The Product Marketing Salary Survey is making a comeback for 2020! We want to make it even better than last year’s and to do that, we need your help!

The more results we get, the more granular we can go, and the better the report will be, so please take part and share with your product marketing peers too!

Complete the survey

Our friends over at the Sales Enablement Collective are asking PMMs to nominate their outstanding Sales enablement teams. Give your big hitters some well earned recognition!

The winning team will be announced during the upcoming virtual Sales Enablement Festival.

Let’s take a look at the wisdom PMMs in the Slack community have been imparting this week.

Not in Slack already? Not a problem. Get in on the action (for free!) here

Q: What’s are the most important metrics that you check almost daily, and which dashboard/app do you use?

A: “Beyond revenue, customers, adoption -  the salesy ones, we are tracking number of weekly customer feedback meetings/calls, just started tracking the number of ad hoc requests from other depts (to see how well we're doing to start at being a hub of info and then later how well we're doing at making them self-sufficient).”

David Simutis, Director of Product Marketing at FullContact Inc

Here are some ideas for measurement ahead of launch during the pilot.

  • Adoption of a feature
  • Service calls & type
  • Utilization

Sometimes we also track messaging effectiveness during the pilot (using feedback from sales… not external message testing).

As for feedback, we:

  • Track satisfaction ratings on peer review/rating sites (ex. G2 Crowd/Capterra for my biz).
  • Ask clients (temporary in product modal asking for feedback/rating, 1:1 outreach, small group feedback/focus groups, and sometimes surveys).

You may also want to measure yourself as compared to your competitors. Are you first to market? Fast follower? etc. Depending on your position (and goals) your progress with the latest product/feature against this market objective could be a metric worth sharing.

Betsy Linder, Vice President of Product Marketing at ADP

Q: I’m on a small marketing team, and a member of our team is beginning to see an uptick in the content requested for external audiences. I haven’t been with the team long enough to know the nature of the request, but I’m willing to bet it’s mostly external presentations for customers, etc. We’re trying to filter urgent content requests from less than critical so we can prioritize our time. Can anyone share any tips or proven best practices to solve this problem that doesn’t start with ignoring sales and CS?

A: “Definitely not a good idea to ignore sales and CS. Those are important stakeholders, and having good relationships is critical to growing your sphere of influence!

I would start by setting up time with the requester and having a listening ear.

Try to understand the "need behind the need". They might be asking for “product deck that says X, Y, and Z", but the true need may be something deeper. Maybe they don't feel confident presenting to a certain audience segment, for instance. Best case scenario you learn something new, or you already have what they need in a different format!

If the request truly is too niche, or not aimed at your target audience, it's also good for those stakeholders to understand the rationale on why those requests aren't taking priority.”

Leah Langston, Product Marketing Manager at Zapproved

Q: Our organization is growing and I’m trying to achieve better job clarity for the team. How do you typically divvy up competitive intel with the product managers vs product marketing managers in your organization?

A: “Usually the PMM handles it with input from the product manager who really should be spending their time working on the product. The product manager usually sees customers and speaks at events so they get to hear/see things which should be brought back. They should also review what you have produced, but I would say 85% is on the PMM team to do it.”

Keith Brooks, Product Evangelist, Speaker & Mentor

“When I was director of product marketing, I had a three-person competitive intelligence team - done right it's a big job. However, if you don't have a competitive intelligence team, it seems to me that product marketing should handle competitive intelligence. The way I look at it, product marketing figures out what the product needs to be competitive and then communicates to product management what needs to be incorporated into the product.”

Lawson Abinanti, Positioning and Messaging Consultant

Q: I’m looking to get a SaaS-based project management tool for the marketing team to use (10 people).  I’ve used Asana and Smartsheet in the past, heard good things about Trello and my boss says she got a recommendation for Monday.com. Any suggestions?

A. “I’m a big fan of Asana. Notion is great too if you want something more documentation-centric and less ‘project management and ticketing’ focused.”

Jon Lewis, Product Marketing Manager at CIRA

“Huge fan of Asana! We chose it over monday.com.”

Kathleen Kranzlin, Director of Product Marketing at Rokt

Q: Has anyone got a good PMM 'launch' process template/toolkit for use in continuous development/agile? Product have started to move to agile but commercial is used to 'big bang' launch marketing, so want to learn what to implement to meet both needs.

A: “We recently moved to a SaaS cadence model. For small feature releases and below we’ve been doing sprint-style launches (two-weeks) with minimal market support. For everything else, we’ve been planning bigger launch campaigns that all lead up to a bigger launch even where we announce the bigger product innovations and releases on a quarterly basis.”

Nikos Drakatos, Director of Product Marketing at Peakon

“The process that's worked for me looks something like:

  • Discuss all stories selected for development with the Product Owner at the beginning of each sprint. Get all the info about what the feature should do, who it's for, why they want it... all that stuff that should be in the user story.
  • Then use a priority matrix like Intercom's to decide what I will actually do for the launch on the Product Marketing side.
  • Draft some initial messaging for the feature, then don't do anything else until the story is out of testing and ideally out of user acceptance testing.
  • Then update and create all the content and materials needed in the following sprint once the dev team is done with it. This is the hardest part to get buy-in on, but it kind of makes sense to think of Product Marketing as an extension of the Product team the same way that documentation is. It's pretty much impossible to write complete documentation for a feature that's not done yet, and the same goes for Product Marketing.”

Tim Hinds, Co-founder, Product & Marketing at GrokSpark