If you are a startup or want to grow your business to 10x , this presentation will help you get the right product marketing team in your organization.

1. Product Marketing
For Start-ups and Growing Organizations
Source : Marketo

2. Before we start
• Sales drives revenue
• Demand gen creates leads
• Customer success reduces churn
• What does product marketing do?
Source : Marketo

3. The Confusion
• Product marketing teams can report to product - like at Samsung
• while in other places the team reports to marketing – like at Apple
• Some teams play more of an inbound or upstream role, owning the product
roadmap, while others take an outbound or downstream role, taking the
product to market.
Source : Marketo

4. Uncovering The role of Product Marketing
• Best Example is Google
• The job of product marketing to Know the customer. Know the magic
• Let’s understand it better
Source : Marketo

5. What is “Know the Customer”
• Championing the voice of the customer into the business
• Basically, it goes beyond needs and pains but delves deep into their psyche to
understand the emotional drivers of purchase and use.
• Product marketer is more act like a sociologist or psychologist than product
manager or technologist.
• Uncover the strategic, boardroom level problems you could help them solve
• Interview sales reps, sales engineers, and customer success teams
• Validate with deep-dive phone interviews/online survey with customers and non-
customers
Source : Marketo

6. Plans for Success
After the previous exercise, you have the blueprint - how you
can communicate across marketing, have sales conversations,
and price the product
Source : Marketo

7. Win/Loss Analysis
• You can drive win/loss analysis (as product marketing is neutral from
sales/customer success) —a process aimed at deconstructing why we won or
lost deals by conducting customer interviews and surveys
• Buyers will often open up to product marketing in the spirit of improving
pricing, messaging, value propositions, or the sales process.
Source : Marketo

8. Ideal Customer Profile, Segmentation, and
Buyer Personas
• Product marketing identifies the group of customers that is the best fit for
driving growth. This is brought to life through market research and real data
about existing customers.
Source : Marketo

9. Keys to Knowing Your
Customer
Source : Marketo

10. Talking to Your Audience
• Product marketing is not an armchair quarterback role
• Successful product marketers need to get close to the front lines to
understand their audience and the changing market dynamics
• Product marketing managers should spend at least 20% of their time
interacting with their audience by joining sales calls, attending conferences,
and interviewing customers.
Source : Marketo

11. Spending Time with Sales
• No team better understands the questions your customers are asking than
your sales team.
• Spending time with sales will help build customer empathy and help you
understand the feedback that is coming from the front lines
Source : Marketo

12. Know the Magic
Knowing the magic is about possessing a deep, unmatched knowledge
of the product. Product marketing is the product evangelist and
cheerleader, inside and outside of the company. They are responsible
for articulating why your product is different, better, special, and for
how best to convey the value it adds in the customer’s own language.
Source : Marketo

13. Align Product Management with Product
Marketing
• Align product marketing managers to product managers one-to-one on your
teams
• When product marketing teams has been most successful, product
marketing managers and product managers are attached at the hip and
working in concert.
Source : Marketo

14. Partner with Product
• Sit with your counterpart on the product team at least two days a week and
book weekly product marketing interlock meetings
• The benefit :
• Product Team feels they have an ally in marketing who could help them communicate
the value of what they’re building,
• Product Marketing Team feels, they had a simple, cleanly packaged story to tell.
Source : Marketo

15. Some Questions
Here are some of the questions product marketing can ask to ‘know the magic’:
• What inspired this feature?
• Why did we build it this way?
• What other approaches did we try to solve this problem?
• What was the biggest problem we had to solve in reaching this point?
Source : Marketo

16. Other Roles – Product marketing Can Play
• Packaging: Bundling features together to simplify the way buyers buy and
maximize the perceived value
• Pricing: Developing simple, easy-to-understand pricing models built around
value rather than features
Source : Marketo

