Voice, Value & Velocity: CMOs discuss product marketing best practices

What is product marketing? Simple question, right?

Ask that question to a few hundred CMOs and things get lively very quickly. Last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk focused on marketing's relationship with product and how the product marketing manager (PMM) role works most effectively at companies of various sizes and stages.

Below are extensive chat highlights from both sessions featuring best practices, cautionary tales and a few links to recommended outside resources as well.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of your peers, let me know!

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Align with Product Leader on Brand = The VALUE of a PROMISE, consistently KEPT

Align with Product Leader on role of PMM = 3 Vs (Voice, Value, Velocity)

Brand = the value experience

When it comes to brand, how do we also balance “Value and Values” both consistently kept.?How do we think this is changing or evolving?

The fastest growing companies are super disciplined about their roadmap, in my experience

The challenge for Product is they’re constantly getting pulled into an internal focus.??That’s where there can be strong partnership with Marketing who can help provide the external POV.

Strategy = what NOT to do also...

“Strategy is choosing” — > stealing this...

The other half is marketing (working with CEO and Product) sets that external, durable positioning and brand promise — and then uses that as a touchstone to bring back up to every theme/strategy decision

I once was part of a team that produced a piece of very expensive content, for a very huge product launch, that included a feature that “was not in the product and never would be”…coming back from that, rebuilding trust after that was HARD.

The strength of marketing and product marketing’s voice and seat at the table directly correlates to their relationship and understanding of the customers’ true needs

Marketing needs to be in the fold to collaborate on innovation as marketing insights should help inform upstream design

Product marketing not only translates features to value and message going outbound, but can be powerful at collecting market feedback and shaping it to what PM and engineering can understand and get behind

we break our agile IT product dev sprint "points" in Differentiation, Hardening, Parity, Corp Initiatives) - clearly the goal being differentiation

Good PMs and Good PMMs are equally hard to find and hire, and they are the wonder twins of success when you find great ones

Velocity = activation — such a good insight

Velocity/Plays— I would say Integrated campaigns over a year or more with all the pieces working together….. programs on reputation, demand, customer, and enablement...

This goes beyond product marketing to other functions in marketing that contributes to integrated campaigns

plays should fold into integrated campaigns, and extend to sales enablement, customer/channel comms

How many PMMs do you need??1:1 ratio of PMs to PMMs is model I have used, but usually have challenges finding enough PMMs to match PMs

We’re going down the Plays Path - we call them Account Plays.?I’m hiring a Direct Report to run those across Marketing and Sales.

Spent six months in product marketing reporting up to product. Nothing got done during this time. It belongs under marketing.

PMMs and Marketing are one team here, but it's the Growth team, reporting to a Chef Growth Officer.. and that is separate from Product org and Sales org. Works really well to sit between.

Vast majority of companies we work with have PMM in Marketing. Exceptions include highly technical products, orgs with major divide between engineering and commercial sides of business, and product teams managed by a sales-focused leader

The one thing that could be added is maybe “vector” or choice of market portfolio, where to drive additional funnel velocity

That’s where the interlock with product mgmt happens - especially since with agile, product teams have gotten more and more tactical

Always describe PMktg as the small cog that drives sales, product, customer success, mktg etc?- when it works - it flies!

There is a lot of confusion about what Product Marketing is or how it should work.?I wrote this blog post on the topic a couple years back https://theadaptivemarketer.com/2016/11/14/what-is-product-marketing/

Have market insights under marketing. This changed my world.

Product marketing needs to balance the tendency for product management to listen too much to engineering and keep the market info flowing into the product roadmap

I find it amazing how many early stage companies build out strong data and insights team initially and then once they have early product market fit, immediately reduce the scale and size of this team. I usually join companies at B/C round and have now had to built this back out again twice!

