Last week saw the very exciting launch of Product Marketing Rendezvous!

Sign up and enjoy 30 presentations, 8 hands-on workshops, and 3+ hours of recruitment matchmaking from companies like Microsoft, deliveroo, Sage, and Linkedin.

Check out the stellar line up of speakers here.

Speaking of a stellar line-up, we’ve got one for you below!

PMMs from all across the globe have been imparting wisdom and offering sage advice in the Slack community, and we’ve collated some of the best.

Not in Slack already? You're missing out on a wealth of information, including red-hot tips, great job opportunities, and interesting debates. Sign-up for this, and a whole lot more, right here.

Q: I'm presenting at our company's SKO next month - five consecutive sessions, 15 minutes each. I'll have over 300 sellers in the audience and, of course, it's 100% remote. I've done shorter presentations to this audience, but never an hour and fifteen minutes. Any tips on making it impactful and fun?

A: “Videos, polls, chat questions. breakout rooms, any way to break up the consecutive talking is absolutely required for a virtual SKO.”

Yitzy Tannenbaum, Product Marketing Manager at AlgoSec

“That is a heavy lift, fair play to you for taking it on. I have two suggestions: first of all, apply the serial-position effect putting a huge emphasis on impactful beginnings and endings. Secondly, focus on your energy. If you keep your own energy levels up that will bring the audience with you. Best of luck.”

Sean Broderick, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Altify

*Check out PMMfixx for a ton of excellent examples of impactful and fun presentations. We bookmarked all of our favorite presentations from the last 12 months worth of PMA events.

Q: I’m working with our Product team to improve how we gather feedback from sales and services teams. It’s previously been tricky to get consistent and actionable feedback from the business so we’re taking steps to change that. How do you get useful and consistent feedback from the Sales and Services teams for the Product team?

A: “It’s all about the google forms for internal product surveys - keep the survey simple to get feedback, provide insight on how you are taking action on that feedback to incent them to keep giving it. Be ready to analyze themes and trends coming out of the feedback to make it actionable so it doesn’t turn into a black hole.”

Lauren Culbertson, Co-founder & CEO of LoopVOC

“Forcing feedback from sales can create friction because it's a task that doesn't immediately impact their comp sheet, taking them out of their hunter/farmer workflow.

“Building/enhancing/reinforcing the use of a long-form win-loss note field on opportunities, that you can then mine, later on, choosing who and where you need to engage depending upon the discovery work/problem/theme you are investigating is a worthwhile investment, it also sometimes has a side effect of building a stronger and more empathetic relationship with sales teams because you're now living their deals thru their notes.

“I'm also highly allergic to those who put 1,000 drop-down boxes on opportunity records in Salesforce when a deal is won or lost - stop mangling the voice of the salesperson.

“Implied but not explicit in all of this, data is great but if you spend more time collecting, than processing, forming and validating an opinion, and subsequently taking action, is the data really valuable to begin with?

“Salespeople absolutely hate it when you ask for their feedback but they can't see a result from it, and will deliberately dissuade others from participating - because if it's not working towards their comp plan, why should they give you their data and opinions? (and rightly so).

To get consistent feedback you have to constantly feed back into the machine (consistent execution, feedback, results, participation, etc.)”

Luke Walker, Principal Product Manager at MontyCloud

Q: In your experience who owns release notes? Product marketing, product management, or someone else? Which distribution methods have you found most effective?

A: “At our company, the owner is product management, due to the closeness with development/engineering. If it is a major release, marketing will help pizzazz the customer-facing notes for communication.”

Camil Lafreniere, Product Leader

“My recommendation would be PMM/Marketing for end-users and PM/ development team for technical documentation. We created a post about this some months ago.”

Mariana L. Head of Marketing at Beamer  

“Of course, it will depend on how your organization can best compose and share the release notes but I agree with the idea above. The PMMs are most likely translating the technical to the consumable for customers so they can understand the value of the features/releases. While PMs would lead the documentation for engineers, PMs, etc. In short, who is best positioned to share notes for your specific audiences?”

Daniel Scibienski, Product Marketing Manager at Ellevation Education

Q: What are your favorite questions to ask product marketing candidates when interviewing them?

A: “How much do you know about [our company/market/products/business model]? [hint] a strong PMM candidate will have done their research and will/should come up with some viewpoints (even if not exactly correct).”

Bertrand Hazard, VP GTM Strategy at SonarSource

“I love to judge people’s curiosity and level of prep by looking at the quality of questions they have for me. It’s always a red flag when people don’t have any questions for me.”

Brandon Redlinger, Senior Director Product Marketing at ringDNA

“We’ve collected a series of sample interview questions for each PMM role, from PMMs. They’re all available here.”

Richard King, Founder of Product Marketing Alliance

Q: Do any of you run a product advisory council or something similar where you meet quarterly/2x a year with 5-10 clients (I'm talking B2B products) to get feedback? I’m curious what the agenda typically involves in order to really get value out of it over the long term.

A: “We meet quarterly. The agenda is often what we have done, where we are going, items coming up. General feedback, the status, and future of the industry, market. Feedback on forward-looking items, problems. In the end, we often have an open discussion and get feedback, assistance on prioritization on items, problems that are coming up.”

Camil Lafreniere, Product Leader

“We focus on our ICP customers and we go over the industry and market, then dive deep into a specific topic each session. Something that we’re thinking about building or we want to improve on to get insight into how it might affect their daily operations and where we can address pain points, then we’ll give them a roadmap overview for the next 6 months.

Laura Maxwell, Product Marketing at Fleetio

“Pay extra attention to curating the guestlist for these. If customers are too similar/in the same industry they may be concerned about being too open with feedback. If they're not similar enough (rep from enterprise and SMB business) they may wonder what they're doing there. We've done different tracks/swimlanes for events before.”

Alison Turner, Product Marketing Manager at Mailgun