Linda Su

You should always feel compelled and empowered to take ownership over your role, work, and the impact you make. At more senior levels, there may be more opportunities presented to you, however, no matter your level, there are many ways you can control and increase your own visibility. Here are several ways to increase your visibility and show your impact: Internal roadshow and feedback: Whether you're just starting at a company or have been there for a while, it's always a good idea to walkthrou ...Read More

Product marketing gets a ton of requests from other teams -- it's because we're very cross functional and on the positive side, valuable! However, you should always be prioritizing impact and quality over ad hoc work and quantity. Your time and skill set are valuable, so always protect it. Here are some ways to manage unrealistic expectations, move aways from ad hoc work, and get comfortable saying no: Managing unrealistic expectations: This depends on the situation and whether it's because the ...Read More

As a product marketer a close partnership and relationship with the sales team is critical as a core objective of your role is to help drive pipeline, accelerate deals, and grow customer relationships. The first step should be to build those relationships with sellers and sales leaders. Set up 1:1 or group calls to understand the current state. Tell them that you're working on a new or refined "pitch deck" and want to understand -- how they run initial discovery calls today and what slides they ...Read More

There are different ways to set up your messaging framework, and you want to make sure it's tailored to your buyer, company, product, and goals. That will help determine which sections you need. For example for product messaging, we use the following sections: Value proposition Differentiators Capability/Use Case Feature Benefit Proof points For solution or persona messaging, we use the following sections: Solution Outcome or Persona Value Prop Driver (what we call Capability/Use Case) Product P ...Read More

Your messaging should always aim to influence and shape the market's perception of your product. Good messaging accelerates trust between your company / product and your buyer, which in turn leads to demand, adoption, revenue, etc. Your audience is multi-faceted and so your messaging should be as well. Strong messaging addresses the following points in a clear and compelling way: Persona: Who is the target audience? Job to be done: What is their "job to be done"? Pain points: What's their challe ...Read More

As a product marketer, the best piece of career advice I received was "to be kind, not nice." Let me give some context to this. For me personally, and for many PMMs I know, a strength of ours is empathy. And empathy is a critical and extremely valuable skill to have as a PMM when building strong cross-functional relationships, collaborating with other teams, and ensuring voice of the customer and the needs of your buyers are integrated in everything you do. However, sometimes being a very empath ...Read More

Your messaging should always aim to influence and shape the market's perception of your product. Good messaging accelerates trust between your company / product and your buyer, which in turn leads to demand, adoption, revenue, etc. Your audience is multi-faceted and so your messaging should be as well. Strong messaging addresses the following points in a clear and compelling way: Persona: Who is the target audience? Job to be done: What is their "job to be done"? Pain points: What's their challe ...Read More

A clear and simple way to format your messaging is with a message hierarchy or message house. As part of the message house, strong messaging addresses the following points in a clear and compelling way: Persona: Who is the target audience? Job to be done: What is their "job to be done"? Pain points: What's their challenge to accomplishing that? Differentiated solution: How can you help them solve that problem in a unique and better way than anyone else? Features: What technical features prove th ...Read More

There are many ways to drive successful sales enablement -- paying for technology can definitely help, but there are low cost ways as well. Here are sales enablement tools and approaches I've used as a product marketer: Email and Slack: While simple, email and Slack are great ways to keep sales and other cross-functional teams updated on the latest messaging and content you've created, and to reinforce launched initiatives and ongoing programs. We've had weekly and bi-weekly enablement newslette ...Read More

Keeping your messaging up to date is so critical both to ensure you stay relevant in the market and so your internal stakeholders like sales, success, and marketing are using the latest and greatest. Often times, there will be natural points for you to review messaging for example, if you're preparing any enablement/training, there's a big event or campaign launching, or you're doing message testing. If these don't naturally come up, a good benchmark to set is to review your messaging quarterly ...Read More