Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann

We just went through this exercise at Momentive, focusing specifically on building buyer persona "packs" – a collection of materials to help our broader organization understand our target personas. Depending on your project timeline, you'll likely want to conduct a blend of primary and secondary research as well as both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research (industry reports, surveys, etc) can provide great stats, but qualitative research (interviews, recorded calls) is where you'll understand even more context about your buyers. Sources to help you prioritize which personas to focus on: * Industry reports where you might find stats about your industry's TAM, you may also find intel about the top buyers. * Your own customer database, segmented by spend level, purchase frequency, or renewal rate. * A market segmentation study - especially important if you are earlier stage and your customer database won't reflect the potential opportunity. Sources to help you create buyer personas: * Existing research that's been done at your company - this could be UX research, brand health studies, pricing interviews, etc. * Customer & prospect interviews - the best source of information is directly from the mouth of a real buyer. At Momentive, we use usertesting.com and respondent.io to recruit non-customers for interviews; we leverage our Customer Success team to get in touch with existing happy (and unhappy!) customers. * Market research surveys - by surveying a representative sample of your target buyers, you can easily quantify top challeges, pain points, and purchase drivers. I'm #blessed at Momentive to have our own survey platform & integrated panel (including B2B targeting) for this: momentive.ai/insights/ * Recorded customer calls: We're big fans of gong.io to listen to sales calls with our target buyers. Discovery calls are the best for teasing out context/challenges/pain. * Job descriptions: this is a sneaky one, but I love browsing LinkedIn job descriptions for specific titles so you can start to understand the nuances in responsibilities/ownership across different roles in a department. * Win/Loss analyses: great for getting insight into why you win. If you don't already, I'd recommend making win/loss fields mandatory in your sales CRM. * Internal experts: Selling to IT? Interview your own CIO. Selling to marketing? Interview your own marketing leaders. Sometimes they're the best sources * A good ol' Google search using top keywords can help you see which sites/publications are serving content to your target buyers, to know where your buyers can go for education/information. * Industry organization sites or publications can reveal hot topics your buyers care about In my experience, buyer personas are most impactful for aiding strategy for marketing, sales, and product prioritization. Once you get deeper into product design and UX copywriting, user personas become much more critical. Most of the sources I've stated above would be great for generating user personas, espeically 1:1 interviews. You would focus your questioning and documentation less around the buyer journey/decision making and more about their expectations/needs for the product itself.

We JUST revamped our GTM framework & process at SurveyMonkey and you're in luck - I drove this process at the company & am coming off the project pretty fresh. Ultimately, product marketing should own the go-to-market launch framework and process. So you or someone on your team should be a driver, with several cross-functional partners consulted. We got drafts in front of product leadership, marketing leadership, sales enablement (whole team in our case), sales & success leadership, and any other critical teams involved in product launches. In the roll out, we included a GTM launch framework reference deck that outlines our process, a GTM strategy overview deck that we copy & fill in for each major launch (doubles as a kick off deck + source of truth), as well as a execution plan template that's modular based on launch tier. At SurveyMonkey, we found that a simple Tier 1-3 system didn't account for nuances across the types of features, products, and solutions we launch. We have cases where we may be launching major customer features (e.g. revamping our logged-in home) where we need extensive proactive customer communication but don't need a large market push. We needed a way to account for this. SO we created a dual tiering structure: market launch tiers and customer impact tiers. Every GTM launch gets a classification for market launch + customer impact. Market launch tiers account for the activities targeting prospects, analysts, investors, and the press/media. You know you need a market launch when the new product/feature allows you to capture new business, is a differentiated solution, supports a strategic partnership, and would ultimately improve the way the market/investors/analysts view the company. * Tier 1 market launches would be reserved for new proucts or solutions (or a VERY significant update to an exiting solution) or a new strategic GTM partnership * Tier 2 market launches would be leveraged for new features, integrations, or services with the opportunity to impact the market. Tier 2 launch plans could also be used to soft-launch a Tier 1 solution in a public beta program with additional Tier 1 activities to follow. * Releases that would NOT require a market launch could include features where we're playing catch-up with the competition, updates to existing features, UI improvements, or end-of-life (EOL) of a product/feature. Note that this doesn't mean that customer communication isn't needed. Customer launch tiers account for activities targeting existing customers. * High customer impact launches would be reserved for new products/features that immediately and drammatically alter the customer experience for the majority of customers, affects the price they pay, requires admin or customer action, or involves EOL for a product/feature used by a significant number of customers. * Medium customer impact launches would be leveraged for new products/features that changes the workflow for a subset of customers, or and EOL for a product/feature with minimal usage. * Low customer impact launches would use minimal customer comms about updates/enhancements to existing features that wouldn't dramatically alter the customer workflow. * Releases that may not require any customer communication would be things like backend or infrastructure updates that don't impact the customer experience at all. For each of these market launch & customer impact tiers, we have a recommended set of activities. It's especially helpful for guiding more junior team members who haven't led many launches in their career. But, ultimately, our launch tiers serve as a guideline and starting point. For every launch, we will evaluate the situation, and may add/remove elements of a tiered plan based on what's needed.

