Why PMMs are the right choice to be the brand evangelist

This article originates from Zack's presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in Chicago, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

My name is Zack Wenthe, and I’m the CDP Evangelist for Treasure Data. I work in the product marketing org, which is part of our marketing org. My job is to go out and share what the customer data platform (CDP) is and what we do.

More importantly, though, I'm a marketer and I talk to marketers. Today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the rise of the PMM evangelist and why this is the perfect role for your product marketing teams.

I’ll look specifically at:

• Why it’s time for product marketers to step out from behind the curtain
• The power of community evangelism
• Dedicated evangelism
• A day in the life of an evangelist
• What I’ve learned
• The secrets of storytelling
• Leading your customers down the ‘yellow brick road’

A little backstory…

Before I jump into it, let me tell you a story. Recently, my grandmother passed away (it’s not a sad story; she lived an amazing life). As a family, we got together and had an opportunity to talk about stories and things we remembered about her.

One of the stories that came to my mind was from when I was four years old. My parents were going to the hospital to have my brother, and I was not happy about it. I wanted to go with them, and I was throwing a huge fit.

My grandmother came over and bribed me to calm down with dinner and a movie. It was 1985, so it wasn't like we turned on Netflix – it was whatever was on TV that night – but I was just happy to watch a movie. What we watched was The Wizard of Oz.

As a four-and-a-half-year-old, I was enthralled. I spent the next year talking about this movie and everything that happened in it. Every year, they replayed it on TV, and I got to remember how much I loved this movie and how much I hated my brother (just kidding!).

And so, when I was preparing for this article, I thought it was only appropriate that I used The Wizard of Oz as an example.

Why it’s time for product marketers to step out from behind the curtain

When we think of evangelism, we tend to picture big scary heads talking – the heads of our executives and founders. This works because they're passionate, so evangelism comes to them naturally.

However, the reality is that there is often someone behind the curtain: the product marketing team. We're pulling the levers, creating narratives, doing the positioning, and sometimes we need to step out from behind the curtain and own the story.

Owning the story is essential, and today, I hope to convince you of its importance. When you do, you can help a whole loving band of characters.

You can provide your marketing team with a message that they had in their hearts all along. You can help your customer success team have more heart and empathy with customers. You can give your pre-sales team the courage to tell customers stories while getting away from features. You can even help sales have a brain!

... Just kidding. What I mean is that sales teams are always craving knowledge, and as a PMM you’re perfectly placed to give it to them.

Now, it’s important to note that this loving band of characters isn't just supporting players in this movie – they are the stars, but so is the wizard. The same applies to evangelism in your company. You and your teams have a starring role to play.

The power of community evangelism

We can break evangelism down into two types: community evangelism and dedicated evangelism. Community evangelism is where your entire organization is working together to share the same message, with each team sharing it in its own unique way.

If you're just getting started, community evangelism is an easy way to get going, so let's a little deeper into what the heck that means.

Community evangelism provides the ability to multiply a message. If you put out a press release today, how long will it live in the market where people are reading it? Maybe three or four days, or perhaps only a few hours, depending on how interesting you are.

Similarly, if you post something on your LinkedIn company page, how many people see it? It depends on the size of your page. Unfortunately, LinkedIn company pages have one of the worst reaches of all social platforms.

Marketing messages tend to be thrown out into a small echo chamber of employees who follow the company page, some industry people, and that’s about it.

Community evangelism allows companies to create a multiplying effect. For instance, if I send out a message – it could be about a launch or a case study, for instance – the sales team can pick it up and add their spin on it.

If you have 20 salespeople, that message is amplified 20 times. If the CS team does the same thing, the power of that message multiplies further.

However, many people make the mistake of just writing a boilerplate social post, and having everyone post the same thing.

To truly get an impact from your community evangelism, you need to teach everyone how to enhance their storytelling. Help them to add their own spins to the core message, and you'll be amazed at the impact it can have.

Let's a B2B feature launch as an example. This feature is important to our customers, but a press release is probably not going to get picked up, so instead, we tell a story about a pain point that a customer is experiencing. We’ll put that message out there and teach sales how to add their spin to it.

Now, salespeople love to talk and add their flair, so all of a sudden, this message is going to become folklore. It will get repeated in customer meetings and posted on social media. When you give salespeople permission to tell a story and show them how they will do it. That’s such a powerful tool for your company.

Unfortunately, most salespeople forget to add their spin to stories. That means when you're working on enhancing storytelling, you need to be the champion of the story. Give them some frameworks, ideas, and examples, and remind them to do it every once in a while.

At Treasure Data, we use a program called PostBeyond, which is a distributed social platform. It allows our marketing team to write messages that anyone in our organization can then post on Twitter or LinkedIn.

That in and of itself is a great way to get your social posts out there. However, we take it a step further by encouraging our team members to add their own flavor to the messages and turn them into stories.

