Thomas Dong

I have been fortunate to work for CMOs who have a firm grasp and strong working knowledge of all aspects of marketing. Often times you run into CMOs who only know brand, or only DG (or for that matter, only PMM), and the results can be disastrous. My past bosses have structured our marketing teams into three distinct pillars: Product Marketing, Demand Gen, and Corporate Marketing. The roles and responsibilities are quite clear, but keeping communication open is essential even within our own marketing function. PMM owns GTM strategy, positioning & messaging, content strategy, product launch, and sales enablement. As the driver of GTM strategy, we are leveraged for our deep understanding of our personas to provide guidance to Demand Gen on everything from campaign themes, to email nurture, and website design. As a Product Marketing leader, I have also comfortable passing our messaging platforms, which provide core approved content, over to the Demand Gen team where they can craft campaign emails and web copy, tuning the core content as needed for their target audience or channel. Similarly I have a tight collaboration with Corporate Marketing, which owns content marketing, external communications, and analyst relations. By mapping out the customer journey, PMM can craft a compelling content strategy, and thus align with the content marketing efforts of the Corporate Marketing team. And just like with Demand Gen, external communications and thought leadership are based on our core positioning and messaging, but adapted and extended as necessary. Last but not least, analyst briefings and inquiries are a team effort across Corporate Marketing, Product Marketing, and Product Management, with PMM generally owning the decks and demos. With a strong product marketing foundation in place - e.g. persona definitions, journey maps, and messaging platforms - in combination with a system of trust, PMM's generally small footprint can scale effectively and our critical resources can be pulled in for content validation and approval on only the most critical pieces.

Whoever controls the budget for the website owns the strategy, and that is typically Demand Gen since the website is the foundation of digital marketing. However a corporate website serves many different audiences and purposes, thus the role of the web manager is to coordinate the requirements of multiple stakeholders, including PMM (product pages), Business Development (partners page), Finance (investor relations page), HR (careers page), etc. As the driver of GTM strategy, in addition to the product, solution, industry and customer pages, often times PMM is also responsible for the Home Page and heavily involved with the design team on website navigation. Additionally, as the owners of positioning and messaging, we work closely with Demand Gen on campaign landing pages, designing CTAs, and recommending the most relevant and impactful content to curate off every page. Interestingly I have found the best way to foster a strong working relationship with the web team is to collaborate early on SEO. In fact, I like to describe SEO as PMM's silver bullet. Too often SEO is relegated to a final checklist item during product launch when pushing out new product pages. But rather than being the last thing done, it should be thought of more strategically and be one the first. SEO provides a market signal for intent and the actual voice of the customer, through the terms and keywords they are using to search for products similar to yours. Therefore SEO should be a key input to messaging before any web copy is every written!

Become the driver of GTM strategy. Going back to the corporate trinity: Sales, Marketing and Engineering, a sound GTM strategy informs Engineering on what to build (roadmap), suggests to Marketing what messaging resonates and where and how to reach our targets (campaigns), and helps Sales focus their efforts and find repeatable success (sales plays). This all begins with a strong foundation in persona-based marketing. The key is to drive consensus at all levels and across all functions on: 1) Who the personas are, organized by Champions, Economic Buyers, and Influencers. To see what I mean by personas, see my persona archetype template. 2) Organizing those personas into the Buying Committee for a given product or solution, and mapping out their journey through the stages of the sales funnel (e.g. awareness, learn, evaluate, buy, adopt, advocate). For a visual, this is what I mean by a journey map. The journey maps help institutionalize all the learnings and assumptions into one simple yet powerful visualization, while helping every function understand their role in servicing customers through their journey. As owners of this view, PMM will soon be looked to for guidance on roadmap, documentation and training requirements, partner/ecosystem strategies, community development programs, event strategies, campaigns and thought leadership topics, etc.

There are many stakeholders when it comes to competitive intelligence and aligning messaging and product strategy with competitive differentiation. I have found an effective model where PMM is the the driver, although any of the contributors could also drive. Regardless, it is a joint effort across at least PMM, PM, Presales and Sales Enablement (some larger enterprises like IBM have dedicated, centralized competitive program offices). As the driver, PMM can focus on arming the sales team with up-to-date tools (e.g. battle cards) to win, ensuring marketing can land us in competitive evaluations, and ensuring the roadmap continues to reinforce our competitive differention.

While I see PMM as the flywheel of the corporate trinity: Sales, Marketing and Engineering, and view our influence and relationship with all as important, the one stakeholder relationship tied most directly to corporate success is with Sales -- and Sales Enablement in particular. Unless Sales is successful selling, there is no need for Marketing or Engineering. In driving GTM strategy, PMM can ensure repeatable sales success, so that reps can focus solely on selling. So very practically, our working relationship with Sales Enablement boils down into 3 major collaborations: 1) Sales Kickoff (SKO): Once a year we level set the entire Field on the latest positioning and messaging, sales tools, sales plays, and competititve landscape. 2) Continuous enablement: Throughout the sales year, we must inform reps of new releases, content, and competitive perspectives. And we must provide this information in as many channels as possible, from weekly calls, to emails, internal newsletters, and Slack. Duplication and repetition is not only good, it is necessary. 3) Sales kits: Sales enablement platforms have gotten much better, and now allow us as content creators to curate for reps, all the right content down to the persona and sales stage.