It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at SurveyMonkey, but here's how I'd envision this working: Product marketing owns: - Buyer persona research, development, and enablement - Product messaging/positioning - Go-to-market strategy (e.g. by persona, industry) - Product/feature launches - Bottom-of-the-funnel product content/collateral - Competitive intelligence - Analyst relations Customer marketing owns: - Customer advocacy: customer stories, customer participation in thought leadership, review site management, communities, advisory boards - Customer marketing: scaled customer onboarding & engagement programs, cross-sell and up-sell customer campaigns - could include email nurtures, customer webinars, etc. Brand marketing owns: - Brand messaging and narrative, as well as brand guidelines - The visual manifestation of the brand (logo, colors, fonts, imagery/animation style, iconography, etc.) - Content strategy, and Top-of-the-funnel thought leadership content - Creative production for full-funnel campaigns (ads, - Brand health measurement & tracking Once the company scales to where there is a) a full portfolio of products and/or brands and b) there is significant investment in full-funnel campaigns across those products/brands, then integrated marketing becomes a necessary function. Integrated marketing owns: - Full-funnel marketing strategy & execution management for large-scale campaigns (these could be brand campaigns or Tier 1 launches).

For almost every feature launch, you have to evaluate the amount of market- and customer-facing activities it makes sense to do. For features that don't warrant a market launch (i.e. they aren't a differentiator, don't support a strategic partnership, or open up opportunities for new business) but DO warrant customer communication and customer-facing team readiness, it's still important to have launch tiers. Is this something that adds value & could enable up-sell or upgrades? Is it a major UI change that would impact their day-to-day usage of the product? Have customers been asking for this? Or is this just an intuitive update to an existing feature? You can think about activities in several buckets, listed below. Note that these are pretty comprehensive, and you'd want to trim this down based on what you're launching. You may, for example, opt for fewer proactive comms touchpoints & more reactive comms preparedness. Launch planning & readiness: Customer segmentation Pull any necessary data/lists Define customer launch segments Document customer comms strategy Channels (email, in-product, 1:1, etc) Comms schedule/phases timing Messaging framework Legal approval of messaging Internal readiness Product/Initiative FAQ Sales & Success training CustOps training Marketing/Comms training Customer communication: In-Product Comms In-product targeting In-product UX copy/design In-product entry points Update transactional emails Error message (for outage) Help Center customer facing FAQ Marketing Comms Upload/create customer send lists Email copy/creative Email localization Contnet updates (website, sales collateral) Sales/Success Comms 1:1 Customer email templates Customer-facing FAQ CustOps Comms Publish page in CustOps wiki CustOps email signature CustOps customer case category CustOps case quick-text responses Social Care team preparedness Day-Of Activation Cut-over plan (e.g. re-directs) Slack channel announcements Customer-facing team reminders Monitor customer case volume Customer onboarding and expansion: Customer onboarding New customer onboarding strategy Update onboarding email sequence Update getting started guide Customer-facing how-to videos Customer training / best practices Customer Engagement QBR template updates Customer touchpoints (email, etc) Customer Expansion Expansion playbook updates Renewal process & playbook Gainsight CTAs It's also important to note that a small feature on its own may not warrant a market splash, but if you bundle multiple similarly-themed feature into one announcement (e.g. multiple analytics features or multiple integrations), then you may be able to swing a market/press moment. At SurveyMonkey, we ladder up feature releases into thematic launches to get more market "bang for our buck" and to reduce the number of individual launch workstreams.

As part of our GTM launch framework & process roll out, we created a GTM strategy & execution plan templates that correspond with different market launch & customer impact tiers. If you nail the GTM strategy, the plan will fall into place if you have the foundational framework. Here are some of the things that make up a highly effective GTM strategy & plan. You can pretty much tackle each of these in order, starting with aligning on the process goals & timeline, then working on the GTM strategy, which will then inform the launch execution plan. 1) Align on the launch process * Clear launch goals (and accountability) * Launch timeline * Roles & responsibilities (we use a DACI model) * Success measurement & tracking 2) Develop a focused strategy * Market & competitive intelligence * Ideal customer profile & target personas * Product messaging & differentiation (incl. message testing) * Product/feature naming * Pricing & packaging 3) Collaborate on an effective execution plan * Product readiness (both in terms of product releases, but also ensuring product-market-fit) * Acquisition strategy * Campaigns & demand gen programs * Sales & success enablement * Effective content/collateral * Customer advocacy