We ask them to share the message with a specific customer and say, "I saw this and thought of you," or, "This may solve a bigger problem for you." This gives our company a real voice in the marketplace.

At the end of the day, people buy from people they like or from brands that feel good to them. The easiest way to feel good about something is by having a personal connection to it.

When your salespeople, CSMs, or marketing team members are out there sharing a story and explaining how a feature may solve a bigger problem, it creates that connection and resonates with your customers.

Dedicated evangelism

Community evangelism is a great starting point. But how you get real gains is by giving somebody, even halftime, the dedicated opportunity to get out and talk – and talk often. Dedicated evangelism is what I do; part of my job is going out and spreading our message through podcasts, for instance.

The funny part is when I go out and talk, I don't necessarily talk about customer data platforms. My job is to talk to marketers about things that they're struggling with – what's going on with TikTok? What's going on on LinkedIn? How do we deal with first-party data? How do you deal with Google not making its mind up about cookies?

All these things bouncing around in marketers' heads are what I talk about.

Whether it's on a podcast, on a webinar, at a trade show, or at industry events like this, these are opportunities to build awareness of your brand. That’s the opportunity that dedicated evangelism offers – the opportunity to build a brand both for your company and (more selfishly) for you personally.

This is vital because ultimately one of the biggest challenges we all face is awareness, especially in B2B, but even more in B2C, as budgets are getting tightened, ads are harder to pay for, everything gets more convoluted, and there's more noise in the marketplace.

The more opportunity you have to build a brand – and that doesn't necessarily mean the creative; it means the story behind it – the more opportunity you have to get into the hearts and minds of your customers and prospects.

All you need to do to kickstart your evangelism is start getting content out there and have a point of view about something. You could talk about your day job, for example.

As product marketers, we do a lot of things and we can share a lot of knowledge that is applicable to a lot of people. There are a lot of things we can teach, say, a pre-sales org about creating connections, messaging, and narratives.

Even if you forget everything else in this article, remember this one little thing: you don't only have to talk about your company. Your platforms, your message, and your voice are better when you're talking about things that you care about – things that matter to you and the audience that you're trying to attract.

If you use your company message sparingly and your point of view liberally, the outcome will be revenue.

I did a LinkedIn Live a few weeks ago and drove over half a million dollars in the pipeline. There were no plans to drive the pipeline through this event – I just happened to get lucky. We were talking about a topic that was interesting to one of the participants, who then saw one of my posts, which got shared up the chain, and they requested a demo.

I had positioned this LinkedIn Live as a mid-funnel accelerator. We were talking about how to implement a CDP when you have limited resources. It’s a very simple topic, but it just happened to address the very concern that had been keeping this now-customer from getting started with a CDP.

I never once talked about how Treasure Data worked. I never did any more than a quick blurb at the beginning to explain what a CDP was. There was no product demo. There was no pitch. It was all about sharing tips from what we've learned on our journey of implementing a CDP, and we walked away with revenue.

A day in the life of an evangelist

Now, whenever I tell people I’m an evangelist, they’re like, “Sounds cool. What does that mean?”

Well, I spend the majority of my time on content creation, writing blog posts, and internal presentations. I turn feature decks into stories and use case studies to illustrate problems and solutions, with customers as examples.

If you’re working on messaging or talking about your product, real-life examples are your best friend. That way, you’re not talking about the product – you’re talking about how somebody used it to drive an outcome, which is much more compelling.

I also spend a lot of time recording videos, doing podcasts, and hosting webinars and live events. Right now, I’m working on an "Ask Us Anything" video series, where I answer customer questions that may be too specific or niche for a webinar. Those videos are going to go up on LinkedIn and Youtube.

We know that people hate talking to salespeople. They tend to be 60 to 70% of the way through the buying cycle before they get to us, so the more I can answer their questions before they get to our sales team, the better positioned we are to be the vendor of choice when it comes to the sale.

To the outside observer, it looks like I spend a ton of time on LinkedIn, but the truth is I batch it. In the morning, I do a longer post and then spend about five to ten minutes engaging with and commenting on other people’s posts in our niche. At lunch, I do the same thing, and then in the afternoon, I tend to share a shorter post or a picture.

You don’t need to overthink this. Just by being out there and being consistent. I'm building rapport and I'm building a community of marketers. I’d encourage you to do the same.

What I’ve learned

So what have I learned through doing this job?

One thing I've learned is when you start creating content, everybody wants you to create content. This is the challenge. The content marketing team comes to me all the time like, “Hey, do you want to write this blog post? Do you want to do this video?” Product’s like, “Hey Zack, can you record a demo for me?”

If you’re anything like me, when you've got all these requests coming at you you’ll want to say yes. However, you've got to manage your time and you've got to plan. I plan what I'm going to do in each quarter. Trade shows, events, and launches are my immovable objects.

