Nathaniel Plamondon

Unless you can find someone to take a shot on you, the best route is definitely making an internal move. I moved to product marketing from content marketing – I made it clear to my manager that PMM was where I wanted to end up, and we worked with the existing PMM org to find me stretch assignments and side gigs so that I could get exposure to the practice while still fulfilling my existing role. After some time doing that, a role opened up and they agreed to give it to me in an entry-level capacity, and I grew from there. Overall, your combination of transferrable skills coupled with domain expertise from time with the company is what will make you more valuable than an experienced outside hire. For this reason, you may have similar luck making that adjacent move to a competitor. We have a PMM on our team who did not have specific PMM expertise when they applied, but was in an adjacent role for a competitor – domain expertise matters!

When I started as a PMM, I wish I'd known that it does not matter how sharp your messaging is, how impactful your sales decks are, or how well your collateral converts if you can't activate people around it. Working as a PMM in four different companies, the work has varied significantly, but the thing that has remained constant is the importance of building relationships with all the key stakeholders. Getting different parts of the business onside with what PMM is doing starts with finding out what PMM can offer that helps them. For me, it's about knowing what questions to ask and finding out how we can find effective ways of working that are mutually beneficial. Working relationships can sometimes feel transactional or, in certain sorts of power dynamics, like a one-way street. Some key questions for common PMM stakeholders: * Product – How can we keep one another in tune with what the other is doing? How can PMM help Product keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the market, while Product helps PMM educate the market on novel ideas? * Sales – How will you create a two-way dialogue to ensure that what PMM puts out there is resonating? How can you capture common objections and competitive intel from field teams and collaborate on how to adjust sales materials accordingly? How can we track the effectiveness of those adjustments? * Enablement and training – How will you build programs that take the good work you're doing and take it wide across the organization? How will your materials be tweaked for different training audiences? Where does PMM's responsibility end and Enablement's responsibility begin? * Marketing – What sorts of materials are most useful to broader marketing teams to ensure we're capturing the product message correctly? How can we effectively scale PMM's expertise across a larger marketing function so there are no bottlenecks? * Design – How can you collaborate on user journeys and use those journeys to impact marketing materials? Ask the right questions and create two-way relationships with your stakeholders. Establish a rhythm and find out how they like working with PMM, how they've worked well with PMM's in the past, and how you can make your work more collaborative.