Sharon Markowitz

Positioning is a brief description of a product or service that your company offers, how it meets the target audience, the respective category and how it's different from the competition. This is typically an internal document. Messaging relates to how you will communicate the main value proposition and key benefits to the target audience. When thinking of partnerships, this should be a joint-message to the target audience. It's always best to test messaging qualitatively and quantitatively with ...Read More

KPIS for a partner marketer vary based on the maturity of the partnership as well as what the team is solving for in creating the partnership. Also, sometimes the company and the partner are focused on different KPIs.KPIs may include sales, customer growth (new segment, greater penetration), retention, awareness and usage. At an established fintech company, the focus was on awareness and usage as it was a large app marketplace, and the fintech company decided to build a specific tech stack and p ...Read More

Product marketing managers should have a foundational understanding of AI technology and its potential impact on their roles and functions. So many products today have an AI component, or are prioritizing messaging around an AI component that its critical to understand given the inherent nature of product or partnership marketing is cross-functional.Several years ago, I worked for a major social network, and we were launching a new product to support heads of talent and recruiters in finding the ...Read More

Congrats! This is exciting. Here are some tips for developing your GTM strategy for a new partner channel: Research Talk with your sales colleagues to learn what they’ve done to date, and if they have industry experience with this specific partner channel Leverage your network, like LinkedIn, to learn how to GTM with that channel Understand with your sales colleague if it's appropriate to have an exploratory call with a contact at the partner channel (i.e. the business development, sales, or mar ...Read More

Ways to continuously optimize the partner process may include: Review GTM plans against targets both leveraging quantitative and qualitative data to determine what worked and what can be improved Embrace testing as an approach for GTM, where the company and the partner can test, learn, iterate and scale or pivot. Always be learning, and reaching out to other partner marketers outside your company and industry to apply best practices. How to test and scale or pivot? I am a big fan of The Lean Sta ...Read More

Marketing partnerships may not be the right nomenclature. If a company has an app on an App Store or App Marketplace with thousands of apps, these are not considered "marketing partnerships". Think of your favorite app on your phone, there are many apps on the phone you can select, but they are not all "marketing partnerships".As a partner marketer it’s best to provide a partner go-to-market playbook to those companies that have an app on the App Store or App Marketplace with ways they can drive ...Read More

An ICP or Ideal Customer Profile is meant to serve as a guide for who to target, attract, and retain as the most valuable customers.  In other words, an ICP is about advising your sales team on accounts that they should be targeting based on specific qualities, but can be more broadly considered to support marketing and product teams. Here are tips for creating an ICP: Talk with internal stakeholders, like product, sales, and other subject matter experts (SMEs) in the industry that work at your ...Read More

A product marketing manager skill set is foundational for being a partner marketing manager, whether at a junior or senior level. The key areas that make an exceptional partner marketing manager include the ability to: build strong relationships influence stakeholders who may not be direct reports, and embrace the value of partnerships to extend the reach of a company with current and prospective customers. Before addressing the points above in more detail, the nomenclature mentioned in some of ...Read More

This is a great question, and those I’ve worked with, know that I will get on my soapbox any day as ultimately we are in business because of our customers. When I worked at Intuit, I loved that if you encountered founder Scott Cook at the office, he would stop and ask if you had any customer insights to share. It wasn’t if you were a marketer, it was that it was part of the DNA of the company, and what I feel makes a company that is now 30+ years old continue to innovate with sustainable growth. ...Read More

Technology to support sales enablement will vary significantly, with key factors around product marketing’s responsibilities, size of the organization, and budget. Less is more, as ultimately, you want to ensure relevancy and team utilization (“team” utilization was intentional!).  CRM systems, sales enablement platforms (from content management to account-based marketing), and collaboration and communication tools are some of the most relevant groupings.  CRMs:  Salesforce and HubSpot are well- ...Read More