Prachi Mishra

“Analyzing the customer journey” is quite a large questions! It really depends on what you’re trying to solve for. Instead, I’d first try to figure out what I want to learn/where I want to focus my time. By scoping things more narrowly, you’ll be able to figure out a method and metrics to get useful answers. So first, map what you know— start with the evidence and assumptions you have and document it. Once you have everything in one place, pull together your PM, Sales, Competitive Intel (+ whoever owns win-rate analysis), CS, Demand Gen, and UX and walk through what you have. Whether this is with each person one-off or a lively discussion with everyone in the room, I have seen that different stakeholders have different data points and assumptions. These conversations will make it easier to understand where there are gaps/data is lacking in an impactful way and clarity will help your business grow. On the flip side, you might even see that someone has the data you need! In terms of the customer journey itself, some topics I like to consider for mapping/conversations: * Consideration set (who is the competition, why are they winning deals, when do they lose?): be sure to include not just product differentiation here but selling tactics as well (ex is your competition an industry giant who has great exec relations with clients, or maybe a start-up who does a great job of selling quickly when budget is approved?). * Messaging: You hopefully have a good insights into this outside of just customer journey, but do you talk about your product/solutions the same way the customer is describing them? Does the language change throughout the journey based on who is getting added to the conversation? Does your Sales team know how to speak to the different personas? * Buying committee/personas: think about the user, the internal advocates, and the exec sponsors — how do these individuals interact? What problems can you solve for all three - does your messaging address that appropriately? * Touch-points: How does your company talk to prospects? Do your Sales and DG teams work together to send the same message or are they taking a different approach? Are these touch points effective? Are you even going after the right titles? * Win/loss rates: Not every company tracks this, but data regarding your sales team’s win/loss ratio and why those deals went through or didn’t can be wildly helpful. I usually try to get more details from Sales reps directly, but if your organization doesn’t document this, talking to Sales (reps or leadership) is a good place to start. * Feedback from Sales/CS: This is likely something that is the most accessible since Sales can be quite vocal, but listen to your Sales team and try to answer if there’s an underlying issue. Ex: if you repeatedly hear that the team needs new collateral, is that because they don’t know where the collateral lives (and so the customers aren’t seeing it) or because there are new use cases that need to be showcased? At the end of the day, Sales/CS is on the frontlines - don’t dismiss their requests too quickly :) Once you have your customer journey “problem” scoped, figuring out metrics and methods will be a lot easier. Hope this is helpful! If you have a more focused question on customer journeys, please tag me! Would love to help. 

Getting the attention of a remote sales rep can be difficult but a handful things have been really helpful in my experience: partnership with Sales leadership, multiple learning options, quizzes/certifications for enforcing learning or understanding gaps, and making resources easily accessible. * A strong partnership with Sales leadership: I’ve found this highly valuable since for a sales rep, any time not spent moving a deal forward is often considered time squandered. I like to get alignment with Sales leadership to not only dispel this idea but to flip it — the training should help Sales hit quota by understand the customer/product better or helping the team understand differentiation, etc. I then try to get someone on the leadership team to join a session either live digitally or in a recorded format. Getting leadership’s explicit approval helps get the team to pay attention and provides credibility for the material you’re going to present. * Multiple learning options: Sales reps are human! Some of them will prefer text/slides, some prefer short videos, others will prefer to learn in person. Now days, it’s getting easier to create multiple types of content from a single base. I typically build out slides for an interactive webinar enablement, then use Zoom to record “highlights” video — if you only have 3 minutes, what are the most important takeaways, and will break out the Sales leadership intro as a separate video as well. Additionally, other sales collateral, like win wires, customer stories, battle cards and demo videos, can serve to support your main learnings. This way, people have a variety of options for learning the content and can do what suits their learning and time needs best. * Quizzes/Certifications: If you need to enforce learning, (and have Sales Leadership alignment), I recommend a quiz and a certification for those who get X% correct. Even if it’s with a Google form, a quiz/certification helps ensure who is looking at the material and where there are learning gaps that need to be addressed. * Make resources easily accessible: I bet we've all heard: “I can’t find the training” or the "I don’t know where the link is” as an excuse before. I like to put together a small bulleted list of links and add it almost as a signature on every slack message, email, Sales Enablement hub post, and training deck I have. By keeping those links easily accessible, your teams will never forget that they still need to take the training and that all the links to get to the module/deck/video are right there in the team slack, the all hands deck, the email from their Sales leader, etc. You should be impossible to ignore in the best way :) 

When growing out my teams, it's easiest to look at what problems need addressing, but also the different ways PMM orgs can be organized. Every company I've worked in has approached PMM differently based 1) how much of a product expert PMMs need to be, 2) how much support customer audiences need, 3) how your GTM teams are organized. 1) For highly-technical products, it often makes more sense to have a single PMM own everything from product roadmapping with PM all the way through owning the launches (sales content, enablement, external facing collateral). This provides PMs, Sales, and Marketing confidence in having an SME and provides the PMM a clear path of ownership. 2) For products where the functionality is less complex, but the customer language and application is nuanced, it often makes more sense to have a PMMs owning different audiences. For example, this could be a product that is used for different use cases across multiple verticals or LOBs. 3) The third way to organize is to have "internal" (most typically R&D/PM world) and "external" facing PMMs (GTM / customer facing). This approach blends a bit of the above strategies -- where you set up PMMs as product specialists with PMs/eng/UX as their primary stakeholders and other GTM specialist PMMs whose primary stakeholders are Sales/Sales Enablement/Marketing. Each still keeps the customer close -- PMM product specialists typically reference user research/beta testing while GTM specialists will have anecdotes directly from Sales, Marketing, and customers. Here, swim lanes are going to be split in a couple ways but I've seen PMM product specialists work with the R&D side to get the product/feature to be fully viable for launch (building customer profiles, presenting at internal committees with PMs at key developmental milestones, building content for GTM etc) and PMM GTM specialists working to launch the product (events, campaigns, building content for GTM, Sales enablement, etc) and beyond. These three set-ups are what I've seen across my experience, and at the most mature organizations I've worked within, at Salesforce and Docusign, they will have a highly-matrixed version where all three exist though the department the role lives within might not be strictly PMM. However, that being said, it is often clear what is being prioritized -- Sales/GTM motions or product innovation/adoption -- with regards to the bottom line and business impact. While there's no "one size fits all" way to scale, I recommend considering the following questions to help you prioritize what is the most important to your organization and your approach to scale: -- How specialized is the product? How long will it take someone to full onboard to the product? -- How specialized is the customer audience/message? Does nuanced customer messaging require someone from that industry/LOB to fully understand/empathize with the customer? Do PMs/Sales need a point person to build stronger customer perspective? -- What resources does your organization have right now to support product development vs GTM? What is the larger priority adoption vs new sales/up-selling? Bonus thoughtful manager considerations: What does my current PMM resource want to do more of, less of, and are there things s/he/they would like to own if things were structured different? Hope this helps!