Zachary Fox

I highly agree with much of what has been said and would add that Product Marketing is a pretty ambiguous role when you think about it. It is often very different according to the org. Tranferring to a new team or having a new boss or a new CMO could mean an entirely new idea of what Product Marketing should or shouldn't be doing and what success looks like. For example, in one of my experiences Product Marketing was nearly 100% product strategy and organizing (like a Project Management Office) product launch, with zero focus on content, demand generation, etc. In my role now Product Marketing is 100% responsible for all bottom-of-funnel content, be it landing pages, ads, sales or channel material. I am now bringing the team to the strategy table with product. What I do is create a "Product Marketing Strategy and Metrics" doc and align that with every important stakeholder in the business, everyone on my team and new leaders so that we understand exactly what everyone is expected to be delivering and measured on.

I personally like mixing the “packing of features into a big launch” and the “ongoing drumbeat”. What we did this year was choose 4 customer objectives for our product for the year and kick the year off with a campaign speaking to them and how they solve our customers biggest needs. We then planned one “big moment” for each objective over the course of the year, this would be a month when we would hit hard on this theme repeatedly tied to a major launch. Then, outside these 4 big months we plan a steady release of smaller enhancements, tying them back to our 4 objectives.

Thanks both! Lots of planning and then lots of writing and reviewing and discussing is our plan so far, and Donald Miller’s book is up next As well. I like the idea of having someone in the target audience to bounce stuff off of. My big personal challenge is translating the concise ”write as you speak” approach that is common in the US to a Portuguese-speaking world where everything is more verbose. Cheers!

We followed a somewhat similar path as Patrick and I couldn't agree more about thinking through all those aspects of the company, strategy, customer and product portfolio. As my company serves primarily SMB customers we didn't have that as a variable and grew focused on our products, of which we have 2 and whose PMMs focus is basically as Patrick aligned his, with product feedback collection also a key part. We also had a strong need to support growth via our two main channels: inbound marketing and our partner channel so we added a person to support each. The now 2-person team focused on our inbound channel is responsible for competitive intel, sales enablement and BoFu marketing strategy as well as personas and journey research. The partner PMM is responsible for launching new plans and products in the channel, supporting our partners with product enablement, supporting our partner sales teams with enablement and collecting feedback from partners. In previous companies I've seen these sales and marketing enablement and competitive teams fit under the PMM lead for each large product but for us the bottom of our marketing + sales funnel needed such a strategic makeover that it made sense to break out separately with more senior people leading the charge.

We just finished our company’s first true Personas project and took clear steps to convince many teams that have never worked with personas before. The most important of which was to call a meeting, present the idea and ask a selection of people from each of the 4 teams that would most use them to quickly come up with the personas (sales, content + growth, customer success and product) they thought made sense. In a quick brainstorm we came up with wildly different answers from each team and even a clear confusion between whether personas should be buyer or user and why. The 2nd step was to ask each team to identify where they used personas in their work or could use them. From this meeting we walked away from the group with a clear view that personas were needed and not generally understood or agreed on. So we built a proposal to run the interviews in process in house, defined clear objectives and shared with the leaders of these areas. They agreed and we moved forward. There were only 2 monetary costs involved: 1) paying participants in the survey and 2) printing persona cards for the sales team to use in their daily routine. For added success we packaged the personas with the new sales deck (4 slightly varied versions) and product packs for the CS team.

Aside from the triggers, I would say it is imperative to constantly review your pricing on a regular basis. Aside from one-off items mentioned above, I run an annual process (that in the future I want to be 2 per year) where I gether the pricing committee that I lead and we bring up suggestions of the key issues we think we need to be addressed with monetization strategy. Our process goes as follows: 1. I prepare an initial list of pain points and opportunities 2. I send the list to others to add theirs 3. We all detail the problem, if there is a hypothesis and the type of analysis that would need to be done to get to an answer 4. We sit down for the first meeting and prioritize the opportunities based mainly on impact vs. effort 5. We assign specific owners to each "initiative" that is prioritized and decide which we will address first and what we will do by the date of the next committee meeting. 6. In each subsequent meeting we discuss, make decisions and define next steps / understand how to operationalize Generally I try to start this at the beginning of H2 giving us the entire semester to dig through the various initiatives and operationalize either 1) at the time of solving if it's a quick win or 2) together with our planned annual pricing change in Q1. The parallel process is our annual pricing increase where I work with our BizOps lead to model potential increases, considering various feedbacks and things happening in the market, with customers, etc. Generally we do this in Q4 along with our annual planning and implement in Q1. At my company I am responsible for driving these pricing decisions, but I need to work with and get resources from other teams to run analyses. If you're not in the process, you should insert yourself and you should start bringing valuable data and info to prove your worth ;)

I recently came across and really loved ActiveCampaign's produt page (ActiveCampaign.com) , it does a fantastic job at explaining benefits and features together in a simple and clear way. This messaging is clearly targeted very well at their target customer of small businesses who aren't marketing savvy.

Three things to add here that could be helpful: 1. First is branding and values. Don’t be afraid to showcase your values before you get to a specific campaign, especially while thinking about your audiences. For example, in Brazil women are still very underrepresented In tech, both as founders as well as product and engineering people. We had this great internal initiative where we raised the % of women on our tech team from 18 to 29% in Q2 amidst a hiring spree. We decided we should talk about that in our customer/product newsletter and got tons of fantastic responses From customers and leads. We may even include it in our product keynote at our 15K person event. This sends a message that our company cares about women In tech and I believe that will make more women founders comfortable buying from us. 2. Treat them as personas. Many of us do separate campaigns for separate personas, perhaps one of these groups needs to be treated as a separate persona with a campaign specifically adapted for them, whether they are inside your country or not. 3. Make sure to have solid representation in your cases: do you have enough cases with minority or women owned businesses? Does your sales team know to pull on them?

While I’m not an expert on this topic, our team is in the midst of doing just that. One of the biggest levers we have is our portfolio of plans and some of our hypotheses are the following: -create a new up market plan -re position a core plan -down position or create a more simpler plan with a different (more lean) sales and service offering that is more fit for the SMB crowd (self-serve perhaps?) My guess is that as you move the core product up market there are likely features or “extenseness” of features that your smb cuatomers really don’t need, so if you go back and talk to them you may find that it is actually quite simple to carve off an offering that is in fact more targeted at them. Just don’t forget to think about the margin and thus the sales and service model. When you work generic messaging in non targetable channels channels you have to think through the key benefits of each of these plans vs the needs of those customers and find the right mix to attract both sets of customers. One thing ive seen a few companies do is actually name the product for SMBs differently (look at infusionsoft here), but I think that is a comexity that most companies don’t want to take on. Hope this at least gives some ideas!