Mike Greenberg

This is probably one of the toughest problems we face as marketers. A lot of times, teams will look at a combination of leading quantitative indicators (clicks, conversions, time spent, etc.) and qualitative signals (from buyer interviews, listening to sales calls, etc.), to take a best guess at what’s working and what’s not. There are lots of problems with this. It’s tough to isolate messaging as the primary driver of these results, and assign quantifiable measures that will clearly indicate improvement if you make changes. Qual feedback takes a lot of time to gather, especially if you want to validate your messaging across a number of buyer personas. A/B testing can help, but you and your GTM team need to be pretty careful not to change anything else (including upper-funnel stuff like ad copy and targeting) that might impact results, which can be paralyzing. Worst of all, while you’re doing all of this, you’re already in-market: the train has left the station and you’re losing opportunity if you’re not sure your message is connecting. Instead, my recommendation is to validate your messaging before you go to market. (I won’t do too much self-promotion here, but it just so happens we make a Message Testing solution at Momentive, and it’s one of the products we leverage the most internally.) With a message testing solution, you can get a number of messages in front of your target audience — we tend to target a broad array of business buyers — and get real data on which messages resonate across a attributes like overall appeal, uniqueness, and, importantly, desire to learn more (as well as segmentation across buyers if you like). This is the kind of thing that, a few years ago, you’d probably need to engage a research agency to run, but modern survey-based tools like ours have purpose-built methodologies built-in, and you can get a clear signal on your key messages in just a day or two. We ran one of these recently to test new headline messaging for our Momentive homepage and it paid off in spades. It validated a messaging direction with our target buyers that was different than what internal leadership was advocating for — so we had some data to bring to the table justifying our positioning (see another of my AMA responses on gaining XF alignment on positioning). If we hadn’t tested, there was a strong risk of going to market with a losing message on one of our most important properties. Instead, we were able to go live on Day 1 with a message that we already know will resonate. In fact, two of our test messages performed strongly, so we were able to run an in-market A/B test to find a winner without really risking any traffic to a poor performer. tl;dr: I recommend using a survey-based solution to test your messaging before you go to market. You’ll get quantifiable information about what works and what doesn’t, aid internal buy-in, and gain a lot of launch day confidence. You will influence other performance KPIs driven by the GTM team, but PMM’s biggest responsibility is ensuring you have messaging that resonates with target buyers.

The right team structure is going to be highly dependent on your business, so there's no one right answer. I've been on teams that have been organized by product, vertical, customer segment, and GTM motion (self-serve vs. sales assisted) with equal success and equal lack of success. Company-level priorities can provide a great North Star to align your team's structure and accountability to. For example, if one of your top goals is to improve NPS by 10 points this year, you might do well to have a PMM whose job it is to think about customer engagement and retention strategies. One thing that's been very successful on my team is bringing on a PMM dedicated to competitive intelligence, which is not a role that sits on a lot of product marketing teams. Our observation was that even though competitive insights are a core part of our job responsibility, PMMs get so busy we they really only go in-depth when a project or launch requires it. We wanted to drive more ongoing competitive visibility across the org, but also to be more agile in our response to competitive threats, so placing that role at the intersection of product influence, internal enablement, and GTM execution has really accelerated impact.

Product Marketing is great for growth because there are always new problem spaces to learn and GTM strategies to challenge us. I love building teams that are curious and eager to try something new. Here's how I do my best to facilitate growth: * Hire well and bring on PMMs of different skill levels and experiences to round out your team * Create a culture of mentorship where your more senior PMMs are teaching and delegating to junior team members; don't allow silos to form on your team * Align work with everyone’s areas of interests and growth to the extent that you can, partnering those with experience with those who want it when possible * Stretch your PMMs outside their core areas of responsibility with a new challenge or project when you can (I’ll often do this when balancing workload across the team, if I can take something off the plate of an overstretched PMM that aligns with the interests or career goals of another team member, regardless of whether the project is within their typical day-to-day scope.) * Support your team’s success by finding opportunities to make them and their work visible internally and externally so that they earn the trust of partners and leaders * Invest in their professional growth (Product Marketing Alliance provides great resources and opportunities here) * Celebrate learning moments and big swings, even when they don't work out

I'd describe positioning as how we want to be perceived in the market, and messaging as the customer-facing language that proves it. But in practice, I've rarely (if ever) had this specific conversation at Momentive outside of PMM: it tends to be pretty marketing-centric. What I've learned from internal stakeholders is that what's most important to them is to be able to look at a messaging document and know what's internal framework vs. something they can use in external-facing materials, so we tend to mark things clearly in those terms when putting a new messaging resource together.

