What is Product Marketing? How you do find the top 10% of Product Marketing professionals for your team - and how do you actually attract and hiring that talent?
Product Marketing - As simply put, a role with the direct objective of communicating the product and its benefits to your audience. This person is the liaison between product and GTM functions. They'll own product launches, messaging and product positioning, customer feedback to product, GTM relationship with product, sales enablement content, partner marketing, competitive analysis. Anything that has to do with brining your product to market and making it wildly successful.
When do you know you're ready for a Product Marketer?
Timing is critical for a product marketer to come in. You cannot bring someone in too early and expect them to be wildly successful.
If your product-market-fit is not quite there, if your sales funnel is seeing large churn at later stages, if your ICP is not extremely well defined... then it will be hard to attract top talent to join, and even harder to make them successful. A few key questions to ask before making this hire:
- Is the product is well established, core functionality is top-tier, roadmap is aligned with industry trends and customer interest, and the infrastructure is ready for large growth in customers/usage? Is there a deep product and feature expansion roadmap for next 12-24 months?
- Is your ICP extremely well defined and narrow? You know what industries you work in well? You know what buyer personas are involved in your sales cycles?
- Is your lead generation model strong and DG team well constructed? If your lead generation model is already producing well and you begin to add in product marketing, it typically amplifies what’s already working and further accelerates growth.
- Is your sales pipeline running smoothly, with minimal churn rates? Are conversation rates from SQLs -> Demos -> Close solid and consistent over a period of time? Pain points in the sales engine should come from top-of-funnel issues.
How do you go about hiring a Top 10% Product Marketing?
Your first product marketing hire needs to be at a level of competency where they can develop a true strategy, execution plan, and growth metrics for the success of this program. A manager or director is vital if VP does not come directly from a PM background.
What are the most important qualifiers to relevant experience?
- Obviously, this role has a lot to do with product. You'll want to find someone with experience dealing with similar products; in technical scope, in functionality/usage, and in general value proposition. The more technical your product is, generally the more closely you'll need to align a candidates 'product' experience to find the best match.
- Industry, buyer persona, market segment, and customer profile are extremely important. If your industry is niche, it may be more important (but more difficult) to find someone that understands your space. Are they marketing to the right market segment (smb/mm/ent)? Are they marketing to cost centers or profit centers? Are they marketing to technical (dev/product) personas or marketing to commercial (sales/marketing) personas? This will be extremely important in constructing relevant messaging for your products, speaking the "language" of your buyers, and positioning you in the right places.
- What stage of company have they worked in before? Do they have experience in early stage startups that are still defining their market and best buyer personas? Do they have enterprise experience working with large product sets and more detailed product/feature outlines? This is a "depends on what you want" but always something to consider.
How do you find them? Once you've defined your core criteria, how do you actually get passive candidates speaking to your and hired on your team?
- Work backwards in your search, from top performers inside the most direct of competitors to candidates with relevant industry and product (technicality and value prop) alignment.
- Position this as an "opportunity" and not just a "job." The right person, especially if this is your first PM hire, will need to take extreme ownership over the success of product marketing in your organization. This alone can be exiting to many, but take it further and paint the vision for growth in this role, both in responsibility, career, and financial growth.
- Benchmark compensation - if you want top 10% talent, you need top tier compensation and long term incentives to attract them. Product marketing can and should have a measurable impact on your business’ success - measure it and incentivize appropriately.
Product Marketing is a unique and valuable function within a growing organization - it can help you more closely align with and communicate to buyers and customers. And it can indirectly influence millions in top-line revenue, from a team of only a few people in many cases.
A good Product Marketer is focused on buyer behavior - and in a market like today, this is changing quickly and vital to understand. Hiring the right person is a key step in creating a flywheel for exponential product success, greater customer alignment, and commercial growth for you business.
