staying on top of competitive news updates. I would estimate 10+ hours were saved in creating the program and templates by using the tool (being conservative in my estimates). 
2. These tools give you a way to track how your teams are actually using/consuming the competitive intel you're publishing. For example, after publishing a battlecard, I could see who viewed it and how many times. This helps in tracking the progress and success of your program.
3. In addition to battlecards, you can create other resources such as dashboards and newsletters. For example, I created a competitive dashboard focused on a specific industry (financial services) and it covered all the competitors who play in that space.
4. If you or your sales team comes across intel that isn't found on the web, you can upload it into the tool. Nothing is lost and it is all stored in the same place.
5. Everything is easily editable in the app vs. updating and formatting a static document such as a PPT or Word doc.

Can this be done without a tool? Of course! It just will take more time. Creating a competitive program without a CI tool can be done, but is much easier if you have other tools such as other social listening tools and sales enablement portals whether that is a Seismic, Highspot, Showpad, etc. Even just SharePoint makes it much easier because you can upload your battlecards and cheat sheets and still track who is viewing them and how often. I actually have paired up my CI tool with SharePoint a number of times to create the comprehensive competitive program the business needed. 

To add, having the CI tool will not magically provide a competitive intel program. A lot of work still has to be put into using the tool. The tool is simply a platform that helps automate, standardize, and measure. I've been the champion for CI at many places and sadly the programs disappeared after I left each company. 

The 6 keys to a successful CI program are: 

1. Championed (and not just by 1 person, but by multiple, ideally, by multiple teams so if there is turnover, the program doesn't disintegrate)
2. Centralized (everyone needs to know where to go to find the intel)
3. Scalable (want to be able to grow it easily and not reinvent the wheel)
4. Consistent (need to be able to remain consistent and predictable, i.e, send out your weekly newsletter on the same day each week)
5. Concise (we all have the attention span of a gnat, so keep your battlecards and newsletter short, sweet, and to the point)
6. Measurable (not being able to measure the success of your program makes it much harder to justify the time spent on it) 

Hope this was helpful!

So happy you found product marketing and it interests you! I actually wrote about this topic years ago: https://medium.com/projectproduct/10-skills-traits-youll-find-in-exceptional-product-marketers-12fccfd35e2a

Now, today, I can narrow it down to just a few traits I look for as I find these skills very difficult to teach/train in the workplace. I can help and teach those early in their careers how to overcome public speaking fears, how to price and package a SaaS product, or how to go about competitive research, but I find these 3 traits difficult to teach:

1. Curiosity: If you're not a person who is curious, product marketing is not for you. A willingness to research, dive deep, and ask questions is critical.
2. Solid writer: Product marketing is all about communicating the value of what you're selling. If you cannot clearly articulate your message and the value, a career in PMM will be tough. And you might work at places where there are no other strong writers to lean on, so being able to clearly write is a key skill. 
3. Project management: As with many professions, there is plenty to juggle and competing priorities. And a core responsibility for a PMM is launching products, which can be large, complicated projects with many stakeholders. All this requires the ability to manage projects, stay on top of deadlines, and remain organized.

Hope this helps!

I like to utilize a document I call a message house. Having a structured format with each section outlined and definitions and examples at the ready can make for a great workshop experience and help keep stakeholders more focused and aligned.

Below are 2 articles I've written on the topic. Might be helpful in jumpstarting your next messaging project. Enjoy!

Part 1: https://medium.com/projectproduct/the-power-of-a-message-house-for-product-marketers-8b9bfe01e5a4

Part 2: https://medium.com/projectproduct/the-power-of-a-message-house-for-product-marketers-part-2-bca8f3ea9ad7

Great question! I am a HUGE fan of templates and frameworks. I create templates and then modify them for each company so it better suits the needs of the business. I've written a couple of articles on this topic (see below):

Part 1: https://medium.com/projectproduct/the-power-of-a-message-house-for-product-marketers-8b9bfe01e5a4

Part 2: https://medium.com/projectproduct/the-power-of-a-message-house-for-product-marketers-part-2-bca8f3ea9ad7

I have found holding a cross-functional workshop to be very helpful when developing and finishing the "message house." You might need to hold a few different workshops depending on the depth/breadth of your document and the number of colleagues you need to involve.

Great question! I have seen customer marketing both within PMM and outside of it. Depending on the organization, it could work either way as long as product and customer marketing work very closely together. 

To ensure success, I would suggest that customer marketing be part of product marketing for many reasons. PMMs are expected to be experts on customers and are usually the ones that either lead or highly influence customer-related activities such as: 

• Increasing product adoption
• Content for customer events
• Win-loss analysis
• Customer stories/case studies
• Customer communications, specifically about best practices and feature launches
• Advisory boards
• Etc.

When customer marketing and PMM work together and there are no silos, then the customer experience improves. A win-win situation.