Tracy Montour

As a product marketing leader with no budget, I totally empathize with your concerns but I am here to tell you it is possible. It's all about relationships. You need to work with marketing, product, and sales leaders to align on iniatives and convince them it is a good use of their time, resources, and budget. You can do this by mutually coming to an understanding of the problem at hand, and why the spend is justified. Always come prepared with an ROI analysis/forecast!

It is critical to have a product playbook that outlines this entire process and indicates explicity R+R (DACI model often works best).  It all starts with the product vision including: What is the product? (vision) Who is the user? What is the problem we are trying to solve and why does it need to be solved? Why now? What are the use cases? Next, you need to look at the competitive landscape: What currently exists? Who bought it? Who's using it? What are they saying? What are their pain points? How many competitors are there? Is it a mature market? new one? Is there 1 dominant playe...

My not helpful answer is that there is no "typical" 30-60-90 day plan. Your first 90 days will vary drastically depending on the stage of the company you are joining, the maturity of the product marketing team, and the specific challenges the company is facing. In my experience, the first 30 days are about learning and building relationships. The next 30 days are about aligning on a plan of action. And the next 90 days are executing that plan.

The sales team have so much knowledge and one of the biggest risks for an organization is trapping this information in a silo. Work with your sales ops team to determine whats to disseminate this information strategically throughout the organization (for example, adding fields in Salesforce where necessary). Listening to Gong recordings is a great way to glean customer sentiment and feedback without being interruptive, and it never hurts have valuable 1:1 time with your sales team.

The most important thing to dig into here is why the existing GTM strategy is not working. Without deeply understanding this, you're just guessing blindly when doing GTM planning. Focus on really understanding your points of failure, speak with customers, speak with analysts, understand the market, and try again. 

Working toward building long term value depends on your product vision and overall company strategy. When working with the product team leadership to establish the roadmap, its critical that you start with a vision that will align all of the feature deliverables into core themes that support the customer and their needs in current and future markets. 

The category name should make clear to the customer how your the type of technology solves the challenge they are experiencing it. It is critical that the clarity and understanding of the problem are evident. More importantly, it is critical that your organization closely aligns itself with this category, regardless of the name. In order to become a Category King, you must be the first brand consumers associate with the category. This can be done via messaging, research, campaigns, and most importantly - a mix of all the channels for your target audience uses.

In my opinion, the most important factor is the stage of the company. Their stage of growth and the maturity of the product marketing function will define the type of work you have to do. Being the first PMM leader at a company in an earlier stage will mean you will have to balance priorities and wear more hats in a much different way than more established, later stage companies. No choice is correct, it's all about your preferences. 

Every GTM strategy starts with positioning and messaging.  A detailed and well-aligned positioning document is essential. This should include personas, the problem you're solving, how the solution is defined, what the competition is, the positioning statement, and use cases (it can include more or less depending on the size of the launch and your specific scenario). From there, the messaging should be defined. And only after this should the GTM channel strategy be created.  At minimum, these three documents must be created. Hope this helps!

Because Product Marketing is a strategic function, it can add value at any stage - even as early as defining the product strategy and vision alongside the product leader. The earlier the company hires a PMM, they more they will understand how to position their product and avoid many pitfalls that startups are prone to hit.