Sam Melnick

Competitive positioning is worthless if you can't explain and train your sales and customer success teams. That's why partnering closely with your enablement team and front-line managers is essential to getting the right information to the team AND for them to retain the information. Here's how I've done it (with significant help from my enablement partners): * Trainings: Provide live and recorded training sessions to ensure everyone understands the competitive landscape. Live sessions allow for real-time Q&A, while recorded sessions (often with quizzes) offer flexibility for reps to learn at their own pace. * Slide Deck: Create specific slide decks for specific competitors. Each should have a "how to use" section at the start, competitive differentiators, and strategic insights. This deck should be easy to update and accessible for quick refreshers before important calls or meetings. You will be updating these quarterly. * Wiki Card: Develop a detailed wiki card with talk tracks, objection handling, and expected FUD. Ensure it's easily accessible through your sales enablement platform so reps can reference it during sales calls. Additionally, work closely with sales or customer success managers to refine the message, so they can effectively train their front-line teams. This collaboration ensures the competitive positioning is consistently communicated and reinforced when you aren't in the room.

This is a fun, but challenging question. If there's no Wave or Magic Quadrant (MQ) for your category, long-term and strategic thinking becomes incredibly important. Here are some approaches to consider: * Play the Long Game: Understand that establishing recognition in a category is a journey that typically spans 2-4 years. Be ready to commit to a firm and analyst practice for an extended period, getting placed doesn't happen in a single cycle. * Explore Adjacent Categories: Look for existing reports/categories where you can position your company as a part. Being included, even if it's not as a top-ranking company, can pay dividends if you're called out as exceptional in a specific niche. This can add to your competitive positioning and visibility in the market. * Cultivate Analyst Relationships: Build strong relationships with industry analysts. Provide them with valuable insights, learn from their perspectives, and engage in meaningful discussions. Analysts play a crucial role in shaping market perceptions and can be valuable allies in gaining recognition. They are human as well, they want to work with interesting and smart people! * Start Small, Aim High: Begin by aiming to be included in reports or analyses that may not carry the same weight as a Wave or MQ but still contribute to your visibility and competitive standing. Every inclusion adds credibility and opens doors for future recognition. There really aren't shortcuts here, you need to take a patient approach, but it can pay off in the long run, particularly in the enterprise space!

Managing up is a huge part of being a PMM, especially when aiming for a leadership position. How this is done depends on where you are in your career and what is expected of you. An IC Product Marketer needs to manage up and across, but I'd expect them to seek out specific direction from their manager and other key stakeholders more frequently than a senior manager or Director who should come with more developed plans and recommendations. That said, there are a few common themes that I would recommend regardless of current level: 1. Understand Your Leaders: Get to know your leaders' preferences, communication styles, and priorities. Do they want to be brought in early in a process for input or are they good just reviewing your project plan or goals? 2. Proactive Communication: Regularly update your leaders on your progress, challenges, and strategic direction. Be proactive in seeking their input and feedback, change happens constantly, your leader is your conduit to getting information quickly and making sure your work aligns to top-level goals. 3. Use Your Leaders to Prioritize: Don't look to leaders or stakeholders to tell you exactly what to do, rather use them to prioritize initiatives effectively. Go to them and say "How would you prioritize these X initiatives?" or "Which of these projects should I drop?" 4. Adaptability: Remain flexible and open to feedback from your stakeholders. Product Marketers are in the middle of A LOT of different teams and projects, you have to show that you are willing to adjust your approach and pivot when necessary. Digesting new information and addressing feedback is an important part of managing up. 5. Measure & Tie to Goals: It's easy to get lost in the execution as there is always more to do, but show leaders that you are tracking specific goals that relate to corporate initiatives and report back on progress.

When building a B2B Enterprise product GTM strategy, four key pillars stand out: ICP, Messaging/Positioning, TAM, and Company Goals. These need to be in sync for success. Start by triangulating between ICP (who exactly are you targeting), Messaging/Positioning (why should they care), TAM (is there enough market to go after), and Company Goals (does this align with where leadership is taking the business). If your ICP is off, you’re chasing the wrong customers. If your messaging doesn’t resonate, you’re losing deals. And if your TAM is too small or doesn’t align with your company’s vision, growth will be stunted from the start. Get these pillars locked in and aligned—everything else builds from there.

To me it starts with right people to target (ICP) and the right message. I've talked about ICP in other answers so for this I want to talk about clarity and simplicity in messaging. If you're not maniacally committed to simplicity and clarity in your marketing messaging, you're going to confuse your customers and prospects. Think about it: You spend 30-60 hours a week (or more!) thinking about your company, its product, and mission—probably even in your off-hours if you're like me. 🙃 But your customers? They aren't dedicating anywhere near that much time. At Postscript, our customers tell us they spend 1-6 hours a week thinking about SMS. At Allocadia (my last company), people were only thinking about marketing budgets once a week or even monthly. Then in the Marketing Technology industry (where I've worked for awhile) there’s Scott Brinker's massive Marketing Technology Landscape with 14,106 companies in it this year… talk about overload. This is the same in all industries. So, when you're crafting your messaging, challenge yourself to make it more simple and clearer. Your customers don’t have the time or attention to wade through the nuances—you need to get to the point fast. That's one of the biggest risks in your GTM plan, overcomplicating messaging.

