Yes, we’re product marketers. MQLs can sometimes be a dirty word to us.

But you know what’s going to score you brownie points with your fellow marketing and sales teams? Delivering projects that drive marketing qualified leads!

Here are two, pretty simple projects that you could get done – in less than two weeks – that will help you become the belle of the marketing all-hands.

These are great opportunities to show off your product marketing skills and support your marketing and sales teams with new call-to-actions as part of your buyer journey.

Create a pre-recorded demo video

It sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it actually is.

Offering a pre-recorded demo video on your website, gated behind a form asking for just an email, is one of the simplest data-for-information exchanges you can set up. It’s a perfect soft call-to-action for website visitors that don’t want to sign up for a trial, don’t want to speak to sales, but want to see more than just the information on your website.

Your demo video should be like the actual demos your sales teams give – or at least, should give. It definitely shouldn’t be feature-heavy, and it definitely shouldn’t bore viewers.

Your demo video should focus on the outcomes and value your product delivers, not the features. Instead of the standard “you click here, do this, and then see that happen,” voiceover, you want to tell a story that combines your product features, benefits, and ultimate outcomes into a packaged nugget of value (funnily enough, I call these value nuggets).

Here’s a simple outline for your first pre-recorded demo video.

1. The situation, problem, and implication of what the customer’s life is like today – be clear on who the target customer is, the impact through their organization, professional, and personal lenses. Use 1 or 2 slides.
2. Value they desire – the three ideal outcomes that your product solves (that they want to achieve). Use 1 slide.
3. Switch to a product screen recording. For each value, create a narrative that walks through;
   • Importance of the outcome
   • The progress to achieve the outcome with your product, connecting features to benefits
4. Recap each value, and finish with overall messaging in one slide.

Making these happen can be complex, if you’re after a super high production quality video. You can start with something you can make in Apple iMovie or Descript. Maybe work with a pre-sales or customer success manager to perfect the flow and capture a screen recording that you can chop up. Make a scrappy first version, and then see if you can get the budget to work with someone from Fiverr, Upwork, or a local student to perfect it.

Then, distribution: get it up on a separate ‘[product name] demo video’ page, gated behind an email form, then start linking to it – here are a few quick ideas:

• Review past and upcoming content plans to find opportunities to post a soft call-to-action
• Use in marketing email campaigns – send a one-off email to your entire prospect database, then build it into regular newsletters and lead nurture campaigns
• Let sales reps use an ungated version of the video as an alternative call-to-action in their nurture campaigns and cold emails: ‘Can I send you a quick demo video?’
• Promote in retargeting paid acquisition campaigns to visitors who viewed the website but didn’t sign up
• Include it in follow-up emails to all leads collected at online and IRL events

The placement of your demo video in the buyer journey should be determined by what you know about your buyer journey – make sure that it’s a logical progression between your buyer’s previous step, viewing the video, and the next step (likely, talking to sales).

P.S. Don’t forget to add a ‘book a demo’ section on the webpage, and make it really simple for those who view the video to put their hand up for sales interaction.

A one-two punch: regular demo webinars

You’ve gone to the effort of designing a demo script that speaks to your product value, benefits, and features. You’ve made it into a recorded demo video.

But not everyone likes demo videos – they need a bit more interaction. And not everyone wants to speak to sales.

So, get the most juice out of your efforts and set up regular – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly – demo webinars.

These will be approx 30 minute sessions that you can host as a product marketer – trust me, you’ve got this! – or with a customer success or pre-sales rep. And they’ll follow pretty much the same flow as the demo video:

1. Introduce the problem you’re solving and the challenge that customers are experiencing
2. Present how you help
3. Walk through the similar narrative: value > benefits > features
4. Maybe bulk up with a case study
5. 10 minutes at the end for an AMA, so folks can get their questions answered live

My recommendation is to use Demio for effortless webinars. Use a few slides from your sales deck, practice a few times to build confidence in your pitch and delivery, and make it human. Tell stories. Your viewers will love it. Maybe brand it ‘The [Product] Rundown’ or ‘[Product] 101’.

You’ll promote your regular webinars in pretty much the same way. Throw up a webpage where you can update the date of the next webinar and the registration link, then drive traffic to it through very similar methods as above:

• Call-to-action in content
• Add a call-out in every prospect-facing newsletter
• Share with sales reps to include in cold emails as an alternative to replying
• Try some paid retargeting campaigns, maybe paid social on LinkedIn to target a specific market
• Include a link to the webinar page on every ‘thank you’ page from your other gated content – give those leads a place to go next
• Share it via organic social and create some snazzy banners to share

These will feel much easier to carry out than creating a demo video, because they’re more human and natural. But, creating a demo video first will really help set the scene and perfect what you’ve got to say, and how you’re going to say it.

Make SaaS tangible with demos

I think this is a principle that we can all lean into more. SaaS is pretty intangible sometimes – a bunch of buttons and fields on a webpage.

When we link that to the bigger problems we’re helping customers to achieve, we’ll do better. When we show the outcomes that our features solve, we’ll do better. When we talk about our product in a human way, we’ll do better.

Good luck, and hit me up if you’d like some examples of good demo videos and demo webinars!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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There’s nothing like having something to back up your perspective – especially if it’s something controversial.