We have 9 product marketers split across two teams that collaborate closely. Broadly, my team of 5 (including me) is responsible for new product and feature GTM targeting a general audience, as well as competitive intelligence. Our peer team of 4, led by another awesome PMM Director, is responsible for persona-specific GTM and international GTM strategy. For broader context on our product and space, SurveyMonkey offers both self-serve (Freemium) and Enterprise feedback products targeting teams and organizations of all sizes. Our product supports a ton of use cases for online forms and feedback, but we have several prioritized use cases and personas that we develop for and market to, including employee experience, customer experience, and market research. So for us, it makes sense to have both general and persona-focused GTM motions working. Within my team, focus areas by PMM are: * Our core features and freemium surveys product * Enterprise product and AI features * Online form features and third party integrations * Competitive intelligence and product-led growth initiatives Maintaining 1-2 core focus areas per PMM allows everyone to develop a solid level of domain expertise, and we have a range of skillsets and experience levels on the team that helps us stay agile, engaged, and effective. I’ve spoken about this in more detail in another Sharebird AMA, but one of the things we’ve done a little differently than many PMM teams is bringing on dedicated competitive intelligence expertise rather than splitting this responsibility across PMMs. Centralizing CI in this way, and as a function within PMM, has paid dividends and helped us improve sales confidence and win rates, influence product roadmaps, and develop a competitive GTM strategy at the company level. It’s a function I highly recommend adding to maturing PMM teams.

Marketing fundamentals are the same whether your growth strategy is PLG or traditional outbound marketing (and the two are not exclusive!): you still need to understand your target market, develop effective messaging, and get in front of the right people at the right moment. At SurveyMonkey, we engage in both PLG and traditional marketing as part of our overall GTM strategy. With PLG, we are thinking strategically about how the product itself can act as a channel for delivering our message, convincing customers, and driving product virality. Using SurveyMonkey as an example: * When somebody sends a survey, we can grow awareness with brand impressions made through email invitations, on survey pages, and even through the content we decide to display after a survey is taken * A freemium, self-serve pricing model and try-before-you-buy tactics help grow acquisition * Customers who want to leverage their own brand, instead of ours, can upgrade to a paid product directly through product-driven purchase flows — one of many levers that can drive paid conversion * Strategic feature investments, like in-product collaboration, paired with good promotion at the right moment, increase engagement and ultimately drive expansion and retention outcomes Lastly, consider how PLG and traditional marketing channels can be used together to increase effectiveness, and make sure that both product and marketing teams have access to key signals about user behavior so that you can reach them with consistent messaging across all of the channels available to you. For example, if someone hits a paywall in your product but doesn't convert in-the-moment, traditional marketing channels can take over to reinforce your message / convince even after they've left your website or app.

Great question (and there are a few others around messaging development process that I’ll use this response to cover). We have a few processes and frameworks in place that really help with XF alignment. First of all, if you don’t have one, I recommend developing a messaging framework or template that the entire PMM team will adopt consistently, and that you’ve socialized with partners in advance. That way, your cross-functional team knows what to expect from PMM whenever they receive a new messaging brief. Over the past year, I collaborated with my fellow PMM leads to create a fresh messaging framework template at SurveyMonkey, and we brought our frequent internal customers into that process to provide feedback (primarily folks in Marketing/Communications and Sales Enablement roles). As a result, we’ve now got a template that partners agree — in advance! — will contain all the key information they need to be successful, and this cuts down greatly on any XF friction that might occur when it’s time to deliver a new messaging doc. Additionally, it’s important to show your work so that you’re bringing partners along for the ride as they read what you’ve got to say. The opening third (or so) of our template is dedicated to summarizing (with data!) the market opportunity, buyer pain points, the competitive environment, etc. We also show the building blocks of our positioning — the target audience, problem statement, competitive differentiators, value statement, and benefits — as separate elements before weaving them into customer-facing copy. If we’ve done any message testing (more on that in a different AMA response), we’ll include the results of that, too. There’s little room for “we don’t believe you”-type statements, because we’re drawing a pretty clear map of how we arrived at our positioning. Lastly, we’ll usually do a first pass with our creative team of writers to ensure our tone and voice are on point, and customer-facing messages are compelling, before briefing in the GTM team. Ultimately, your writers (if you’re not writing all copy yourself) are on the hook for translating your messaging doc into an array of wonderful collateral. The extra bit of preview and polish has everyone ready to run with your messaging and start creating as soon as you hit “go”.

Thanks for sharing that article! Though I can’t speak directly to Slack’s land-and-expand tactics, we follow a similar strategy at SurveyMonkey, and I'm happy to share some insights into what makes it work. In a bottom-up SaaS expansion strategy, the end goal is typically to get to the IT buyer by growing an installed footprint in an organization that’s too large (for IT) to ignore. This is how Slack has grown, and it’s fundamentally different than a top-down strategy where you’re more typically targeting departmental buyers directly with a sales-assisted motion (though you can certainly do both!). Some thoughts to this end: * A freemium, self-serve model helps if you want your users to bring your product into their office environment (usually as an alternative to something that is too expensive, too complex, or simply not provided): your product should be as accessible to people as possible (“land”) * Leverage surveys, interviews, and other feedback to know your users and use cases deeply so that you can tailor your messaging as you make the case for growing your product’s footprint in their department, and then their organization * Influence your product org to adopt PLG tactics and inherently viral features in your product roadmap, and drive adoption of these as a key part of your marketing strategy: collaboration and sharing features are a great way to use your product to drive expansion * If you don’t already offer one, consider a self-serve, multi-user offering that sits between individual accounts and an organizational (enterprise) deployment to encourage adoption by small teams: create an expansion “ladder” of offerings your customers can climb as their usage matures toward companywide adoption * Maintain and make available great data on organizational usage that customer-facing teams can leverage to make the pitch for shifting from self-serve/ad-hoc to IT-led organizational adoption: for example, a sales or CS team should be able to speak to how many self-serve users are in an organiation, how active they are, and even how much money the organization is currently spending on self-serve / “bring your own” users * Package your offerings smartly so that organizational deployments add value for both end users and IT buyers, so that the entire organization benefits from moving up the ladder. * Remember that end users and IT buyers don’t care about the same things, so you’ll need to adopt your “expand” pitch based on the audience: end users care about value that makes their job easier. IT buyers care about buying down risk and maximizing ROI from their technology spend, and may never actually be end users of your product. Your messaging and teams will need to be adept at speaking both languages. Hope that’s helpful!

