The Three Pillars of a B2B Marketing Team

Over the years I've built and led several marketing teams, ranging from small teams of a just a couple marketers, to teams of 75-100+ marketers spanning multiple offices and countries. I've also seen lots of different proposals and recommendations for the "ideal" marketing team structure. While I absolutely believe that different companies will have unique needs based on market conditions, stage of growth, and, most importantly, the individuals on the team, I typically start with a simplistic view that there are three core pillars in a b2b marketing team:

1. Product marketing
2. Marketing communications
3. Revenue marketing

In this post I'll describe those three pillars - and the typical sub-teams within them; and explore when it makes sense to break from this three pillar structure.

Product Marketing

Having spent the first half of my career in product marketing and product management, I am admittedly biased in believing that product marketing is a critical - and arguably the most important - pillar in any marketing team. When I talk to early stage companies about their marketing teams or their plans for marketing, I invariably start by asking about product marketing.

Product marketing provides the critical messaging foundation for the rest of the marketing team - and the rest of the company.

Product marketing is responsible for core product messaging and positioning: defining who the product is being sold to, the target use cases, the value proposition or "why" of the product, competitive differentiation, and so on. Product marketing should be creating the messaging playbook that other teams use to develop advertising campaigns, trade show messaging, sales presentations, website copy, blogs, etc. I can usually tell which companies have good product marketing by doing a quick review of their marketing materials and gauging how clear, compelling, and consistent their messaging is.

As companies grow, sub-teams within product marketing - or potentially alongside product marketing - could include:

• Sales enablement - responsible for training the sales channel. This could be in product marketing, a stand-alone team, or live in sales; but should be tightly coupled with core product marketing.
• Competitive / market intelligence - understanding and disseminating competitive information and updates to teams across the company. I've seen this in product marketing or as a stand-alone team depending on market dynamics.
• Launch management - the team responsible for coordinating product launches. At Formlabs this was part of product marketing, at Qlik this was part of marketing communications.
• Industry marketing - as the company specializes in different verticals, industry experts responsible for adapting the messaging to those verticals.
• Ecosystem partnerships - defining and managing relationships with critical ecosystem partners.

From my experience, at the outset a good product marketer can span all of these areas, and then, as the team grows, sub-teams can be created within product marketing or elevated to be peer teams of the core product marketing team.

Marketing Communications

Once product marketing has defined the core messaging, you need a team to tell that story to as many people as possible through many different mediums. While this is often split into sub-teams, and may come under different names (corporate marketing, brand marketing, content marketing, etc.), at the outset I group this into the overall umbrella of marketing communications.

MarComm's goal is creating broad industry awareness and interest in the company and its products.

This team needs to take what product marketing develops and then figure out the most effective ways (PR, social media, blogs, etc.) to reach target audiences in engaging ways. As companies grow, typical sub-teams include:

• Content marketing - responsible for creating core content through blogs, the website, webinars, presentations, videos, etc. As the company scales internationally, localization becomes increasingly important and can become a separate sub-team or shared company function.
• Public relations - often outsourced to a PR agency, this area is responsible for getting stories written about your company and products. And yes - writing press releases; although I believe that is substantially less important than media placement.
• Social media - potentially included within content or PR, this team is responsible for the company's presence and engagement on relevant social media platforms.
• Analyst relations - also potentially part of the PR team, and very dependent on the market, this team's goal is getting positive analyst reports (e.g. the vaunted Gartner Magic Quadrant...). Not to be confused with investor relations for publicly held companies, which often sits in the finance team, although closely aligned with marcomm and the PR team.
• Community - in companies with larger user bases, establishes and manages a vibrant customer community. This function is often paired with revenue customer marketing, customer success, or as a standalone discipline.
• Creative - at many companies this team sits alongside marcomm, or even paired with product design outside of marketing, but at Formlabs sat within marcomm. This team is responsible for the visual representation of the company's story through design, photography, videos, copywriting, etc.
• Brand - I've typically only seen a separate brand marketing team at larger companies that differentiate the overall company brand from individual product sub-brands; otherwise I generally view brand marketing as part of creative.

In the early stages, I've usually found that a solid content marketer and designer (or contract designer) can get this ship off the ground, and that as the team grows the sub-teams identified above begin to emerge.

Revenue Marketing

My third pillar is the team responsible for activities that are directly geared at driving revenue: advertising, trade shows, account-based marketing, campaigns, etc.

Often seen as the most important part of a b2b marketing team, I believe revenue marketing can only be successful if the other two pillars are in place.

Revenue marketing relies on a solid product marketing foundation that establishes the messages, use cases, and target personas. Revenue marketing also relies on solid content; and benefits from the halo effect of broad awareness programs. In talking to early stage companies, I often see the mistake of jumping straight to advertising or trade shows or other demand generation activities without consistent messaging or solid content, resulting in confused prospects and wasted opportunities (and money!).

As the team grows, typical revenue marketing sub-teams may include:

• SEM / advertising - through paid search, site advertising, paid social, etc.
• SEO - improving quantity & quality of web traffic; could also be part of the content marketing team.
• Email campaigns - both to drive net-new audiences and to nurture existing leads.
• ABM - developing and delivering account-based marketing campaigns for enterprise or large account targeting.
• Customer marketing - driving customer retention, upsell, and cross-sell; this team sometimes sits in, or straddles, sales, services, or revenue marketing.
• Campaigns - responsible for defining and executing programs that cross multiple channels and teams; this team often also assumes responsibility for product launch coordination.
• Channel marketing - enabling and supporting resellers in their marketing efforts.
• Field marketing - responsible for executing revenue marketing (and potentially marcomm) activities in specific geographic regions.
• Marketing operations - a critical backbone of any good revenue marketing team, MOps not only manages the core marketing systems, but also provides crucial intelligence and insights on revenue marketing (and overall marketing) programs. At larger companies this is often broken out alongside revenue marketing.

One size does not fit all

Although I typically think about and start building marketing teams with these three pillars in mind, rarely is the team structure that simple after even a few hires. While it I think it is important to have these bases covered, there are many factors that lead to shifts in this structure, and I believe a good marketing leader should be flexible in how they organize their teams.

The most important ingredient to deciding team structure is the people themselves.

In some cases I've had people who's skills and interests span two of these pillars - e.g. a product marketer who is great a content marketing, so we started by slotted content marketing into the product marketing team. In other cases, we restructured to balance out management load - e.g. aligning tradeshows and corporate events with community and technology partnership activities. This structure also often gets morphed as you grow internationally and you determine what functions should remain centralized and which should be regionally aligned - e.g. should European PR be part of European field marketing or global communications.

To me the strict reporting lines are much less important than a) making sure you have all the critical bases covered and b) people are motivated and excited in their roles and teams.

What do you think? What marketing team structures have you seen work best?