But too often, positioning narratives and content campaigns rely on blasé adlibbed theoretical statements, rather than anything concrete. We hope that we have a narrative someone can believe in – but it’s unlikely that we have evidence that someone will accept.

Creating your own statistics and gathering your own insights is a great, simple way to build persuasive evidence. Not only does it back up your positioning and narrative, but it can support coordinated activity across the business to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Gathering primary research and insight to form the basis of marketing campaigns was taught hard at advertising school and has stuck with me ever since. In fact, it’s something that I’ve done at nearly every job in the last few years.

Examples

Here’s three examples of stat-based campaigns I’ve run that have helped drive sales, start conversations, and support go-to-market campaigns.

Kayako: Live Chat Statistics

One of our first post-launch campaigns for a new product that merged a live chat tool with a ‘home screen’ of information, this Live Chat Statistics report surveyed both businesses and consumers with their thoughts on live chat support experiences.

We aimed to show that customers wanted live chat experiences that worked, and that businesses were massively behind customer expectations.

How we used it

• We created a snazzy animated experience (see here on the Internet Archive) that delightfully illustrated the story
• We built all of the stats into our content marketing, repurposing the stats with a whole series of blog posts that looked into every angle
• We summarised into three different lead magnet PDFs that we promoted through social, email, and PPC
• We hosted webinars, guestposted, guest presented and really banged the drum of these stats over and over again

Headstart: Diversity & The Dream

At Headstart (enterprise recruiting software for graduate hiring teams), we were looking to enter the US market with a bang. We needed to have a different take and stand out from alternative solutions by hitting prospects hard with proof.

Again, we spoke to both consumers and businesses on their experiences with discrimination, hiring, and diversity – and found some huge gaps that created a really enticing story, and proved what we already knew. You can read some of the highlights here.

How we used it

• For this traditional report targeted to enterprise champions, we leaned heavily on sales engagement to distribute. Sales reps had snippets, summary images to entice in initial emails, and personal links to see who was reading what (and when)
• We also promoted via paid LinkedIn ads to people in HR and recruiting at target organizations
• This formed the basis of a live-streamed panel conversation to extend the conversation

SmartFocus: Christmas 2014

Wow – this is 8 years ago!

At SmartFocus (previously Emailvision, which was of the original email marketing SaaS companies) we decided to double-down on the ecommerce industry.

We surveyed 800+ consumers in the UK and US to understand how they’d be approaching the holiday season, creating infographics that covered market spend, the various Christmas shopper personas, and the differences between how men and women shopped for gifts.

How we used it

• This started out as just a content marketing project but quickly became a project targeted on PR outcomes – it drove mentions in many online ecommerce publications, as well as making some UK and US media mentions
• We involved our customer success team to help guide our customers with targeted recommendations
• Content, email, and social marketing campaigns as standard

Bonus: Lune

Alicia (who I run WTF is Go-To-Market? with) carried out primary research at Lune to understand consumer demand for green, climate-friendly payment methods and services. This now takes centre stage in their pitch to payment platforms.

How to create consumer research surveys

I’ll be honest: this will not be a completely scientific way to get accurate, reliable data to form the basis of strategy or make huge life-changing decisions on.

But this can help you pop above the parapet with a point of view, and provide some proof that helps push prospects along your sales and marketing process.

Define your audience

Usually, you’ll want to get weighted data that represents the census of a particular country. Platforms like Pollfish – my preferred platform of choice – does this automatically.

You’ll just need to decide the demographics of your target audience (things like location, age, gender, income, and some other markers), plus set some screening questions

Screening questions allow you to accept only respondents who meet your criteria, rejecting those from a population you’re not interested in. Tip: form your screening questions with multiple options, rather than asking for pure yes/no examples to avoid people just picking the answer they think you want.

Set your questions

If using Pollfish, you have about 18 questions to extract the juiciest information possible from your target audience before the cost goes up.

I’d recommend separating your questions into themes. For example, you might structure your survey like this:

• Problem awareness
• Problem impact
• Problem solution consideration
• Solution outcomes

Think about the angles you’re trying to extract. What’s going to surprise your audience the most? If you’re using the survey for content and sales, it needs to be have an interesting angle that suggests something your prospects don’t know. If you’re using it mostly for mainstream PR, you’ll need to have something really juicy to provide comment on pop culture.

You may want to work with a special survey writer or researcher (you can find them on Fiverr and Upwork) to make sure your questions aren’t leading, and are actually designed with best intentions in mind.

Run a pilot

Don’t pay for a huge survey to 1000 consumers without doing a smaller test first. You can pilot it either with colleagues and friends, or to a small group of 50-100 consumers.

Pilot surveys help you test whether the questions are easy to understand, if answer options make sense in the real world, and ultimately whether the survey is generating the results you want.

Ensure reliability and trustworthiness

I’m not going to trust a survey of just 200 consumers. The closer you can get to 1000 consumer responses, the more reliable (i.e. repeatable) your survey will be, and the more trustworthy your target audience will find it.

Of course, balance this with cost. If you’re investing a lot of money into the distribution of the content, it’s worth spending on the extra surveys to avoid any reliability issues.

