Priyanka Srinivasan

I think there could be a number of career paths for PMM. In our team, we see everything from Sales (i.e, former AE), to Product Manager, to content marketer to solutions consultant. I think each of these has their ‘edge’ - for example, coming from sales you have a really unique perspective having had to actually sell and deliver messaging on the front lines. An SC has a more technical perspective and they’re a great fit for a technical PMM role. I personally came from a combination of management consulting and operations and, as a result, I’ve been able to carve out a niche for myself more as a mini product GM or broader go-to-market strategist than a PMM. Regardless, the core skillset for PMM in my mind is someone who can tell a story well (in a clear, concise way) and is obsessively curious about the buyer and what makes them tick.

The way I think about the ‘pillars’ of B2B tech marketing a CMO needs to be familiar with are as follows: * Product Marketing: e.g, go-to-market strategy, product positioning & messaging, competitive intel, sales enablement, analyst relations, etc * Demand Gen: Includes sub-pillars of * Performance marketing (e.g., paid media, website, seo, nurture, etc) * Field marketing (e.g., curated experiences, trade shows, etc) * Customer marketing (e.g., customer stories, videos, references) * Content marketing (blog, content pieces for nurture, webinars, etc) * Brand/Corporate: large corp events (e.g., if you throw a branded conference every year), company look and feel (like the logo, website), exec experiences, etc. Usually CMOs have a “major” in one field and “minors” in the other - no CMO is going to be great at every aspect of marketing. They usually hire someone to handle the parts they “minor” in, but they have to know enough about all aspects of marketing to understand what “good” looks like. When it comes to what “major” or “minor” to purse - in the B2B tech world, I’d recommend majoring in PMM and minoring in Demand Gen. A couple of reasons: 1. PMM in many ways is the most strategic marketing function - you’re being asked to come up with the strategy of how you take a product to market to drive the most revenue. Is it through your existing customers base? Is it through partners? How do I position and message it so that it resonates? These are really meaty questions that require a very strategic mind when done well 2. The right strategy then informs the demand gen and, in many ways, the corp/brand side as well. For example, if we want to go after a certain buyer and we know that buyer likes X or hangs around Y place, we can then figure out the right DG strategy to reach that person, with the right message. In this way, DG is more of a programmatic function - you need someone who knows how to execute these programs seamlessly (and believe me, that is a skill), but the fundamental strategy still sits with PMM With respect to corp / brand, I’d say this is a much bigger priority (in general) in B2C marketing than in B2B. Increasingly, from what I’m seeing, most CMOs in B2B tech either came up PMM or DG, with an increasing number on the PMM side (for the reasons I outlined).

As always, the answer is probably “it depends” as it really does depend on what the goal of your launch is. For example, are you trying to drive awareness of a feature? Adoption? Expansion sales? Once you’ve determined the goal of a launch, the KPIs should be relatively straightforward from there. For us, most of our Tier1/2 launches have the goal of generating pipeline revenue (for either new logos, or expansion, or both) so we look at number of demos set / pipeline generated. Even if the opportunity already exists, I’m also curious to see whether this was the thing that moved the needle for the prospect to buy. When it comes to Tier 3/4 launches, the metrics may be more focused around product adoption and less around direct revenue impact. Did the customers we were targeting in our marketing actually try using the new feature? How often do they use it? For example, is it happening on every order/transaction they do with us, or only a subset? For product adoption you also have to determine what “success” means - that is, what is the specific ‘event’ you want to track when it comes to the feature that would make it a successful use.

In general, if you’re early in your career and trying to learn the nuts and bolts of marketing, I’d go for a startup only if you can work for someone who has more experience / has done it before. I’ve seen a lot of early career folks go to startups where the people above them are just as clueless about best-in-class marketing as they are. That’s not going to be a valuable experience for you. However, if you can find a small company where you’re working under someone who has a lot of experience, it can be a really fulfilling experience and you’ll learn a ton. You’ll likely get way more scope, way more at-bats to do interesting things, etc. The flip side, going to a place like Facebook or Google, is that you’ll get very little scope, very little opportunity for upward career trajectory, few opportunities to manage, etc. But those places have really smart, experienced folks who you can learn from over time. That’s the tradeoff.

