Sarah Din

This is a question I get a LOT. Everyone wants to know whats the idea PMM team structure. The short answer is there isn't one. Firstly, the role of a PMM looks different in every company. Secondly, the role of a PMM is not static. The role should evolve based on business priorities. So while you may structure the team a particular way today, know that you might need to change that structure a year from now if your priorities shift, especially at a start-up where things change quickly. Here are a ...Read More

This really depends on your where you are as an organization, and what your overall goals are, but here are a few thoughts and ideas: If you are trying to move up-market as an org, you can try to measure brand perception with different segments over time. While brand perception is not entirely isolated to messaging, messaging plays a huge role in how your brand is perceived and this can be a great indicator of how customers are responding to the story you are telling about your org. Most orgs ha ...Read More

We are in the process of creating an internal messaging hub, where all of our messaging will live. This hub will be on our Confluence site (which is what we use as our internal Wiki for the org). Our goal is to host all of our messaging docs on that hub, and give everyone access to it as a "Single Source of Truth" (SSOT). For the rollout, we also did a focus group with leads from different functions to get feedback on what formats work best for them.Some teams, such as marketing or product teams ...Read More

When: I like to think of testing in 2 stages. The first one is when you are just getting started and want to understand what are the big pain points you are solving for and what do customers care about. That is the first round of market research you will do to build your actual messaging. The second round comes once you have built a basic messaging framework, but now you need to wordsmith. For example, Do they like the word "Measure" or do they prefer the word "Understand". At the end of the day ...Read More

I like to keep these simple, and just use a single value proposition slide. Especially when it’s for an executive team. Here are the basic things to include: Who is our audience? (customer segment) What challenges do they face? (what is the need and the cost of not meeting that need?) What is our solution? (a description of your offering) How do we solve their problem? (Solution/benefit statement) What makes us unique? (Your top 3-5 core differentiators) Alternatively, if you want something more ...Read More

The first thing here is to make sure the research you are doing is done with the end goal in mind. Meaning, think of how you are going to deliver this messaging, what is your final framework and format. If you are using a traditional value proposition framework for example, it might look something like this at a very high level You audience Their biggest challenge Your solution/offering How you solve their problem (solution/benefit statements) Your core differentiators So when you do your resear ...Read More

You want your ICP to give you a good sense for all of the above. Its hard to give you specifics, because this will vary by org.  We defined our ICP per product (we have 8 products in our B2B portfolio), pulled sales data for the past 365 days, and did an in-depth analysis on that to define a few things such as: Top segments we win in (and trends over time) for each product (SMB, Mid-market, Enterprise) Top industries or verticals where we have been closing the most deals, with the highest AOV (p ...Read More

I love this question because in my experience I have hired PMMs from a variety of backgrounds, including people that have had no direct PMM experience, but they all had the right aptitude for the role. Depends on the level of seniority you are looking for OR the kind of product you have, you might have specific technical skills you require. In my opinion, technical skills can often be learned on the job, but there are a few more “softer skills” that cannot. Here is what I always look for: The ab ...Read More

The best way to do this is to create buyer persona categories that remain consistent no matter what vertical you’re speaking to, and then tailor those per vertical. For instance, Quickbase is similar in that we GTM across multiple verticals but we’ve developed 3 core buyer personas: IT buyer, OPs leader, and LOB buyer. We’ve developed personas at that core level, but then we create shorter, tailored documentation per vertical to identify things like specific titles or pain points per industry. I ...Read More

If you have differing opinions across your org, you definitely need to bring some data to the table. Testing is a critical part of developing successful messaging, and testing or market research does not have to cost an arm and a leg. Even if you don’t have a huge budget, you can still do some amount of testing to gather insights that help highlight what resonates with your market. You also want to do a mix of these to get a holistic view of what works and what doesn’t across various channels. H ...Read More