Tip: some platforms like SurveyMonkey Audience will charge you based on the distribution of the survey to a number of potential respondents, not completed surveys. Pollfish charges only on the number of fully-completed surveys you get back.

Crunch that data

Now it’s time to slice and dice that data until you carve perfect nuggets of statistical goodness.

If you’re using Pollfish, the platform already provides a tool to help you segment the data by demographic insights and answers to other questions. This is where you can analyse to find the deltas and gaps and correlations to provide great stats for your report.

Consider all the angles

Often surveys become a bit repetitive… 50% do this… 34% think that… A third of people read this... Try to avoid this.

Group 1 are more likely to X than Group 2. Group 3 do this X times, but this increases to Y times when they are Z.

You can also change how you present the stats. 50%…, Half of…, The majority of… all help you keep readers engaged – and help you tell a story.

You can also think about collecting qualitative data, which is great for human interest angles. These can make strong emotional connections and really embed your survey results in real life.

Design your report

Creating a PDF report or standalone web page is a great way to showcase your survey report in an engaging way. Don’t limit yourself to A4 pages – think about a long, flowing report that readers will peruse on their phone or at their computer.

You can get creative with graph design, showing stats as bar charts or pie charts or line graphs or whatever makes sense.

Unethically, this is your opportunity to convince readers that your stats tell the whole story. You can write the report like you would a story: presenting challenges, introducing the hero, selling the dream outcome, the roadblocks to get there, etc.

Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose

If you’ve invested so much time and effort and money in your survey, don’t let it flop. These stats can become a core part of your positioning and sales narrative, and provide months and months of juice for your content team.

• Tie in your report with events: hold online webinars or IRL conference talks to introduce your stats and hold space for discussion
• Introduce to your customers just as much as your prospects: they can be a big vehicle for distribution
• Think social by default: shareable images and videos
• Train your teams: build the survey results into your sales process at both the top and bottom of the funnel, generating interest and reiterating its importance throughout
• Arm your teams: make sure your sales, marketing, and customer success teams have the material, content, and collateral they need to use the outcomes you’ve discovered in their everyday work
• If the focus is PR, bring a PR team in early: they’ll be able to help guide and shape the survey with journalists to maximise hit rates
• Distribute: guest-post on partner sites, join partner webinars, add your stats to ‘top stats’ for inclusion and backlinks, syndicate content with publishers
• Repeat and repeat and repeat: repeat the outcomes you’ve discovered until everyone inside and outside your business knows them by heart

Your outcomes are only as good as your preparation

If you write a question that’s a bit too confusing, or set up a screening question incorrectly, your data is going to be skewed – and that’s not good.

Putting extra emphasis on preparing your survey pays dividends. If you can, work with a researcher who can craft the survey, manage responses, and analyse the data to give you the best outcomes.

You also need to understand how you will use the survey before you carry it out. Exploratory quantitative research helps nobody. Validate themes and understand likely directions through qualitative research first before going out to build your survey. Know exactly how you’ll repurpose the content to support different marketing and sales activities to avoid wasting time.

Lastly: don’t overdo these kind of campaigns – and when you do, do it well.. It’s become standard for ‘digital PR’ agencies to create crappy, linkbait surveys that are only tangentially connected to the business, that are weak and implausible – damaging brand perception.

Good luck! I’d love to see the surveys you’ve run – drop me a note or leave a comment!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post Using surveys in narratives and marketing campaigns appeared first on Building Momentum.

As product marketers, we’re forever asking ‘why’.

• Why do customers struggle with this problem?
• Why did we build this feature?
• Why are we seeing more closed-won deals from a particular country?
• Why are we not getting traction with performance marketing on a particular channel?

We’re always trying to get to the core nugget of insight that has driven, or can drive, a specific action. (And remember: marketing is meant to drive behavior change).

But when we’re actually doing work ourselves, it’s easy to lose sight of that initial insight. Strategic work quickly becomes part of the everyday mundanity.

A one-pager is never just a one-pager

Whether it’s creating sales enablement one-pagers, updating the pitch deck, or crafting a new product launch rollout plan, it might seem super straightforward.

“Sales asked for this one-pager. We launched some new features, so we should update the pitch deck. This is our standard product rollout plan.”

But we’re never just updating a deck: we’re figuring out how to tell our story in a persuasive way that drives the conversation.

We’re not just creating a rollout plan: we’re looking to drive incremental revenue, better meet customer needs, and showcase our innovation.

And a one-pager is never just a one-pager. It might be intended to actually educate prospects on the problem, or persuade prospects of our differentiation, or support our prospect in championing our solution over others.

The two-bullet brief

Something I learnt (but, I raise my hand, haven’t practiced lately), is to add two bullet points to every document.

These two bulletpoints help me keep in mind what it is we’re actually trying to achieve. They help align work-in-progress reviewers and those giving feedback – and help us have higher value discussions.

At the top of every document or initiative you’re working on, make a quick note on the following:

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

The first is obvious. How successful our work is depends on having a good, consistent understanding of the audience, so keeping in mind the specific type of customer – whether that’s a persona, an industry, or even an internal stakeholder – helps.

But we also need to consider where they are in their buyer journey. Are they early in their evaluation journey? Their needs – and your response – will change significantly.

