Mandy Schafer

In general, product marketing OKRs can become quite vague and hard to measure. However, the product marketing OKRs I’ve seen that are easier to measure are:1) Successful and ontime product launches. This means the product launch was able to happen on time with all cross functional teams trained up prior to the product launch so there were no surprises.2) Completed messaging maps/documents for a target segment or new feature. 3) Completed research around target customer segments and who to go aft ...Read More

Sales enablement should be thought about throughout multiple parts of the GTM process. I like to break these down into 4 stages - Prototype/Design, Early Adopter/Beta, Launch/GA and Post Launch. In the early stage/prototype, sales enablement isn't really a big part, as we don't want to distract sales with early stage ideas that aren't fully thought out. But I would make sure the concept is included in a roadmap/vision to ensure our sales teams understand where we are building and thinking about ...Read More

As the first and only PMM, the first thing I do when I come into an org looking for a product marketing plan is to assess the current situation. This involves meeting with your counterparts first: 1) Marketing Counterpart - What's their marketing budget, what are their goals this year, how are things (if they can be) measured? 2) Sales Counterpart - Who are they targeting, is it working, is there work required to identify the customer segment? How are the sales teams doing, do they understand th ...Read More

Often times I find the most vocal sales reps are actually not the best ones to provide you with feedback, and often end up distracting you. I like to form relationships with the most successful sales reps, and the leaders. Those are the ones you can learn from to help the more vocal ones (that are sometimes struggling the most). I also find being close with the sales engineering/solution engineering teams crucial. Most of the time the sales teams are mainly the door openers. They are great at re ...Read More

Having worked in both the US and Europe, I consider a company really successful at Product Marketing when I notice that their identity is consistent wherever you are. One company i think has done a great job of this is Uber. Even from a global standpoint, Uber has always done a great job of their user-centric message, and has unqiue messaging wherever you are. In addition, being able to create target message for so many different audience types: drivers, riders, buisnesses, resturants and diners ...Read More

I'm going to talk about my experience at really early stage companies, at this point, everyone is doing everything, so the priority is to create some strcuture to help every get aligned on the same goals. When I’ve been the first Product Marketer, or only one establishing the PMM function the first thing I do is meet with sales, product and the rest of marketing to identify the gaps. Generally is there's that piece missing between Product and marketing/sales to message what has been built, and s ...Read More

Enterprise Product marketers really need to be able to understand the long, and complex sales cycles that Enterprise deals take. In addition, they need to understand all the additional nuances that come with large companies. Larger companies are generally public, and have to adhere to many more regulations and complex company policies to protect themselves, their customers and shareholders, and their own employees. Because of this, they’ll demand more features, and understanding of how your comp ...Read More

There are multiple ways I've tried to measure content usage and effectiveness. The most obvious is to be able to have platforms to help you, but I've not always been so lucky to have access to these. Thus, other ways are to set up programs and also do your own analysis. For platforms, I've used Guru and Highspot. I used both of these to store the enablement tools and track the usage (downloads, views, etc). I also really like being able to have access to Gong, which enables me to read transcript ...Read More

PMMs are the most important when it comes to being able to simplify what the product has built and clearly describe what it does and why it’s important. Sales teams are constantly being bombarded with new features that product teams have built, you can’t feed every single feature separately for sales teams to sell.  PMM should be able to help package up these new features (or existing ones) into a narrative to better help sales go to market with them. We did this at Dropbox by leveraging Sales P ...Read More

ABM is near and dear to my heart as I was in the middle of the tornado that spun up the term ABM during my time at Demandbase. As the PMM there at the time, we not only defined what ABM was, but also had to execute on it as well. Based on what we preached, when building out an ABM based strategy, I started by aligning with our sales team to identify the key accounts we are trying to target. From there, start building specific feature related messages to fit that ABM campaign, and also change the ...Read More