If I were starting a product marketing organization from scratch, I’d count myself fortunate. Most product marketing leaders inherit existing teams and then have to mold them to fit their vision and achieve the organization’s goals. This process can be lengthy and fraught with challenges in terms of aligning people, team dynamics, skills development, and dealing with unexpected issues.
Leading a product marketing team places you right between product management and sales. Your success heavily relies on delivering market-valued products and ensuring their value is easy to comprehend, sell, and buy. Despite inherent product feature gaps and sales team imperfections, it’s crucial to structure a product marketing organization that thrives in such scenarios.
Fundamentals of Building a Product Marketing Organization
When starting from scratch, you must balance customer and product expertise with product marketing experience. You need to decide between internal and external hires to avoid doing the same old things. It’s also essential to find individuals who can collaborate well with both technical product managers and high-energy salespeople.
Here are some core building blocks to consider:
1. Mission Statement (Their North Star):
Your product marketing team needs a mission to guide them and define their value within the organization. A good mission provides direction amidst chaos and sets boundaries for others. An example mission could be, “To make our products’ value easier to market, sell, and buy compared to our competitors.”
2. Structuring According to Customer or Product Organization:
Rather than structuring your team to mirror product management, align it with customer departments that your products serve. This approach ensures market and customer-focused messaging. Each product marketing manager should focus on specific customer disciplines, like payroll or IT support, and tailor messages accordingly.
3. Vertical or Horizontal Market Focus:
Dedicate a portion of your team to key vertical industries that generate most of your revenue for maximum relevance. Industry-specific messaging significantly enhances engagement by addressing unique strategic objectives and dynamics.
4. Establish Guidelines with Sales:
Treat sales as your primary customer and develop a detailed plan resembling a statement of work (SOW) to meet their needs effectively. Focus on creating situational sales tools and playbooks that cover the most common scenarios salespeople encounter, ensuring they have the essential tools they need.
5. Complementary Responsibilities with Product Management:
There’s a clear distinction between product management, which focuses on what to build, and product marketing, which focuses on selling existing products. Product marketing should concentrate on market expertise and feed valuable insights to product management, allowing each to play to their strengths without unnecessary overlap in product knowledge.
Product Positioning
Effective product positioning is crucial to product marketing. It gives your products a unique identity, making them appealing to both buyers and salespeople. This identity fosters emotional connections with buyers, builds confidence in your sales team, and creates a perception of superiority over competitors.
Strategic Value of Product Marketing
Product marketing generates the conversation around your products, bringing them to life and creating emotional engagement with buyers. It drives awareness and supports the sales process by providing tools that fill the sales pipeline with quality leads. Well-executed product marketing makes your products attractive, ensuring they outshine the competition.
In conclusion, if I were to build a product marketing organization from the ground up, my team’s efforts would make our products highly desirable, positioning us as the envy of our market.