The second bullet, you might call an outcome or the goal – but that can be too restrictive. We’re talking about success! In the best case scenario, what does this activity enable or achieve?

• Success of a product one-pager might look like an improvement in opportunity progression, with customers excited to learn more.
• Success of a website update might be prospects having an elevated understanding of our product differentiation with a positive impact on lead generation.

You might want to treat this as a hypothesis and approach it from an experimental perspective, but that can be overkill and confusing for people or organizations that don’t operate that way.

Think bigger

As product marketers, we’re experts in second-order thinking. Our actions have consequences and implications.

Let’s make sure that the work we do always has the right implications and work towards the best outcomes.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post Okay… but why? appeared first on Building Momentum.

Let’s be honest: if you’re struggling to gain traction, there is no silver bullet that kickstart your growth.

I’ve seen this exact situation play out time and time again. An eager CEO or VP Sales, dismayed at plateauing growth (or worse), pins all hope on ‘the next thing’ to change the game. The next thing comes, and… as predicted, the results aren’t as expected. But never mind; “The next thing will help!”

There’s definitely a lot to say about keeping motivation up, or creating a reality distortion field to eke out extra performance. But a white lie can quickly snowball and create mismatched expectations which leads to ambiguity and inertia.

Traction is tricky to define, but people generally refer to it as top-of-funnel lead generation, sales revenue, and ‘being seen’ – a mixture of qualitative feels and quantitative evidence.

There’s no quick fixes, only work. Here’s some tips to help overcome the challenges you’re facing.

Positioning is strategy in action

The way you describe your product in your customer’s world is a vehicle to define your go-to-market strategy.

• Who is your customer, and what’s going on in their world?
• What value do they desire – and how does your product help them get closer?
• What are the features that matter – and how do you communicate that?
• How are you positioned in the market, against competitors, and priced?

But most of the time, the concept of positioning is relegated to just marketing fluff, ignoring the strategic process that goes into it.

Here’s how you remedy it.

Firstly, get your assumptions out on the table: who do you think your customers are, and what do they value? I recommend doing a customer empathy map to see not just where you and your team are aligned, but where you have low confidence – and where the gaps are.

Positioning (and strategy) is much easier when you are the thing for someone, rather than something for everyone. Focus on niche customer segments: a group of people linked by a common pain that they’ll pay to solve. You can’t please everyone either. Make the hard decisions and say no to certain segments.

The definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”. How are you supposed to do that effectively, if you don’t understand their world?

Research is key to that. Don’t just think about your product – look to build empathy with their broader jobs, pains, gains, and triggers.

Then look at how you differentiate. It’s much easier to compete for a customer, rather than compete against a competitor. Know the customer so well that you’re positioned as the best option for them against all others.

Once you’ve understood your customer and what they need, think about how you communicate to them. Elevate away from technical features and simple benefits, and instead focus on communicating the holistic value you customer desires.

Lastly, get creative! Step up your messaging with language and tone-of-voice that drives action. Life is too short to use boring words.

How does your customer buy?

The process that your buyers go through, complete with the questions they have, the touchpoints they interact with, what they need to move to the next stage, and who exactly is involved.

This process will broadly look like:

• Identify a need
• Explore how to solve it
• Evaluate solutions
• Negotiate and purchase
• Adopt
• Expand

At each stage, you can identify and rank opportunities to feed into marketing (like the channels and messages you use), sales (e.g. collateral, narrative, and process), and product (e.g. onboarding flows, product improvements, and so on).

Force progress through product launches

If you’re investing time and energy in building new product features, whether to support existing customers or to help attract new ones – but not planning how you introduce it into the world – then you’re missing out on free energy.

Haphazardly announcing a feature on social media isn’t a launch, and a blog post announcing a feature that nobody reads is a waste of time.

Developing a tiered approach to launching features will help you standardise how you release products out into the world. Think about the five A’s of feature releases: audience, awareness, action, affinity, and accountability.

Don’t just think about launches tactically either. Plan activity from first principles from the perception that you want to convey to your customers, your prospects, and others in the market.

There’s no silver bullet, only work

Traction depends on everyone putting the same step forward at the same time.

Positioning is the embodiment of your business strategy. Your buyers journey is how you meet them in the marketplace. And your product launch strategy is how you build perception, time after time.

Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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I recently sat down with Josh and Nate from the Searching4SaaS podcast to talk about the role of product marketing in early-stage SaaS.

You can listen to the podcast above, or find it wherever you get your podcasts. You can also read the edited transcript below!

Big thanks to Josh and Nate for having me on!

What’s the biggest thing people get wrong about PMMs?

Product marketing is such a broad term, there is so much that you can do with it.

There are so many things that we can do or that we can be involved in. I think one of the biggest disservices that marketers or CEOs or founders give is not really giving product marketers the space to find their own way to help the business. I think often we get categorized as either one of two models.

Number one is just being an internal agency for sales enablement or content marketing teams. It’s just like, look, we need this one sheet. We need this data sheet. We need a deck. It’s horrible, I spent most of my first couple of jobs being a deck monkey. And it was horrible. It’s not a fulfilling job at all. We can be much more strategic than that.

