The New Four P's - How I build High-Performing Product Marketing Teams

Throughout the course of my career (especially in the last ten years) I hear the same thing from every CMO and CEO I speak to about potentially joining their team: "Product Marketing leadership is the most critical hire for our company." While I pondered the answer to that statement in every interview or networking discussion on how I could provide the help they were looking for, I realized how critical it became to have a repeatable and proven formula on how to approach the steps of onboarding, setting vision and charter, and operating as a high-performing team. This article describes my "philosophy" and approach to starting at a new company as a product marketing leader, and building a great team that contributes to overall company success.

If you've had a chance to review my background, you'll see public and once-private companies like VMware, ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), Automation Anywhere, Freshworks (NASDAQ: FRSH), and Gong. With the common theme throughout being that staffing the PMM function with the right leader had a direct correlation to company success. With the inevitable shift from boom-to-bust-to-boom that comes with economic variability, we are often asked to create "new" positioning and messaging - from the top of the company narrative all the way to individual products and services. It's like reinventing the company every time there is an upturn...or downturn.

So, here's my approach. I have been leading product marketing teams for a long time now. Most leaders build a 30-60-90 day plan and they might start with a few predictable steps, like: assess the team, set the course, and then execute.

But in order to do that effectively, I uncovered some consistent themes with how to run an effective PMM team. In less mature organizations, product marketing can become a bit of a “dumping ground” for a lot of the hard work that other teams don’t want to (or can’t) do. So I have found that stating our team charter up front saves a lot of that ambiguity later.?

Here’s part of what I align my team around on Day One after I arrive:

To: All Product Marketing; cc: Executive Leadership

Team,

What is Product Mmarketing? If you had to describe it using a metaphor, what would you use? To me, it's simple, we are a bridge. Pick your favorite 2-way bridge, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, the Napier Bridge in Chennai, the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia - they all are a way to facilitate transportation / communication from one side to the other, and back. We are a bridge - between Product, and Sales. We take technical concepts and turn them into customer-facing value, and we take customer input and socialize it with our engineers. Along the way, we streamline our go-to-market (GTM) engine for better performance, through messaging, planning, and execution.

Our guiding principles.

Our "north star" is something I call the "4 P's" of product marketing. While the 4 P's is not a new concept to marketing overall, these 4 are directly correlated to what we do in Product Marketing. They are simple and easy to remember, and I encourage you to share them with your stakeholders in Sales and the Business Units.

• The Pitch - outcome and value-oriented messaging that centers on the "unfair advantage" we have in the market. We have to tell people what we do (capabilities), but more importantly we have to focus on what problems we can solve for them and what they will get out of using our software (value). A great story at our company will have all the elements of any great story you might see in your favorite movie - things like villainy, heroism, peril, cost, loss, transformation, victory - these are not just for movies, but ways to make any story better. We will apply some of these best practices to our storytelling moving forward.? We should endeavor to be the creators of heroic stories that lift our community up and distance ourselves from the competition.?
• The Plays - These are the GTM topics that we need to surface for the company, orient our sales activities and supporting campaigns to build pipeline and ultimately lead to bookings. The best approach here has always been "less is more" and getting to a tight set of GTM plays is critical to scale in any growing organization. We will align to the needs of our sales team and the business overall and focus our energies to provide them with killer, compelling content that shortens the deal cycle and increases deal size and value for customers. It requires building knowledge of our ideal customer profile, buyer personas, org chart navigation, and building "recipes" that helps reps with what they need to "Know, Say, and Do" for each play.
• The Proof - this is the critical element of how we support what we say in the market with our messaging. We should very rarely make a claim without proof, and that proof comes in the form of a) voice of the customer, and b) voice of the industry, e.g. analysts. While it is not common for PMM teams to own customer advocacy and AR, I feel those two perspectives are essential to creating the most compelling stories. The kind of stories that are compelling, highlight our unique capabilities, and have quantifiable value. Stories told by your customers are 1000x more effective than coming from our own voice, and amplifying that through the analyst community to their clientele establishes a scale and reach that only the most successful companies achieve. ?
• The Plans - this is where we serve the company as CMOs of our individual businesses. You, as experts, need to understand the levers we can pull to impact growth and achievement in our products. That means, understanding where we are today, setting goals, and building the actionable and measurable plans to get there. We will provide the rest of the marketing organization with recommendations and strategies on how to win in our individual and combined product portfolio, and report back to our business stakeholders and leadership team on our progress. We will operationalize and standardize how we get work done, so we can leverage each other and the rest of the broader team to crush our annual business goals. These plans manifest in building a winning launch strategy, campaign themes and customer journeys, and building an operationalize competitive intelligence model. ?

So, look for us to constantly up-level the way we show up on the web, in the Field, and with our partners. We are going to execute our GTM machine in a way that builds some new muscles. We will measure everything, in the context of these 4 p’s:

• For the Pitch: sales tracking on how the messages are landing (some great products for this, like Gong! :-) )
• For the Plays: Deal velocity, conversion rates
• For the Proof: Analyst sentiment, heroic customer stories
• For the Plans: Bookings, pipeline, retention, win rate?

How does this resonate with you? Let me know in the comments. If you are a product marketer, in search of a hyper-growth company to join, and a team that knows how to add value to a business, come join me.

-Kevin