Sara Rosso

One of the biggest risks of operationalizing a GTM plan is the lack of a common understanding of the time it takes to do good marketing work, internally. Marketing shouldn't slow down product; but at the same time, the more time and advance notice marketing has, the more we're able to enrich, adapt, and customize a GTM plan appropriately. A GTM playbook is a best-case scenario and a guideline which has to be adapted rapidly and practically to the lead time available. The marketing team for WordPress.com is relatively new (around 5 years old for a product almost 15 years old), and speed is...

See this answer for how we work as a 100% distributed company. We work a lot in "public." As for updates, the entire company publishes bi-weekly updates on a special p2/site that's meant to aggregate the most important updates from each team or division across the company. This is the opportunity for the team to highlight wins, lessons learned, or changes the rest of the company shouldn't miss. And it's great to be able to link to specific project, research, or test results for more details without overwhelming the person reading.

As a fully distributed / remote company, we operate slightly uniquely than other companies - the two biggest differences are 1) we don't use email and 2) everything by default is public to the entire company. Instead of email, we publish everything on our intranet, which is naturally powered by WordPress, and it's also public to the entire company. The intranet is essentially hundreds of WordPress(.com) sites, which we call P2s after the theme they run. P2 is available for anyone to use https://p2theme.com/ and the design enables easier front-end posting & inline commenting, so it's less o...

It depends on what you'd like to accomplish - Zoom is great for video because you can shift between a very personal feeling like showing all participants on video, to more formal broadcasting with focusing on you as a single speaker or spotlighting an entire panel. I don't think Zoom's chat function is as robust as it could be compared to other tools, so if you're dependent on that to surface questions or engage customers you might look at others. We've used GoToWebinar and Crowdcast as well. If you're looking for webinars as a lead funnel versus engaging with or educating existing / known ...

Having worked on both the B2B and B2C markets, as David above says, the sales cycle length is completely different, and B2B can be weeks or months depending on the product and budget approval needed.  With a startup you might be able to get to the decision maker or budget holder much faster than an enterprise, but depending on the product it might not be an essential buy for them depending on what stage they're in - make sure to factor in what Series / stage the startup is in to your planning. 

I think you need a mix of experiences AND data to transform what might seem like different opinions into persuasive arguments with impact.  Experiences provide the context and detail, relatable quotes or example customer pain points, etc., and Data provides the measurement - how big of a problem is this? How easily can we quantify it? What impact might it have? That way it can be prioritized. In your example, perhaps a sales team says "Customers tell us they want this feature / benefit we don't have." with the data, you're also able to say "And we lost X opportunities this month becau...

Foundational qualitative research should be done as soon as you are able, and also ahead of any major product shifts or market expansions. We've also explored qualitative research with "the ones who got away" - lost, paying customers. Understanding where we've failed them or where competition has become a better alternative has also been really helpful - sometimes it's a solution we already have that they weren't able to find easily and we can make changes without largely changing the product. The quicker you can engage lost customers, the better, because once they've left their desire to...