The other model is that we can just be a conveyor belt for product teams. So whatever product teams ship, that’s it. We launch it out into the world, we write the release notes and maybe send an email to customers or whatever. Again, it’s really unfulfilling. It’s not it’s not a nice way to work.

And also misses out on the strategic value that product marketing can bring. And I think that’s because at it’s core, product marketing is a strategy role. We really have to understand who our customers are, what the business is doing, what’s happening in the market… and then try and draw those dots together.

It’s just that pace that people are yet to really twig them to at scale. There’s definitely companies and people out there who are advocating for this approach. But that’s the one message: product marketing is strategic. Don’t make that mistake, don’t try and force them into executional stuff all the time, make sure there’s that room for strategy as well.

JOSH: Does the fact that the word marketing is in the title kind of allude to that? All the things you described are things that traditionally marketers have looked at.

JDP: Exactly. You know product marketing is often seen as the fluffy people that make the deck after the fact, the ones that do execute on whatever strategy has already been decided, but we can step back from that and really understand what the landscape is saying, what we’re hearing from customers and have some input into the way that we move forward.

It’s just so much better for everyone involved. It works so much better.

How does research play in product marketing strategy?

You can go super deep into the research. But what I mean by strategy is all about understanding where you are today, where you want to be by a certain timeframe and the steps involved to make that happen. And then putting that into action. You don’t need to do super deep research all the time.

You can do really nice targeted pieces of customer research, competitive research, or just understanding more about your business goals and the way that the business system works.Some of those bits can really give you a lot of answers into how to really maximize the results that you’re going to get from a go-to market function, from a marketing perspective… there’s so many of these bits and pieces that’s impacted by what product marketers can do.

When do should a traditional PMM join a business?

I don’t think there’s anything really as a traditional product marketer, I think it we’re really versatile and that we can be thrown into a situation and just get what needs to be done,done. I think there is a time when you can say, “okay, we can benefit from some product marketing expertise and skills here”.

And I think that really does depend on the go-to market motion that set, the existing skillset of the team, and the biggest challenges that you’re facing over the next six to 12 months probably.

If we’re gonna think about, you know, a standard B2B SaaS startup, so imagine that the founder is a you know, a product person who’s taking on the sales ownership, and the go-to market is a traditional inside sales play. I think product marketing should be like the first or second marketer that you would hire now.

It used to be that the first person would be a demand generation, but that’s changed a lot because it’s significantly easier to access an audience now than it ever has been. You’ve got social media, you’ve got all of these outreach tools. You’ve got all of the advertising networks and things like that. It’s easier than ever to get in front of people.

But the challenge is, is to how do you make sure you get in front of the right people, the right audience, and then how do you pitch in the best way. How do you sell them on what your product is and how it can help them?

That’s one of the reasons we’ve seen such a big increase in demand for product marketers over the last 18 months to two years, is there is so much differentiation required now to kind of cut through the noise and product marketing is one of the best tools you can have to build that into the core of your go-to market.

Especially in teams where the majority skillset is kind of technical or there’s technical founding team. Product marketers are going to have a real big impact, the sooner the better.

I think that tech people are really great for thinking deep about the application of technology, but product marketers can really join the application of it to the use cases that a specific customer can get value from. And that’s where you’re going to connect the dots, and put the pedal to the metal, and really see things start to take off.

Do product marketers replace the things a startup CEO would do?

I think, you know, in the early in the journey, you have a CEO who is really close to the customer. They’ve got that past experience, they’ve been in that role before. And so they’ve got this really deep ingrained understanding, but as you scale the business, the CEO spends less time on sharing that viewpoint and advocating for them across product engineering, success, sales, marketing. It becomes less clear, and there’s more ambiguity.

Product marketing can come into these kinds of situations with a little bit of research, a little bit of thinking, and be able to bring everyone together around a single definition of who the customer is and how you best reach them advocate for the customer amongst all of those teams.

So yeah absolutely, that’s a really interesting way to look at it.

Where should a PMM sit in the reporting structure: product or marketing?

There’s a lot of conflict about it, a lot of strong opinions!

I’m biased. I’ve only ever worked in product marketing where we’re aligned to marketing teams. So we’re part of the marketing or broader growth team and we are primarily concerned with revenue, customer acquisition and adoption, retention, satisfaction kind of metrics.

I like that a lot because it’s really focused on the commercial aspect. And it’s very customer focused and there’s always a recognition of the channels that you’re using to communicate to the business, to the rest of the world.

But conversely, there are people that have only ever worked in product teams and love that really close connection with what’s on the roadmap, where things are, how they can, how product marketers can help product teams to influence the roadmap more around customer insights and help drive that part of the process as well.

I don’t think there’s any clear and cut answer. So around the best way to do it, I think experimentation is the best,best thing to see how it fits. I think some of those things are going to come out quite naturally during the first couple of years of having product marketing in the business anyway. But I think it’s very interesting.

I can’t imagine working for put a marketing team under product. I can’t, connect the dots yet in my head around how I would be most successful in that setup. But I guess it would just be a learning curve.

Where is the crossover between product marketing, and growth marketing or product growth?