Ours currently has win/loss and CI and interlocks with AR, CAB etc

I feel like part of having so many members of the team is to bring the biases to the table and balance them (this may be a fantasy world)

For measuring success, due to the cross function nature of PMM, we suggest shared ownership of north star metrics. e.g. 3 okrs: 1. Product - reduce TTM by x%, achieve y% uptake of new product. 2. Sales - x new logos, y new market expansion. 3. Marketing - launch of product wiki, x case studies, y customer/internal stakeholder NPS

PMM must be accountable for revenue

Founders often want product marketing under them in product management and argue that marketing is not technical enough

Sales owns company-wide revenue for the quarter, Product Marketing owns long-term revenue growth for a product or product line

I always call product marketing the bridge or translator from product team to sales/customers and vice versa

Especially for community practitioner type PLG companies, founder-CPOs frequently try to put product marketing under them, arguing marketing is not technical enough and we have limited voices as CMOs against a founder’s belief

A few years ago I put together a free training course on Product Marketing, you may find it useful for anyone on your team that wants to get into product marketing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qD1-YkFJcE

Product Marketing Community link - a couple folks have asked. https://www.productmarketingcommunity.co/

At Adobe it sat in the BU with engineering, product management and product marketing.?The best part of that was that product marketing owned P&L, so we still had control over how we invested and went to market.?I think in big companies that is more a common model where marketing is more brand / demand focused.

For me this is not a land grab / territorial thing… if its really about competitive / customer / messaging / sales enablement / market / product - its difficult to have that wide perspective in product where focus is “building the product”

Working with a client now where PMM is in the product org - very small / young org - not surprisingly the focus is very much on product capabilities, vs. buyer needs

I also haven’t had PMM work on deal velocity and stuff like that, but they have to own the message, product positioning, competitive info and be the hub between sales and product tech

It worked to have PMM in Product in a company where the user was highly technical and that “translator” role was not valuable. That was an outlier, but it worked quite well there.

Maybe the real challenge here is the name “Product” marketing vs Solution Marketing or “Segment Marketing”?all of which I’ve played with to varying degrees of success

Our product marketing team is called solution marketing, but the roles are PMMs

Buyer Marketing - e.g. understanding buyer needs, problems, and defining strategy to engage and persuade them .

Analysts look at their “categorizations” as their own products. But product marketing at the analyst firms does not exist. The research managers don’t have a customer input process

+1 to PMM as first hire. Figure out the value first, then scale it up. Starting with demand is a fool’s errand.

Being the demand person w/o strong product marketing sucks.

PMM + Demand first 2 investments in MKTG. Most CEOs hire a generalist first, but its a mistake

So true- in many companies Product Marketing is the team that just writes collateral and updates the website, not a strategic role

One thing we are not covering is marketing folks who have had sales experience - that is rare but very important if you can find it

We have two functions - product marketing and audience marketing. Our AMMs focus on ICPs, Personas, and each “minor” in a vertical. Our PMMs each have a product line they own as well as a cross-platform concept or element that they champion. Each role having the secondary focus eliminates silos and really drives collaboration and creativity amongst the group.

I spent 3+ years in sales at a start up - moved from marketing to sales - then back to CMO, I am better for that experience

Totally agree PM is first to hire to work on messaging, positioning and roadmap, but I think you Demand Gen for ICP work and GTM. Demand Gen is much more than lead gen, they are actually the ones that understand the market - in my experience

Or you end up with someone that really wants to run all of marketing vs PMM

I find that if the product strategy is not figured out in advance of a launch, that the strategy work happens when you draft the press release and build out the collateral. So it is important to get that strategy work done, and done well.

In early-stage startups (my wheelhouse, mostly) I have often explained to PMMs “as the team grows, you will be the last person to get direct reports.” It is not a function for empire-builders. It is a function for people who thrive cross-functionally.

I find focus and prioritization the most difficult part of PMM role. The ability to influence lots of motions, but not get lost in all the overwhelm.

PM to me is the internal function (though they should talk to customers). Demand and Content are more customer-facing through their output

Yes, as you build out additional pillars on the team, you need to carefully navigate the sense that people are losing “territory”/influence/ownership.

They should be part of the positioning effort on branding.

Past the big narrative, PMM is leading all the company and product position in the rebrand, here.

Product Marketing helps the brand team bring the companies point of view to life in a way that promotes the problem you solve

Someone once told me, and I agree, PMMs are like midfielders in a soccer team. Play offense and defense and run the most amount of miles and rarely get the glory.

You want someone who thrives in a strong group of peers (other marketing leads) and isn’t overly ego driven. It’s a really hard role and hard to fill.

I believe a LOT in co-ownership. DG and PMM are coming at it from two different directions, one from product and customer familiarity, the other from rubber-hits-the-road experimentation in digital and other demand channels. So they need to be partners in ICP development.