This article is based on Karen’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Tel Aviv earlier this year. Check out the exclusive OnDemand recording of this amazing session here!

If I were to ask you about your top three objectives in life, you might struggle to come up with more than one. We’re so busy with our day-to-day routines that we often forget to take the time to pause and gain clarity about where we want to be.

But this clarity is so hard to find, right? When there are so many distractions, emotions, and people vying for attention, our brains become muddled and it's hard to know what we truly want.

But this truth and this clarity can be found in our dreams. Our dreams reflect our deepest desires, our real challenges, and our weaknesses – without the external distractions that can cloud our waking thoughts.

But if dreams are so powerful, how come we often forget them and continue racing through our lives without direction? Imagine how much more effective we could be in life if we would only listen to what our souls were telling us overnight.

Up until the 1900s, dreams were considered irrational fantasies, dark thoughts lurking in the corner of our minds. And then Freud came in. He found patterns in our dreams, and he created a framework that allows us to categorize, interpret, and understand our dreams.

So, how does this all connect to product marketing?

We’ll get to that shortly, but first, let me introduce myself. My name is Karen Cohen, and I have a wealth of experience in the product marketing realm. I've been a product marketing manager myself, and I've been driving, mentoring, and creating go-to-market strategies at different companies for over a decade.

When I look back over the years, I realize that we've been obsessed with questions like ‘What is product marketing?’, ‘What does the product marketing manager do?’, ‘What is the product marketing skill set?’, ‘Where does product marketing sit within the organization?’, and ‘How do you measure its success?’.

I'm going to be an annoying Karen this morning because my answer to all these questions is that it depends. And to illustrate that matter, I want to tell you the story of my past five years.

Over the past five years, I’ve taken the product marketing team at AppsFlyer from a party of one (that's me!) to a team of more than 22 product marketing managers worldwide.

When I joined AppsFlyer, we were transitioning from an early-stage startup to a growth-stage company. Today, we have extensive marketing solutions for different verticals from gaming to eCommerce, media and entertainment, finance, and more.

However, it didn’t start like that, so let me go back to the beginning.

Product marketing in early-stage companies

Every company at its early stage has the same needs. The company needs to build its brand because, in most cases, it's not known. Plus, as a marketing team, you also need to generate pipeline in order to help the sales team to sell.

Usually, marketing teams and sales teams divide and conquer. While the sales team is focused on driving revenue, the marketing team will be busy running events and creating content and ads to promote their brands and create pipeline.

If you as a product marketing manager are hired at an early-stage company, you're probably going to be an extension of the marketing team. They’ll be looking for a content writer, a deck creator, a jack of all trades, and a marketer that will give a little product flavor to the marketing team. Essentially, the marketing team will be measuring themselves in terms of the leads that they bring to the table.

However, you (and this is something I want you to remember) as a product marketer, need to connect to the business needs – and what really matters to the business at that stage is annual recurring revenue (ARR). If you keep the importance of revenue in mind and focus on helping the sales team to win more, you will be successful.

Psst… we’ll be using a few more business-related acronyms. Here’s a list that you might find helpful.

Product marketing in growth-stage companies

In the second stage, it becomes much more complex and more interesting. This is the stage we were at when I joined AppsFlyer. You still need to solidify the brand, generate pipeline, and sell, of course, but things are a little bit more complicated.

You have a bunch of customers that you need to delight, and you also have to deal with a lot of different regions. Plus, you don't have just one product anymore, but multiple product lines. And, because you now have so many product lines, you're not just going to sell your first product, but you also need to upsell and cross-sell to your customers.

In most cases, this is where you'll start reorganizing your product marketing team around the different products, making each product marketer an expert in their particular product line. Their input comes from their product team and their output is for the sales team. So, not only will your product marketers be product experts, but they’ll also have a deep understanding of sales enablement, pre-sales, and the entire sales lifecycle.

At this stage, the Northstar of the company is net revenue retention (NRR). The formula to calculate NRR is based on your monthly recurring revenue (including all that lovely upsell and cross-sell) minus churn. This is the needle that you need to move in the growth stage.

Product marketing in mature companies

The maturity stage usually comes much later in a company’s journey. However, as you know, we’re currently in an economic downturn, and this is pushing companies into the maturity stage earlier.

In the maturity stage, we need to keep solidifying the brand, generating pipeline, selling, upselling, and cross-selling. But there's something more happening here; we also need to retain our customers. All being well, you have a huge customer base of amazing companies, so there’s a lot at stake. There’s a delicate balance to strike between upselling and cross-selling to your customers and working to retain them.

Gross revenue retention (GRR) is the metric you’re going to focus on as we enter the maturity stage. You can calculate GRR by measuring our monthly recurring revenue (excluding revenue from upsells and cross-sells) minus churn.

To move the needle on GRR at this later stage, you need a certain type of product marketer. It's no longer about being a content writer, a product expert, or a sales expert. The most vital skill at this stage is the ability to understand and interpret data.

Why? In the same way that you can use Freud’s frameworks to make sense of your dreams, the product marketing team can use data to pinpoint the company’s weaknesses and opportunities. Do you have a leaky bucket of retention? Do you have an opportunity in a certain region with a certain product for a certain segment? It’s product marketing’s role to find out.

Key takeaways

To summarize what we’ve covered, while companies’ needs may vary on the surface, the core of what they need is the same – they need to sell, upsell, cross-sell, and retain their customer base. The skill sets they need to make that happen will vary depending on the stage of the company.

As for the question about where product marketing managers should sit within the organization, my answer is that they can sit wherever they want, depending on your company’s needs at that time. When I was at HP, product marketing moved from product to marketing to sales, and then back to product. The function you report into depends on what your focus is at that moment.

Finally, what's most important are the business’s KPIs:

  • ARR during the early stages of the company,
  • NRR as the company grows,
  • and GRR once the company reaches maturity.

You can measure leads until the cows come home, but nobody will care. What the business cares about are those core KPIs. If you as a product marketing manager understand that – if you frame those KPIs and hang them on your office wall, if you cut through the noise and create an action plan that is going to drive all your stakeholders in the right direction – then I promise you that your product marketing team is going to be successful.

Even in an economic downturn like the one we’re facing today, product marketing has the power to be the strongest and most strategic partner for the business.

To wrap up, I want to leave you with a quote from Tony Robbins:

“If you talk about it, it’s a dream. If you envision it, it’s possible. If you schedule it, it’s real.”

That's it for today. Just remember: we are the ones driving the change, and if you schedule it, it's real.