JOSH: I could see someone coming from the Product side be doing marketing aspects, or a growth marketer type who’ll be writing onboarding emails, or a marketer ensuring the right features are highlighted. Those are where the lines start to bleed from me. Is that what you see too?

Yeah, I’ve done all of those bits and pieces whilst being in the marketing side and it’s worked pretty fine. I think even though we’re under marketing, it’s a super cross-functional role by default. You have to have connections and strong alignment with product, with success and with sales and the rest of the marketing team anyway.

I think it’s also interesting when you think about the goals of product marketing teams, what they want to or need to achieve your business over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. Once you can be really clear on that, then it makes much more sense, and be like okay, well, product marketing is focused on this particular area so for now let’s align them onto this part of the team, or we’ll make sure they’ve got really strong connection with these people.

But again, one of the things that we don’t necessarily do so well is say, okay, this is, this is what product marketing is going to set out to achieve. We just kind of floats around a little bit.

It’s a really fluid role, a very fluid team. I think in terms of metrics the best situation I worked in was where we had two key metrics. One was net new ARR added each month, and the other was successful adoption of users to the product.

So the number of accounts that signed up the turn into paying customers, and those that hit whatever user goal was. That gave us two really distinct ways to think about it. The first part was about everything that happens before sign up or before the initial kind of payment point. So positioning, pricing, messaging, communicating features, the sales experience, stuff like that was something that we could improve ourselves or through our relationships with other teams.

And then the second part around successful adoption was about, is this the right product for this type of customer? Do we communicate better? Do we help them find out how to get started as quickly enough? Did they achieve that core goals early on enough and see the value in it?

Melding those two together was a really interesting a really interesting experience.

Should product marketing report directly to the CEO?

NATE: I wonder if it would make more sense for product marketing to report directly to the CEO, kind of an agency for the CEO?

Yeah. When you say that out loud, obviously it makes so much sense. All of every single role I’ve had, the product marketing plan has always been discussed with the CEO. It’s always: this is how we think of the positioning, this is what we’re learning, these are some problems we’ve seen in the sales funnel and this is how we’re thinking of fixing them.

You know, these are the broad goals of what we want to do from an adoption and activation perspective. So absolutely we should have that direct line in. The only reason that we don’t is… I’m not sure why we dont, I think that’d be really good experiment for somebody to run.

What’s the direction of product marketing?

It’s this is where I think product marketing is going to fragment in some ways over the next five or so years. I expect that we will see increase in strategy roles. So Strategy teams, Director of Strategy…we’ll probably still have product marketers under a strategy team who are responsible for kind of core market insights from customers, competitors, and general landscape kind of stuff.

And then I think we’ll see some of the more execution part of product marketing go to segment marketing teams that will focused on driving growth and adoption from particular customer groups.That’s where I think product marketing is probably going to be.

We are saying many more CMOs come from product marketing. I think another route for product marketing growth, as well is into chief of staff and COO roles. Anything that is about melding strategy with execution. I think we’re, we’re really strong in helping merge both of those worlds together.

What about fractional product marketers?

Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s grown, the concept has really come up over the last couple of months maybe. It’s really pretty new.

I think it’s really interesting. It’s probably something I’m going to be exploring over the next couple of years, but I think there’s probably two types of fractional PMMS that you might want.

One is one that can come in with a framework and experience: this is how we can do positioning, here’s the process, let’s work on it together, go through that, bring everyone around on why it’s the right direction, and there’s a lot of internal change management with things like positioning that we need to manage as well. And then sell it into the business and make sure it’s working and fitted nicely.

And then I think that is the strategic functional product marketer who can come in and be like, this is how we’ve done this before. Let’s go back to the basics. Let’s build the core artifacts that you need from personas all the way through to buyer journey, through to uderstanding of the broader customer journey, map out the sales enablement material that you need you know, the product announcement matrixes, and all this kind of stuff, which I think is really interesting as well.

But I think one of the, one of the downsides of this is that we miss the opportunity to focus on upskilling the product marketers and marketers that you already have.

That’s something that, one of my friends Alicia Carney and I are doing: a course to help upskill scrappy product marketers. But especially in Europe, there’s not a lot of career growth for product marketers, or an easy way to break into it. And so I think we need a bit more thinking there on how we manage the next generation as well.

What’s your WTF is Go-To-Market course about?

Alicia and I are both pretty involved in the product marketing community. And one of the questions we hear from almost everyone we speak to, whether they’re a new product marketer, someone who’s been in the role for a couple of years or even CEOs and CMOs is: I hear the words go-to-market all the time, but I don’t really understand what it is, how do all the bits connect together? I can read a definition of it, but what’s the connective tissue between all of these different building blocks?

And so that’s why we just called it WTF is Go-To-Market. People that have those questions are generally in their first three or four years, if not earlier for product marketing, we’re really focused on helping marketers in B2B technology companies.

That’s where our experience is mostly from. But also the frameworks and attitudes that we’ve developed as well best fit there. So there’s a lot of focus on understanding our customers, understanding the needs of the business, and connecting those bits together.

So thinking less about product marketing and go-to-market as just the checklist, and more about trying to understand what it is you’re really trying to achieve. Hopefully that’s what we’re going to help product marketers do. We’ve just invited our first cohort which is really cool.

