Madison Leonard

This is such a hard one! I think it would be getting leadership buy-in. There are so many conflicting priorities in the workday, especially in a startup environment. Each team is contributing to the overall success of the company in major ways. When you have new initiatives you want to implement or a pivot in strategy, it can sometimes be hard to convince other teams or figure out a way to add it to their workstreams. And often I find that even if I do get individual teams to buy-in, leadership ...Read More

Ooof this is a tough one and honestly it depends on how things were structured at your organization from the beginning.  IMO, product marketing should influence/contribute to webinars, but not own webinar execution. For thought-leadership webinars, I've seen product marketing, content, and comms all own this in the past.  If you're lucky to have a large marketing team, I usually divide responsibilities for webinars like this:  Product marketing owns outline and enablement material  Content owns ...Read More

Customer advisory boards are best when you keep the customers under 10 people and ask them to stay on for 1-2 years. Strategically hand-pick your advisors from the markets you want to break into or dominate. For example, if you want to go more into Enterprise, you shouldn't have 9/10 people from SMB companies on your board.  While advisory boards can certainly help with retention, I'd argue they are better suited for roadmap planning and keeping them happy customers. For product retention, I'd p ...Read More

Personally, I hate mini projects for strategic roles and think they should be abolished altogether. The only exception to this rule is internal transferring, esp if you have no prior experience in that type of role. I prefer that prospective candidates put together a presentation on a previous strategy they've built. Presentations are a must-have skill for any product marketer, so this is a great test to see how well they tell the story and if the messaging sticks. Presenting previous experience ...Read More

TDLR: self-serve product marketing focuses on the individual user persona and their use cases vs traditional product marketing in a sales-led company focuses on the buyer persona and business results.  However, the catch is that most PLG organizations have both product-led growth and product-led sales happening simultaneously so you'll need both to have a successful acquisition strategy amongst SMB, Mid Market, and Enterprise alike!  If you want more detail, check out this talk I did on the diff ...Read More

The frameworks are pretty similar. Talk with your customers, develop a narrative based on the pain points they have, and craft positioning based on your findings.  There are some cool tools out there to help with website message testing (like Wynter), in-app messaging (like Pendo), and competitive intelligence tools (like Crayon). Ultimately, the availability of these tools will depend based on the stage of the company you're at and the available budget for software.  Even if you don't have acce ...Read More

Land and expand is music to my ears!  Growth for PLG companies focuses on word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer sharing, both organic and strategic.  Example of organic word-of-mouth sharing = mentioning slack in a product marketing discord group.  Example of strategic peer-to-peer sharing = slack prompting me to invite users during onboarding, and I do.  However, this can be utilized internally as well for a bottoms-up adoption movement!  I call these folks "champions" - they are deep lovers of the pl ...Read More

PLG product marketing is focused on the individual user, whereas sales-led product marketing is focused more on the buyer.  However, I will say that most PLG companies mature into utilizing both product led growth and sales led growth together.  For PLG, the messaging is more focused on solving the individual user's pain point, ultimately helping them to do their job better/faster. These users are going to be using your product often and are looking for a specific solution.  However, sales-led p ...Read More

B2C PMM is all about the product itself. You're not having to go through buyers like you do with B2B - so you've got to speak to the product success.  Don't make the common mistake I see B2C PMMs make today! I see so many people just focus on output (number of blogs, that a launch happened, copy skills, etc). Talk about the impact of your work - did it help the product grow? Did you increase adoption or retention? Did you find product-market-fit?  And since it's a big company, they're going to a ...Read More