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Pat Ma

Pat Ma

Senior Product Marketing Manager at Guidewire Software

San Francisco, California

I have 10 years experience in product marketing working at Oracle, Cisco, Nokia, and consulting with startup companies. Learn more at www.patma.com.

Content

What skills are universally key to being a great product marketer?

Pat Ma
Pat Ma

Guidewire Software Senior Product Marketing Manager • 9y

In my opinion, I think the most important skill needed to be a great product marketer is sales (specifically pitching). You have to be able to get in front of a customer and pitch your product well. This means understanding your customer's needs, explaining your value proposition in the first 90 seconds, succinctly showing how your product can solve your customer's problems, and why your product is better than other products that s/he is considering. My ex-boss (CEO of Leadspace and former CMO o ...Read More

1,571 Views

How do you distinguish between a product, a feature, and a solution?

Pat Ma
Pat Ma

Guidewire Software Senior Product Marketing Manager • 8y

Product: This is your product or platfrom (e.g. Salesforce Sales Cloud)
Feature: This is a specific part of the platfrom that customers can use (e.g. Contacts, Leads, Accounts, Opportunities)
Solution: This is a use case for your product - by need, industry, or persona (e.g. I need to track sales, SFDC for Financial Services, SFDC for VP of Sales)

1,374 Views

What has worked for you when trying to scale product training to a large field of sales reps at mass?

Pat Ma
Pat Ma

Guidewire Software Senior Product Marketing Manager • 9y

Do you have a weekly product training with the go-to-market team (marketing, SDRs, sales, and customer success)? We did this at Oracle and Leadspace and it worked well. It's a weekly, 1 hour live training forum where we introduce product updates, new sales tools, and deep dive into customer use cases. At Oracle, over 350 sales reps joined the weekly meetings and they were recorded, so more people go to see the replay if they couldn't join live. For tech, any web conferencing software would do. B ...Read More

1,292 Views

What advice do you have for navigating multiple stakeholders with conflicting feedback when creating sales enablement?

Pat Ma
Pat Ma

Guidewire Software Senior Product Marketing Manager • 9y

Marketing is the only job in a company that everybody thinks they can do. You’ll propose an idea and get conflicting feedback from everyone.


How I handle the situation is saying something like, “I’ve considered everybody’s feedback, tried to incorporate as much of your feedback as possible, and on the conflicting feedback made a judgement on the best path forward.”


You can’t please everyone. But most people just want to be heard and recognized.

858 Views

Any examples of best in class feature launch emails you have seen?

Pat Ma
Pat Ma

Guidewire Software Senior Product Marketing Manager • 8y

On the B2C side, check out http://reallygoodemails.com/category/promotional/product-launch/

This is a visual library of really good emails sorted by industry and category. I think B2B marketers can learn a lot about email from their B2C counterparts by making their emails visual, attention grabbing, with clear calls to action.

822 Views

What are your thoughts about getting certified in project management as a means to break into product marketing?

Pat Ma
Pat Ma

Guidewire Software Senior Product Marketing Manager • 9y

Short answer, certifications are somewhat irrelevant when it comes to getting a job. It doesn't hurt to get more education. I have an MA and MBA. But if you want to break into product marketing, then you have to show you can do the job. I think Certifications < Formal Education < Passion < Relevant Experience < Direct Experience for any job. Understand the company's needs and show that you can solve their problems. If you haven't done the job before, then show that you are interested ...Read More

683 Views