Staying on top of competitive intel requires a structured approach since a lot happens in any given week and you can get requests from all over the business. Here's how my teams try to manage it: * Prioritize Top Competitors: Focus on the top competitors and their key market activities, like webinars or blog posts, to ensure you're monitoring the most impactful information. You can't be everywhere, so prioritization on what will make the biggest impact is key. * Centralize Requests: Use a central place, such as a dedicated Slack channel or Google form, to triage and manage incoming requests efficiently. You want to keep the flow of information consistent. Nothing good happens when a majority of CI is done in DMs or private conversations. * Competitive Intel Roadmap: Create a competitive intel roadmap and get buy-in from GTM leadership to ensure everyone is on the same page and priorities are clear. This helps you avoid (some) fire drills or worse unmet expectations. * Democratize Answers: Empower others in the company to respond to requests. Often, field teams have valuable insights since they deal with questions about competitors directly every day. The key here is to stay organized, keep your intel up-to-date, and ensure people know where and how to get information.

Rule #1 of Competitive Intelligence is to tie it directly to revenue. By doing that you uplevel it from being seen as a research project to something that drives specific impact for the business. Here are three revenue metrics I try to focus on: * Win Rates: Track win rates against your top 2-4 competitors. Keeping the number of competitors limited helps maintain focus and provides clearer insights. * Deal Involvement: Monitor specific deals where CI/MI has been involved. You could track content used through certain sales enablement platforms, or better yet track where you and your team have directly supported competitive deals or saves! * Competitive Plays: (This one is my favorite) Work with Demand Gen, BDRs, and Sales on competitive plays, then track the pipeline and revenue generated from these efforts. By tying CI to revenue in more than just one way you'll quickly make these efforts something the exec team is very aware of!

Let's be clear. CI is a team effort and its very hard to be THE end-all-be-all source for this information. While that can work for a time, a small team cannot be everywhere at all times, so communicating that to the rest of the organization is paramount. There are two tactics I suggest using. 1. Tie your efforts to Revenue (yes this is a common theme with me :) ): You must clearly articulate how competitive intelligence contributes to winning deals and ties directly to company-level revenue numbers. This helps emphasize its importance and impact on business outcomes and gets you buy-in across the organization that they can help make an impact. 2. Flattery and Empathy: Show appreciation and empathy towards customer-facing teams. Acknowledge the challenges they face and how their input and insights are crucial for effective competitive intelligence. Respect their expertise and experience in dealing with customers daily. Also, a little flattery when they handle something well or provide important input goes a long way! But the biggest thing is to ask for help and acknowledge that a successful competitive program takes a village.

Yikes. This is a big one! If your GTM strategy isn’t working, product marketing can’t overhaul it alone, but they can identify when it’s failing. Look for red flags like declining win rates, rising churn, or consistently losing to competitors. If you spot these issues, it’s time to escalate to leadership—especially your CMO, Head of Sales, and CPO. They need to be involved in determining if the current GTM motion is broken. Once there’s alignment that things need to change, don’t rush into a full-scale pivot. Start by testing small adjustments to different aspects of your GTM strategy (messaging, targeting, channels) in short bursts. This lets you experiment and refine before committing to a major shift. Adjust, learn, iterate—until you find the right approach that resonates.

This is all about the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in. I'm going to start with the three main use cases for your ICP aka operationalizing: 1. For your GTM team the its meant to focus outbound marketing and sales efforts and to help you qualify in/out inbound leads. 2. Your ICP is the “Who” of companies that get the most value from your offering. Put it to work by defining outbound lists, ad targeting, creating lead scoring, building discovery and qualification questions, case studies to target, etc. 3. Don't use it to straight up DQ an inbound lead that doesn't check off all the boxes, rather use the ICP to qualify in/out that lead more aggressively. Okay, what should the ICP look like? I have a few sections I try to include: Must Haves: Target accounts must have 100% of these are the characteristics. There should be no edge cases this is the foundation of any segmentation you create. Nice to Haves: These are the bonus characteristics you should look for in GREAT fit prospects. Rarely will you find companies that check off everything on this list. So don't waste time looking for those - instead use it to narrow your segmentation and test different combinations of characteristics. Messaging should strongly align with these as well. Proceed with Caution: These are typically characteristics that don’t disqualify a prospect. They could be a positive for your deal... but they could also be a deal killer. These should be used in discovery to know when to really double down on a topic to qualify in/out prospects. Stay Away: These are the characteristics you should segment out of any paid or outbound target list. For inbound these should be used for discovery to see if a prospect has low potential to be a good fit - note don’t auto-disqualify here!