Category creation (or making the decision to join an existing category) should be a joint effort between brand and product marketing leadership (and sometimes comms leadership), with an ultimate approver in the C-suite, either the CMO or CEO. Here are some of the things that brand and product marketing would own as part of the category evaluation process: Product Marketing: - Competitive intelligence: how are competitors referring to themselves? - Research/advice from industry analysts. Where do analysts see our company fitting in best? Any new up-and-coming category names being adopted that we should consider? - Category name testing - both quantitative and qualitative research with your target buyers. - How the brand messaging house or brand narrative connects to product messaging. For example, product marketing would be involved in defining brand value propositions that are both important to buyers, differentiated, and ownable/connected to concrete product value. Brand marketing: - High level brand messaging house which would include the vision/mission/values, category, and brand narrative. - Brand guidelines for using the category name (in written & visual form). For example, we made the decision not to create a logo lockup for "Momentive: an experience management company". But we did create brand guidelines for how to use the term "experience management" in content. - Category/brand awareness campaigns. If you're creating a new category, brand marketing must think about how to invest in not only driving awareness of the brand, but also the category itself. Sometimes it may benefit you to join an existing category that already has significant usage/awareness. Comms: - Company boilerplate (the "About [Company]" section used in press releases) At my time at SurveyMonkey, now Momentive, I've seen us attempt to create our own category ("people powered data") as well as join an existing category ("experience management"). I'll reiterate that starting a new category can be exciting as it signals disruption and innovation, but it requires significant investment to get it to stick. We didn't invest in "people powered data" and it eventually fizzled and was retired.

There are 3 main areas where I've seen product marketing get involved in brand strategy: 1) Brand category definition: (see my other answer on how PMM & Brand would collaborate on category creation/evaluation) 2) Brand/product architecture: When you have a portfolio of offerings and multiple brands, the need will arise to revisit/simplify the brand architecture. We have experienced this when we've built new solutions, acquired companies, etc. Product marketing can bridge the gap between brand experience and product experience, making recommednations for where a product should live in the brand ecosystem based on how the product is built/integrated into other products in your portfolio or even overlap in buyer personas. 3) Brand value messaging: PMM can contribute to the creation of brand-level value propositions as they ultimately need to tie back to concrete product value.

My top tip for being successful in Product Marketing is getting close to the customer. Ways to get close to the customer: * Do your own customer interviews * Get your hands on as much customer research as possible (product research, user research, win/loss, NPS surveys, brand health research, segmentation, etc.) * Shadow customer-facing teams like Sales, Success, and Support * Get access to tools like Gong for analytics on customer conversations * Attend events & conferences, and simply talk to people * Run customer surveys (for feedback on product, messaging, etc) * Read industry reports, join industry newsletters, attend industry webinars with customer speakers How getting close to the customer will help you be a better PMM: * You'll know what they need to be successful in their jobs * You'll better understand your customers' pain points * You'll better understand how/why customers use your product (and competing products) * This translates to great messaging, thought leadership, product content, etc.

Ohhhh man, I've been here! I cringe thinking back to when I would help sales reps customize individual sales decks. Never again! I started to break free of this first by only saying 'yes' to requests that could help the ENTIRE team. For example, if there was a request for a slide that made sense to include in our comprehensive pitch deck, we'd consider it. If the ask was for a piece of collateral that would resonate with an entire persona (not just one client), we'd consider it. The way you really get out of this cycle is by elevating your relationship with sales from the rep level to the leadership level. * Reset the expectation with sales & enablement leaders for how PMM can effectively spend their time supporting their teams. Scaled asset creation and trainings are the best use of time. Ask that individual rep asks get funneled through management. * Document the asks that come in, and ask yourself "how could I uplevel this ask into something that could help the ENTIRE sales team?" is it a new templated asset? a training for how to customize the assets? * Set the expectation with reps in 1:1 conversations when they come to you that there is a new process for working with PMM. If a rep knows they need to ask for something via their manager, that alone may dampen the volume of requests. And that way, requests that DO get through management are the most important to tackle.

Knowing when to introduce an industry product marketing motion depends on several factors: * Do you have product-industry fit? Or put another way, are you free of any product-industry fit barriers like compliance or regulatory needs? E.g.: HIPAA compliance for Healthcare * Are there early signs of success in that industry? E.g.: consistent stream of pipeline, significant contributor to revenue, decent win rates or deal sizes. * Is there buy-in from other dependent functions to support an industry GTM motion? Web/content resources to support the additional content needs; Budget to test into industry-specific campaigns, etc. * Do you have industry expertise on your sales/success team? For example, at SurveyMonkey, we had a dedicated team selling into financial services that was hired from that industry, spoke the lingo, etc. * And probably the most important: Is the messaging needed to attract your target customer in that industry significantly different than your current persona or use case based messaging? E.g.: for SurveyMonkey, we talk about patient feedback instead of customer feedback when marketing to Healthcare. When we first introduced industry product marketing at SurveyMonkey, we did an analysis across the above factors to make the case for a dedicated PMM hire. We already had experts on our sales team, and a significant portion of revenue from a couple key industries. It’s important to note that introducing an industry PMM function or motion doesn’t mean tackling ALL industries at once. You can start with just one, learn, and build a playbook for expanding to more industries later if you see success. You don’t want to overdo it, especially when you’re resource constrained.