17. Keys to Knowing the Magic
Market & Category Insights:
• Product marketing must understand the category, market dynamics, and trends that drive consumer
behavior. This comes through from following the industry closely, including what’s happening upstream
& downstream in the value chain.
• Product marketers gain this insight by reading industry materials, attending trade shows, and following
influencers and analysts.
Competitive Environment
• Product marketing must be experts on the share-of-mind and share-of-wallet competitors and their
relative standing in the eyes of consumers. This doesn’t stop at in-category competitors, but also
competitors from adjacent or alternative ‘outsider’ brands that might fulfill similar needs
Source : Marketo

18. Connect the Two
Cut Through Positioning and Messaging - Product marketing defines the product
value proposition, the experiences that support it and the product attributes that
underpin these experiences. Product marketing then shapes messaging—how you
communicate
Channel Enablement- Product marketing partners with sales enablement to define
the content and support the delivery of training programs for sales and partners.
Product marketing provides the fodder for the training content, while sales enablement
determines how best to serve it up. This could take the form of demo scripts,
competitive battle cards, sales collateral, pitch decks, and more.
Source : Marketo

19. Connect the two
• Go-to-Market : Product marketing works with go-to-market leaders like the Chief
Revenue Officer, VP of Sales, and Chief Marketing Officer to define the go-to-
market strategy and establish the connective tissue that aligns the target segments,
value prop, routes to market, and marketing campaigns to drive demand. In this
role, product marketing is serving as offensive coordinator, calling the plays and
ensuring that every team is working towards the common goal.
• Demand Gen - Demand generation teams rely on product marketing to help
support demand campaigns by defining what experiences to highlight for which
audiences and what language to use.
Source : Marketo

20. Connect the two
• Web and Design - Product marketing develops the briefs that drive the creation of
website pages, marketing assets, including what experiences you should highlight,
what screenshots to feature, and what language to use.
• Video Production - Work with the creative director to bring the value proposition
and the product’s magic moments to life through explainer and demo videos
• PR - Product marketing works with PR to write launch press releases, ensuring that
the story is well represented, that the key differentiators are adequately highlighted
and that the language will resonate with the market. At launch, PMM serves as a
spokesperson for the company with media, doing demos and sharing the product
and go-to-market strategy.
Source : Marketo

21. Connect the Two
• Launch Readiness - Many technology companies struggle with executing
flawless launches. Products are ‘launched’ when code is ready, leaving
marketing, sales, support, and customer success teams scrambling.
Oftentimes, this is driven by no cross-functional launch coordination, a role
that product marketing helps to fulfill. Product marketing owns the launch
checklist ensuring that all go-to-market teams are at a state of ‘internal and
market readiness’ before the product is launched.
Source : Marketo

22. Connect the two
• Watch Outs: As experts on the customer, market, and product and with the ability
to move fluidly between strategy and tactics, it’s customary for product marketing to
get pulled in a lot of different directions. Product marketing often becomes a jack
of all trades.
• Starting the product marketing team at startup, you have to attend events, deliver
sales training, build collateral, join sales calls and more. You have to wear a lot of
hats and that will give you an opportunity to get to know the customer and the
product even further. But soon, you will find all these execution tasks standing in
the way of tackling the strategic initiatives that would set the company up for
growth over the next horizon. You will feel more like a firefighter, responding to
requests from sales, than providing strategic marketing leadership.
Source : Marketo

23. • When you work with product marketers and marketing leaders, you get them to do a
time study of how much time in an average week they’re spending on various tasks.
You can ask them to color code the chart below to represent the health of each
activity. Green if it’s in great shape. Yellow if it’s done, but needs improvement. Red
if it isn’t receiving much or any attention. You will not surprise to see a lot of red
on the left with progressively more green towards the right.
• With a better understanding of which tasks are going overlooked, product
marketers can work with their marketing leadership to carve off time to tackle the
strategic deliverables that will fuel sustainable growth over the long term, and reduce
the amount of time responding to fires.
Source : Marketo

24. You can reach out
• You can follow me :
• LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitguptanim/
• Twitter : https://twitter.com/amitguptanim
Source : Marketo