In my mind, enablement of internal teams is one of the most important thing you can do when it comes to repositioning or changing GTM strategy, including making it simple and effective to deliver on. We are currently in the process of this with one of our products and audiences right now. Changing how people talk about and position a product is incredibly hard, especially when they’ve been pitching a product in the same way for months or years. From my experience, not only does it take creation of written enablement materials (e.g., FAQ docs) but also live trainings, certifications on new scripts / talk tracks, listening to calls, and an *a lot of repetition*. On top of that, probably one of the most critical things you can do is enlist the help of various team leads / exec leadership to really hit home the fact that we need to be talking about a product / service in a fundamentally different way. It starts from the top where your leadership (Sales, CS) has clear expectations and standards around how you speak about a product and your level of knowledge about it.

I’ve never heard of this particular certification. That doesn’t say much - I’m not your typical PMM. But in general I’d say experience, work samples, business case interviews, and references matter more to me than any outside certifications. To my knowledge we don't really look at that much.

I love this question. I’ll step away from PMM for a minute and say - regardless of what function you’re in at a company, you should be championing yourself and your team constantly. People who ‘get ahead’ in business not only create value, they make sure others know that they create value. What makes PMM hard is that you don’t own a number -- there’s no clear attribution. You can’t say “at the end of Q2 we grew revenue by X% YoY” in the way a sales or DG team can. So you need to constantly be talking about what you are delivering and how you are partnering with teams who do own numbers. What are the channels for communication in your business? At Gainsight, Slack is a major channel. I post often to our Sales channel about projects we’re working on, things we’ve delivered, and I give kudos to others. I do so in a very clear and consistent way. Another idea is asking for your team to be a part of regular weekly business reviews with the Exec team (or asking to be featured one week) if they exist. There’s always some kind of exec alignment session that happens every week or month - find it at figure out who owns it and how to get on it. Also - this is part of your manager’s job (to both trumpet your work and figure out the right forums to do so) so ask them directly how you can get more visibility for you or your team’s work.

Nothing (literally nothing) is more valuable than sitting in on as many prospect / customer calls as possible. It’s the only way you’ll truly understand your buyer and what makes them tick. The rest flows from that. Other than that, make sure you can get at least one launch under your belt as quickly as possible. 

The first thing you have to ask is - is there room for a director or team lead at my company in product marketing? My CEO once said there are basically two ways you can start managing a team: 1. The company is growing (in headcount) and some of that can get allocated to you 2. If the company isn’t growing in headcount, there’s a reorg that happens where you’re given more scope / resources / headcount It’s worth noting that on (1) you need to be able to make a good case for why you should get some of that headcount. Heads are the most fought for things at a company. In order to do that, you need to demonstrate that you’ve taken on a ton of scope / responsibility (that is valuable to the business) and you need people to help you run / scale it. So you should ALWAYS be looking for more scope to take on - ask for it constantly and own own own as much as you can. And make sure they’re functionally valuable things like analyst relations, competitive, enablement, etc etc. And then you’ll have to make a case to your manager. For (2) - you can’t control when that happens, or even less what comes of it. So I wouldn’t count on this as a strategy. If your company isn’t growing rapidly (in terms of headcount), there just might not be an opportunity for you, no matter how good or ready you are. You should be able to suss that out pretty quickly. If that’s the case and being a team lead is something you want to do - leave. Don’t waste another minute hoping for it in your current org. Seriously.

Yes - we definitely have a framework! It is based off of our launch tiers (which I touched upon above). Essentially, we have 4 launch tiers, and each tier has a corresponding set of activities that we’d “light up” if a feature / product is determined to fall into that tier. You can think of the total list of activities like a menu, and a certain set gets lit up depending on the tier. It’s not a hard playbook - sometimes for a Tier 1, for example, we might not do a specific activity that we would normally do, or sometimes for Tier 2s we might include what would normally be a Tier 1-only activity, but it gives us a general sense for level of effort for each launch and the teams that need to be involved. Now comes the natural question of how we determine *what* activities (e.g., press release, emails, in-app, partner marketing, ads, etc) we’d do for each launch tier. This is something I sat down and determined initially with leaders of various cross-functional teams (namely, Demand Gen, Sales, Customer Success) based off of historic level of effort and productivity of these activities / channels. It also can be very specific to your industry / audience in terms of what channels they are active on. One thing to note is that it’s not something that is completely fixed - we’re actually in the process right now of doing a post-mortem on several of our launches over the last 6 months to see if the activities we conducted for them were the ‘right’ ones given their tiering, whether we want change recommendations on activities by tier, etc.