Robert Campbell

Product marketing is the most misunderstood career paths in an organization. You are often asked to wear all the hats and then have nothing to hang them on after other teams have taken credit. How do you solve this problem, especially as you're starting out? As a product marketer, use product marketing disciplines internally to establish your team for success - 1) identify the customer problems; 2) build your messaging; 3) Find the right channels to go to market. Your stakeholders are quite obviously your customers as product marketing. From the sales side, is your sales enablement out of date and not being used by Sales? Is Sales woefully unprepared to talk to the subject matter given it's high technical acumen? Does Sales know who to talk to at their prospects? From a product perspective, does your product team hate spending time with customers because they'd rather be coding? Are release notes coming out dry and technical? Is Product even talking to Sales on a recurring basis? Get a list going and keep track! Next, build your internal messaging. Set the table for success by repeating your team's vision quickly and succinctly in every meeting as you start out. Repeated messages get reinforced in your stakeholder's minds so they come back to you with the same requests, which allows you to determine how to prioritize and delegate your time - as well as make plans for scaling your team. What does product marketing do for Sales and for Product? Make sure this aligns to what you're hearing! Finally, find the right channels and balance those channels effectively, just like you would do in a product launch. Delegating your time across Product and Sales is also important. It's too easy to fall into the trap of spending too much time with one or the other and neglecting key needs from each group. Be intentional on setting recurrences and bring something to the table to each group for each session. Within your third session with each team, start making this process collaborative and repeat past feedback (good or bad) with how you've solved it. Establish social proof! As always, especially if you're a team of one starting out, set effective expectations early. Tease what can be done with more resourcing/budget, but gate effectively your time so you can output high quality work, even if it's only at "MVP" level. Have clear OKRs and show how you're driving towards them over time - and most importantly call out key contributions in your stakeholder teams. Reinforcing effective collaboration starts and stops with sharing the kudos!

Creating a process to address minor releases and enhancements is often as important as your major product launch, especially if you're in a multi-matrixed business with lots of product teams releasing constantly. The two core elements to consider boils down to: 1) customer messaging and 2) sales enablement. Customer Messaging: Product Marketing 101: Identify the customer problem the feature solves and message it with this as the core of the sentence. Borrowing from my PMO days, the Agile user story format makes this incredibly simple - "as a <persona> I need <a solution> so I can <solve a problem>." Starting from there, build compelling messaging that addresses generally the context and tie back to the tone set forth in your brand style guide. This should be three sentences max, and ideally shorter. Sales Enablement: One of the biggest challenges of iterative development to the sales enablement function is not pulling Sales off of selling to train constantly. Build a readout of these minor enhancements based on your customer messaging and build it into existing monthly trainings, or even make it purely a "digest" format out to the sales teams. If this brings the offering to parity (or parity plus) with a competitor, highlight it as such! Minor enhancements may be a deal-maker to some prospects particularly if it's not found broadly in the market. As always, gather feedback from Sales and Product and in your regular syncs with them call out areas where the feedback has driven change in the content or process. This will show your stakeholders you listen and follow through.

The answer to this question really depends on what sort of business you're in. I've typically worked in B2B businesses for most of my career, and B2B organizations have very sales-forward KPI metrics for product marketing, usually coming out of the following three: deal velocity (how fast is sales selling); deal size (how well are you selling the value of the product/solution and are you optimizing for cross-sell); and win-loss rate (how many prospects are closing vs not). However, if you're a product marketer taking a PLG-centric view you might want to have more product metrics as you're casting nets vs fishing poles. Create feedback loops for your messaging on all your customer-facing channels - is this web copy meeting the need? Is the messaging positioned on my materials appropriately to tell the story I want to tell? Are visitors converting to leads? Are we doing "too good" of a job and getting a lot of dormant signups (users that sign up for the product but never use it)? It's harder to draw straight lines through KPIs in the PLG world, but user growth is the most obvious and biggest one, though obviously shared with Product.

Talk to Sales! This is seemingly the most obvious, but layered within this step is the importance of understanding how Sales sells across the team. Talk to the top performers and see if you can sit in on calls, or if your org has a tool like Gong that records sales calls, use that as a tool to extract as much about the buyer journey and customer problem statements. This will help you see what's working today in the sales process. But that's not all! Do the same for your newer less experienced sales team as well. See where they need help and compare and contrast messaging. Sales enablement is not really for your top guys - it's to provide tools and messages to the "greener" end of your team and help them up their knowledge. In many of the companies I've worked for, the sales team is the most in-tune with the current state of the market because they spend every day hearing the problems of your industry and market. They also tend to have more of the "big picture" items from your customer than the customer service team, although customer service can usually have more integral details of feature problems missing from the product today.