We’ve been lucky enough to offer a scholarship as well, to improve diversity in the product marketing community sponsored by Crane VC, which is also an awesome thing that we can hopefully help to change..

The first first course is in February. It’s a six week course, and then we hope to do it every, probably every quarter. It’s really exciting. We’ve asked people to do video applications, if they feel comfortable, and we ask about the best product marketing projects they’ve worked on and the worst ones they’ve worked on.

And you can just see all of these lessons we’ve learnt, where we’ve had exactly the same experiences. So if we can help people manage those future ones a little bit better, then we’re not just going to see an impact on the results that product launches can drive the business, but also see that reflected in the career growth of people as well. And that’s, that’s the driving force behind it for us.

We’ve got people in the cohort from their first product marketing job all the way through to 40-something year old director level people, and we’ve got one CEO of a tech company in there as well. So it’s a real, really good mix of people.

What PMM characteristics should you look for in an up-and-coming potential PMM?

So I think the first part I’d say is empathy really about getting into the minds of our customers. We really need to see life from their perspective. If you take positioning, then the definition of positioning is about occupying a space in the mind of the customer. To do that effectively, you need to understand what is already going on in their head, what’s going on in their life for them.

And so unless we can do that really effectively, product marketing breaks down really quickly. So being able to do research, to be able to hypothesize and you know, validate or anything you need to do to really embody your customer, I think is really important. And that goes hand in hand with advocacy.

So representing that customer that you’ve built a solid understanding of, being able to understand the business goals and the business system as it were that you’re operating within and having the skills to navigate around that to drive the best outcomes I think is really important.

Product marketing breaks down if the work we’re doing is not used by the business. We can do all of the snazzy PDFs of personas and go-to-market strategy documents all we want, but unless it’s put into action and people are being consistent with it, it breaks down.

And then lastly, it’s having an understanding of what strategy is. It’s not solely the 10 year mission and vision. You need to understand that. But you need to understand what are the small steps that you can make today to push you forward between now and then, keeping in mind the intended outcomes that you want to achieve, and then being able to make choices that move you from A to B.

What one tip would you give?

I’ve been through three or four big pivots, changes in the way that businesses are operating, and one of the biggest tips I share with that your internal stakeholders are your customers as well.

So do the same thing. Understand what’s driving them, their jobs, pains, gains, and motivations, and then think backwards into how do you help them get to that desired state.

It’s just a customer, it’s exactly the same process, just a different outlook on it.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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I bet that you’ve seen bold claims on B2B websites or sales decks and though… nah I don’t believe it. Me too.

Everyone uses statistics and proof points in their marketing but too often, I see claims that just don’t make sense:

• Weird, convoluted language – caveated with a paragraph of super small text

• Odd phrasing to convey a distant impact, when really it’s held together by a thread

• Orwellian language and spin that says something but means nothing

But proof points are really important in B2B marketing. They work to persuade your audience that your product/service works and achieves the outcomes that are important to stakeholders.

B2B must ultimately contribute to revenue generation or cost reduction – proof points are how we show that impact.

How do you determine the proof points you should actually use?

Choosing proof points

Using the wrong stat could be the difference between getting in the evaluation set or not. There’s no point using proof points that your customers don’t care about. Not only do irrelevant stats take up valuable marketing space, they take up cognitive space.

1. Understand value

That’s why it’s important to understand the ultimate value that your product delivers to customers.

Regular readers will know that understanding your value your customers are seeking (and how you help them achieve that!) is the most single important thing you can do to build momentum in your business.

This helps you build the mental model that your potential customers operate in, and help you understand how you position around that.

That might mean focusing less, or more, on the functional features (and their immediate proof points) – and instead, more on aspirational benefits or second-order impacts.

2. Connect proof points to value

Throwing in random stats here-and-there again will confuse your buyer. It’s important to deliver a focused message: you help customers achieve X as a result of Y, using Z – and proving it.

I call this a value nugget.

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

When using this, keep in mind that your value is probably not an immediate outcome of your product, but rather a second-order impact.

An example I’ve shared before is Xerox. When marketing their printers, they used stats that showed that the impact their products had on school learning and education outcomes – not just how fast their printers were.

How to create proof points

Sometimes, you’ll have stats ready to hand that you can already slot into your marketing. Other times, you’ll have to create them.

A tip: elements of value

Use the Elements of Value pyramid (detailed in this post on competitive differentiation) to see if there are elements you could mention that you haven’t thought of yet.

Ask customers before they sign

A good practice – if it works for your sales process – is to ask prospects for stats during the sales process. Not only can these be used to build a business case and provide fodder for Customer Success engagements and renewal conversations, but you can use them to determine the impact your product has after 3, 6, 9, 12 months of use.

You can ask customers for hard stats like conversion rates, revenue, or volumes. But you can also ask for softer stats that are less scientific, but potentially more meaningful: how many hours they think they spent on tasks, how happier their team are, etc.

Collect these in the sales process, ask successful customers how those numbers have changed – and build from there.

The survey approach

This is something that I noticed a company do before and I love it. It’s not the most scientific, but it does help you create a pool of stats that you can use that tie directly to the impacts your customers are hoping for.