Then, I slot in things that are not in my control because there are partners involved – podcasts, webinars, and things that. Finally, I look at the time I have left and fit in those extra asks as best I can.

The other big thing I’ve learned is there's an amazing community of people out there doing this exact same thing, whether they have the title of evangelist or they're a salesperson or PMM who just kind of figured this out.

If you want to be an evangelist, go out there and find those other influencers. I don't even mean like the big fancy influencers; I just mean people who are sharing and influencing thought in your space.

Competitors or not, like and share their content and talk to them because what goes around comes around. If you share their content, they’ll share yours.

The secrets of storytelling

Before I wrap things up, I want to share a few storytelling secrets with you. Even if you don't do an evangelism program, but you just want to dial up your storytelling by a couple of levels, these tips are going to help you do that.

Make it human

First, you have to make stories human. B2B marketers are the worst for making our messaging sound like it was written by a bot. It tends to be bland and full of jargon, even though a dozen people were involved in writing it. Stop doing that and add a human element.

At the beginning of a recent customer advisory board event, I ran an icebreaker activity. As I was setting it up, I told the attendees that I am an introvert and, statistically speaking, there would probably be others in the room as well.

So if anyone got tired of talking and needed a break, they could grab me, and we could pretend to talk to each other while scrolling on our phones, and everyone would leave us alone.

It was just a little side note that I shared, but people kept referencing it throughout the event. That small human element made a big impact, which is why we should be including it in all our stories. That’s what’s going to move us away from corporate babble and make all of our stories, conversations, and messaging more relatable and engaging.

You must include triggers

When you're creating content, just putting words on a page won't cut it. You need to include triggers to make an impact. But what is a trigger, you ask? Well, it's something that evokes an emotion or a psychological response.

The most powerful trigger is fear. This is a primal emotion that's deep within all of us. It could be the fear of missing out or the fear of failure. If you attach that fear to your messaging, I guarantee you'll get a response.

In marketing, any response is a good response, even if it's negative. By triggering that fear response, you'll immediately grab people's attention and get them to engage with your content.

Think about it this way: have you ever driven home on autopilot and not paid attention to the journey? I know I have. But what happens when a deer suddenly runs across the road?

Your focus immediately comes back and you're engaged and in the moment. Now, your message doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that, but even basic elements of fear can connect your audience to your message.

The hero’s journey is broken

You’ve probably heard about the hero's journey countless times over your career, especially if you’re in B2B. We’re constantly being told it needs to be the backbone of our messaging.

The hero’s journey is also the basis of every sci-fi movie you’ve ever seen. Star Wars and all the rest of them use pretty much the same format: the reluctant hero goes on a journey, faces challenges, learns some things, and there’s a moment where they’re like, “Oh I can't be the hero,” and then somebody's like, “You gotta be the hero,” and then they step up, triumph, and go home victorious.

But here's the catch: you need a villain to have a hero. Without an enemy to defeat, the hero's journey falls flat, so when crafting your marketing message, you have to be bold and introduce a villain for your hero to defeat.

There’s a water brand called Liquid Death that does this brilliantly. They're all about eliminating single-use plastics, and they use storytelling to make it fun.

For example, they made a horror movie where plastic is the villain, and people who use it are murdered one by one in the woods. This adds a story to something as commoditized as water and makes it exciting.

Another important thing to note about the hero's journey is that your brand is not the hero – your customer is. The brand is to the customer what Yoda is to Luke Skywalker, guiding him on his journey.

Use the right voice

When you’re telling a story, using the right voice is important. I’m not just talking about active vs passive voice – I’m talking about character archetypes and how you position yourself.

You could be a narrator who just guides the audience through the story or you could be the sage who equips the audience with the information they need along the way. Whichever voice you choose, you have to make sure the storyteller has the credibility to back it up.

For example, your salespeople probably don’t have the credibility to present themselves as the sage if they’re selling to executives, because they haven’t been on that executive journey.

It might make more sense for them to take on the role of narrator and introduce a more credible character to be the sage in the form of a reference or case study.

Emotion over logic

The most important rule of storytelling is emotion over logic. We buy things because we engage with them emotionally and then rationalize logically.

This is especially true in B2B marketing where buyers are typically disengaged until something catches their attention – it’s not their money so they don’t care, right? Not until you show them something that’s interesting to them personally.

It's important to lead with emotional appeal, for instance by showing how a product can make a job easier so they won’t have to keep working until after six o’clock every night to get it done.

That’s way more enticing than just saying, "We're the fastest" or, "we're the best." That’s not to say you should dismiss logic completely, but it shouldn’t be the primary focus of your message.

Lead your customers down the yellow brick road

With that, I’ll leave you with one last message: your job is to create a message good enough to lead your customers down the yellow brick road.

While everyone may have different reasons for embarking on this journey, you need to anchor your messaging around a common theme that resonates with your audience and lures them to the same destination. Follow this approach, and you'll be on your yellow brick road to evangelist success.