As far as your approach to messaging, there’s probably more in common than there are differences in engaging B2C and B2B buyers (there are more differences in GTM strategy than messaging). I’ve spent a lot of my career in the gray area in-between these buyers, as PMM for consumer productivity apps at Apple which also targeted SMB and EDU buyers, and in my current role working with SurveyMonkey, which scales from a free offering all the way up to enterprise solutions. Some observations… The B2B journey is a bit different because it can involve a lot of convincing others (those with the purchasing power) to spend the company’s money and resources on your solution, and it’s good to be aware that the internal champion for your product may or may not hold that power, or even be in the same department as the decision-maker. You need to put messages in the hands of the champions that will appeal to buyers, so that they can advocate on your behalf. Understanding that journey, and who the decision-makers are, can help you customize your messaging and GTM strategy to appeal to all parties. As one example, when developing messaging for our SurveyMonkey Enterprise product, we produce a lot of messaging for IT buyers around topics like mitigating data security risks and ease of setup and administration, because we know IT is going to be heavily involved in the purchasing decision, even if they’re rarely the end user for the product. By contrast, for our self-serve, freemium SurveyMonkey product (which is typically still B2B), our messaging focuses on end user pain points and use cases for surveys — IT isn’t typically in the loop for these purchases, so we don’t need to prioritize those messaging themes. It’s super important to understand the decision-making and purchasing process of your B2B buyers to inform the personas you’ll need to influence. You might also consider your buyer’s goal when constructing your Reasons To Believe and any aspirational statements. The B2B buyer might be more motivated by driving organizational success (by which they’ll gain personal accolades), whereas the consumer may be more personally-motivated. What’s important is that as you’re personalizing your messaging for different buyers and buying journeys, if appealing to both of these segments, you don’t compromise your brand voice or tone, which should be consistent (it reflects who you are as a company). Business buyers are consumers too, so I subscribe to the school that advises approachable, friendly language regardless of audience. You still need to poke the pain point, describe technical solutions in nontechnical terms, stand out from the competition, and provoke an emotional response that triggers a buying decision — regardless of whether it’s a business buyer or consumer on the other end of the conversation.

When it comes to understanding product pipeline, the most effective thing I've done as a PMM leader is to nurture great relationships with our Product Management leads. We have a ratio of 1 PMM to every 3-4 PMs, with varying levels of experience in these functions collaborating, so at the leadership level we need to be able to partner well and have open conversations about what's working and what's not so that we can consolidate product schedules and remove roadblocks that might prevent us from having visibility into what's coming and when. If my team isn't getting what they need from their product-side contacts (or vice versa), we need to work together to resolve it and be above a lot of the product/marketing animosity that can develop in other organizations. At a tactical level, my team manages both our customer-facing roadmap assets and an internal go-to-market calendar that we update in line with our twice-yearly planning cycles, and maintain in-between as things change through the course of development. These are great resources that enable our Sales and Marketing teams, respectively, but also provide a good forcing function for regular roadmap-related collaboration between Product and PMM teams to ensure accuracy of our plans. I’ll typically collaborate directly with Product Management leadership on these deliverables, and let them bring in their team members as necessary to keep us accurate. We also maintain a partner map of the PMs, PMMs, Engineers, and Designers that typically work together (based on feature areas) that helps define the executional teams meeting on a regular basis. On the Product side, the PM team has started doing a quarterly internal "roadmap roadshow" that highlights recent releases and previews what's coming, which is yet another opportunity to provide full-company visibility into our product plans. That’s not to say that we’re perfect: product plans and timelines change, people come and go, and new ideas or priorities come up between planning cycles. One of the ways I’m working to improve things is through more formal alignment of our product development and GTM processes with ideas like assigning PMMs as soon as roadmap tickets are created, joint acknowledgement at key development milestones (i.e. everyone has seen and agrees to final product requirements), and ensuring experimentation timelines are fully estimated and baked into delivery timelines. I'm convinced that steps like this can go a long way toward creating a more visible and accurate pipeline into PMM without adding a lot of red tape.