Rinita Datta

Here are some tips on what you could do differently: * Highlight technical value propositions more in your sales enablement collateral * Invest time in technical training for your salesforce * Ensure your salesforce has easy access to technical information, kudos if you can leverage an internal GPT for this! * Think about how you can create self-service demos and sandbox experiences that your sales team also has visibility into * Encourage your salesforce to share technical content and resources with customers

As a solo marketer, I imagine you are constrained on multiple fronts. In my mind, you could prioritize these three high-impact areas: * Create. Commit to a steady stream of SEO-optimized content that covers thought leadership, product features, use cases/how-to, and case studies. Try and leverage other SMEs within and without your company, including influencers in your industry to write and create content. * Invest. If you have a budget, spend it on performance marketing tactics, including paid social and paid search. Also any automation tools that can optimize your customer onboarding and CRM workflows. * Engage. Host webinars, hang out in your audience’s usual watering holes, and talk to at least 1 customer every week to keep a pulse on your community, get regular feedback, and keep iterating on your content and initiatives roadmap.

This is common, and you should start defining R&R with your PM counterparts. Common knowledge states that PMs should do customer-focused research, and PMMs should do market trends and competitive research. But this varies in reality as many companies have research happening in silos, and it depends on who has the need, budget, and capacity to do it. * Emphasize that no matter who conducts the research, both PMs and PMMs can benefit from and act on the insights. While PMs can use the insights to shift product direction and develop enhancements, PMMs can use them to change messaging and positioning and create new content and programs. * Thus, you can argue for building a central repository of all past and upcoming research projects accessible to various stakeholders. Offer to categorize it based on product areas, themes, personas, etc. This provides visibility and avoids duplicate work. * Set up a core research council or working group to discuss research projects and insights regularly. Offer to be the showrunner for this. This would ensure that everyone feels involved, and you can also use these channels to drive accountability for the next steps.

Budget is not the only resource at your disposal; I’d encourage you to get creative and find more avenues to contact prospects, customers, partners, and sales. A simple Google form survey can go a long way. There may be many other low-to-no-cost options for outreach, e.g. your company’s email orchestration system, outreach on LinkedIn, direct outreach through sales reps, analyzing support tickets, running workshops and advisory boards on Zoom meetings. You can also sign up for your competitor’s products, engage with their content and programs, and read customer reviews for your product as well as adjacent/competitive products to get more market context. Once you have built a corpus of research and data-driven hypotheses, synthesize and validate them with your friendly internal stakeholders and categorize them into quick wins vs long-term innovation. Lastly, offer to run cross-functional research insight readout meetings and make sure you have leadership visibility into your efforts.

* Have a learner’s mindset. In your spare time, keep reading technical briefs, whitepapers, documentation, and even JIRAs to understand your products' architecture and technical details. This will help you better understand and better position yourself when discussing the feasibility of a new roadmap item with your PMs. * You can also ask to be a fly on the wall for product and support ticket review meetings to familiarize yourself with the terminology. * I’ve also made it a personal goal for my team and me to attend a few technical workshops and complete product courses every quarter to stay updated with the latest happenings. My team hosts monthly office hours for customers with product SMEs, too, where they hear directly about how the customer uses the product, what problems they face, and what could be done better. * Beyond learning things yourself, give back to your technical counterparts by educating them on the competitive landscape, customer insights, market research, etc., and showing how their work aligns with the business goals. * Subscribe to relevant tech newsletters and blogs and follow key tech influencers in your industry. If you find something worth including in your roadmap, develop your hypothesis on ‘why’ and ‘how’ and take it to your PMs for early vetting. * Ask to present in engineering, sales engineering, or support/PS meetings. In these meetings, you can showcase an initiative and solicit feedback to build a case for influencing the roadmap.

This is often the case at larger companies, and your expected outcome requires a lot of relationship building, regular communication, and tight alignment on OKRs and ongoing research projects. Here are some tactics you can try to drive this successfully: * Set up monthly syncs with the customer research team to share top-of-mind goals, identify new research opportunities or gaps, and discuss insights. * Ask to get included in ongoing research projects. You can review the methodology, participate in the response analysis process, bring your unique perspectives about the market and what you hear from sales and customer success, and align the insights with business goals to effectively influence the roadmap. * Showcase any past experiences where a research project or experiment you did positively impacted business goals. * Educate the research team on the competitive landscape and collaborate with them on the outreach/channel strategy for the target audience using your budget and PMM expertise.

I’d meet your immediate PM counterparts at least once every week and talk about the roadmap at least once every month. If you support multiple PMs, having a monthly sync with leadership helps everyone stay aligned. Try to join any quarterly or yearly product initiatives/roadmap planning and QBR meetings.

I see you have a lot of documentation and developer content on your developer portal. I think you can take the following steps to building an active and engaged developer community * Select a channel where your developers can interact with peers and experts—it could be Slack, Discord, Reddit, StackOverflow, X, HackerNews or a custom online forum. Highlight it on this portal and invite developers to sign up. * See your channel with some FAQs, foundational content, or product news that can spark discussions and peer-to-peer engagement. * Identify your most active developers and invite them to an in-person or virtual meetup to formally launch your community and recognize them as champions or advocates. * Continue these meetups and empower your community members to organize their own user meetups in their local regions globally. * Incentivize and recognize community members with badges for different activities. Developer Evangelists can help foster technical discussions, offer live support, and moderate your community channels as you scale and grow your community. Coming from deep technical backgrounds, developer evangelists can become the perfect bridge between your product teams and customers, help build trust and credibility, and ultimately accelerate community growth.

We’ve typically done this by cataloging every idea and piece of feedback from various sources in a backlog and assigning a weighted score to each for prioritization. The weighting factors can be business impact (new market entry/revenue growth/retention or satisfaction play, etc.), customer impact, alignment with market trends and leadership OKRs, ease and length of implementation, frequency of the request, etc. Doing this exercise collaboratively with your PM counterparts will help you understand the urgency of the requirements and categorize them into short-term enhancements vs long-term strategic innovation opportunities. It would also help to vet this list and your thinking by SMEs in your sales and customer success organizations.

While developers may not be the buyers in B2B, they are most certainly influencing the purchase decisions. Developers also influence purchase decisions in their personal and professional networks outside their organization. Your executive and buyer audience will care more about ROI, scalability, no. of integrations, and security posture. Whereas the developer and end users will care more about technical details like performance, feasibility of implementation and real use case examples with demos and sandboxes. These audience segments are not always mutually exclusive, and developers today could be buyers and executives tomorrow. Hence you are right in needing to balance the messaging. Three ways that have worked for us are: 1. Create separate messaging and assets highlighting product benefits for both technical and non-technical audiences. Tie both to overall business outcomes like saving cost/time/resources, improving efficiency, or speeding up innovation that everyone will relate to. 2. Map your buyer/customer journey content to assess whether you have enough coverage across all stages of the lifecycle. A lack of good onboarding and adoption-focused content, such as technical webinars and use case guidance, can create customer retention problems. 3. Test your messaging and personas regularly, yearly if possible, to ensure your understanding of the customer pain points is current, and your messaging is still relevant to both buyers and developers.