Sam Melnick

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 rec ...Read More

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 r ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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, ...Read More

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 use ...Read More

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 cu ...Read More

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 pl ...Read More

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. 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 number ...Read More

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: For your GTM team the its meant to focus outbound marketing and sales efforts and to help you qualify in/out inbound leads. 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, ...Read More

PMM's are prime candidates for leadership positions due to the cross-functional nature of the work. Great PMMs and PMM teams are working with Product, Enablement, Sales, CS, Ops...not to mention all of their marketing peers. Because of this, there are plenty of opportunities to lead through influence or as a project lead. While not all PMMs want to move to official people management (which is perfectly fine!!), for those who are interested, I look for the following skills: Communication and Coll ...Read More