Survey your customers with questions like these:

1. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? [Product] has helped our business to [increase revenue].

2. By what percentage do you think [revenue would have increased] WITHOUT [product]?

3. By what percentage do you think [revenue has increased] WITH [product]?

This approach gets you three great stats:

• The percentage of customers that say your product has helped grow revenue

• The average percentage revenue increase that customers say your product has contributed

• A stat to help you say “Customers say using our product adds x% more revenue than without”

I like these stats because they’re a mixture of social proof and actual impact. Yes, they aren’t scientifically quantified – but if you’re in a pinch, they’re great substitutes.

And in most cases, what your customers ‘think’ your impact has been is potentially more valuable than what it actually was.

“What if our numbers aren’t great?”

If the statistics that matter aren’t great, I have four options.

1. Consider if they are really the best metrics to use

2. Start a cross-functional project determined to improve that number

3. Find other stats that may contribute to the intended outcome but are not directly linked

4. Be honest: “Right now we have X% impact, and we’re dedicated to improving this all the time”

Never lie about stats – always have a doc ready to go that shows the source and calculations if anyone asks, particularly in countries like the UK where the Advertising Standards Authority can ask for proof of claims.

Use proof points to build momentum

Proof points are crucial to show you have real impact on metrics that your customers care about.

Don’t just throw anything down on the website – take the time to consider what stats your customers want to improve, and then find the statistics that will help you get in the consideration set and move the deal forward.

Avoid caveated messaging – be clear, simple, and direct. Honest, upfront messaging is alway the best policy.

How are you using proof points in your marketing? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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If I see the “buyers are x% through their journey before they talk with you” stat one more time…. *shakes fist*.

But yes, the concept stands. The power is in the buyer’s hands. Caveat emptor stands no more.

Buyers request meetings knowing more about your product, your competitors, and the market landscape than ever before.

So how do you stand out, challenge preconceptions, and persuade them that you have the best solution for them?

Your unconventional wisdom

Presenting unconventional wisdom is a core part of many story-driven sales narrative frameworks:

• Andy Raskin’s ‘world change’ and ‘enemy’

• Gartner’s ‘sense-making’ framework

• The Challenger Sale ‘reframe’

Introducing a unique insight that goes against commonly-accepted knowledge has a number of goals:

1. To position your company and product as an innovator

2. To differentiate from competitors by reframing the problem and value to be achieved

3. To create excitement and motivation or fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) with the prospect

But often, these insights don’t perform as expected.

Instead of unique wisdom that shifts the narrative… we get a generic, dull, and obvious rehashing of the world we already know.

‘Competitive’ product capabilities are retold with macro-level sprinkles of ‘customers expect more’ or ‘technology has changed’ thrown in for good measure.

So what makes unconventional wisdom… unconventional?

Unconventional wisdom that wins

I posit there are three elements that make your unconventional wisdom / world change / sense-making strategy / reframe really pop, and get you the results you want.

1. It’s staring them in the face

Sometimes, your customer can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re so close to their immediate, tangible problems to be solved that they are blind to… or choosing to ignore.

Right now, they’re standing at a forked path in the woods; one way leads to heaven, the other to hell. Can you help them zoom out and see the the bigger picture?

Take Drift’s earlier unconventional wisdom: forms suck. Of course! How could we not see that before?!

2. It’s a rational statement that drives an emotional response

Just like the Drift example above, you can feel the exasperation.

Good nuggets of unconventional wisdom will be a purely rational statement, based on fact and truth and natural laws.

But they’ll tug at the heartstrings, make you feel dumb, or galvanize your ambition.

Here’s an example:

This is the story of Nina – a young woman who grew up in a working-class family from a dodgy part of London. She went to school that was in measures for low performance. She received free school meals as a result of a low family income. She worked at a supermarket part-time to put herself through a good university, even after receiving education grants. She received a good grade, and applied for a graduate role in your company.

But so did Thomas, an Eton student from Surrey who interned at Goldman Sachs and received the same grade from the same university.

If you were the recruiter with both resumes on your desk… who would you put forward: Thomas or Nina? Be honest.

On paper, Thomas is the best candidate. In reality, Nina has shown more grit, determination, and ability. But the recruiting screening process isn’t designed to spotlight people’s potential.

Telling a story like this with an emotional edge takes a conventional situation, causes people to look inwards and ask themselves the hard questions.

3. It’s a blocker to their aspirations and ambitions

Telling someone they’re not going to achieve their goal is a surefire way to either get an attentive audience, or get ignored.

When you can back this up with proof, you’ll be able to point out the mistakes and missteps before they’re made. These need to be grounded in reality, and you need to have a solid path to help them overcome these new hidden barriers, and get them to success.

Hubspot’s inbound marketing narrative did this well. Outbound marketing was making lead generation more expensive and less effective – you’re not going to meet your revenue and growth without change.

Strong unconventional wisdom blames the game, not the tools

When you’re bringing in an unconventional wisdom narrative element, make sure it’s not telling them they’re stupid. Instead, help them make sense of the world – it’s not their fault.

There is something happening – to their buyers, to their market, to their organization – that is causing them stress and pain. Not only will you let them in on the secret that nobody else knows… you have the key to fix their challenges too.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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