PMM is a highly collaborative role and I've found that if you define a DACI model: Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed, you can help remove some of that ambiguity upfront. A single approver (likely the CMO in this case) can broker any debates in order to make timely decisions. Then if someone in Marketing (be it PMM or Creative) is the single driver of brand, when UX/design is clearly identified as a contributor, they not only have a voice in the decision, but are executors of the brand strategy as well. That sense of shared ownership in the process goes a long way to fostering a strong working relationship with the UX/design team. At Heap we also have this great value, which is to always assume positive intent. Applying that mindset to this type of collaboration is extremely productive to encourage open dialog and uncover issues and requirements the others may not have thought of! Also be mindful that we are all on a career journey. We should leverage the rich experiences everyone brings to the table. In fact, none of us in PMM went to "PMM school", or grew up dreaming of being a product marketer. We came from other functions like PM, presales, or corporate marketing. You can assume the same of the UX/design team. Be open to leveraging the skills and expertise everyone on the team brings to the table. I have a great example from when I was at IBM and launching Watson Analytics. I was responsible for our launch event and needed video content to play as our customers, press, analysts and social influencers were taking their seats. I could have just played some generic customer case study videos, but when I found out a member of the Creative team went to film school, we leveraged that skill and collaborated on a Hollywood-style movie trailer instead. Two thumbs up!

Very simply become a credible source of synthesized market and competitive intelligence. I'm being very deliberate about the word "synthesized", because in understanding the target market, we must understand and convey customer needs at large, not just echoing the loudest customer or citing the most recent competitive loss, customer meeting, or analyst conversation. That was probably already happening before Product Marketing showed up! Then as a trusted source of market and competitive insights, I have found one very effective way to influence roadmap development. Ask PM to prioritize the backlog of new features into 3 tiers, and organize their Tier 1 features into 3-4 major themes over the next 12-18 months. With that initial set of themes, collaborate with PM to describe and align those themes to key market trends or well-defined buying agendas. PMM can then compile those themes into a well-sequenced narrative that reinforces your competitive product strategy. Those themes can then be leveraged to inform quarterly marketing campaigns and thought leadership progams. Also anchor themes to major industry events when possible. This whole exercise has conveniently produced a market-driven POV on how to sequence and prioritize new feature releases. And in doing so, PMM can help ensure the company and ensuing roadmap becomes more market-driven, versus roadmapping being a purely product-led or sales-led exercise. Finally, kudos to those companies who are recognizing the strategic importance of product marketing and formalizing the function in their organizations. I am seeing more and more start-ups building up their marketing leadership with a strong bias towards product marketing, making it one of the first marketing functions to build out, not the last!

Set a consistent expectation for what messaging entails. The best way to do that is to establish a common messaging platform you can use regardless if you are messaging a solution, product, or feature. Here is a sample messaging template. Filling out this templates ensures consistency and forces completeness every time new messaging needs to be developed and approved. The template requires details on target market/opportunity which provides critical context and aligns your messaging to the relevant personas, their key buying agendas and if applicable, industry relevance. The rest of the template provides a well-defined structure to systematically define the business pains you are addressing, your value proposition (including elevator pitch), the key benefits and your competitive differentiators. You can also track customers and competitors, at the specificity of the solution, product or feature you are messaging. Finally, some of the most important aspects of the template are in the slide's notes section. Listing out keywords is essential for collaborating with other marketing functions, for SEO and to ensure content is effectively tagged. This is also the place to list related products, features and services, to highlight the intended cross-sell/upsell opportunities - certainly something Sales and Customer Success will be looking for. As far as process is concerned, involve internal stakeholders as early as possible. Product input should be easy, as PMs are generally engaged continuously with PMM on positioning and competitive differentiation. PM thus is often a willing partner in messaging, and approvals come naturally. Then as much as you can make Sales and Customer Success part of the messaging exercise, that sense of shared ownership will only help fast track approvals.

It's not so much surprises, as it is the scope of opportunities to improve sales and marketing effectiveness. PMM generally brings stability and consistency to messaging, so where I have built the organization from the ground up, PMM has played a crucial role in helping Sales better replicate success and scale revenue. The website often needs a redesign to realign with crisper positioning and messaging, Demand Gen may need to be redirected on who (and where) they are targeting, and you'll almost certainly need to tame the sales decks that have been created "out in the wild". Before your arrival there were probably varying opinions on the ideal customer profile, target market, product positioning and/or customer value. So lay a strong foundation and get consensus on your personas, customer journey maps, and messaging, and you'll see an acceleration in improvements when everyone is rowing in the same direction.