Let's face it - getting users to sign up for your product takes real work. Achieving product success and generating enough revenue lies in building a product that’s worth your customer’s time. The more product value, the deeper the engagement. 

So, making efforts towards boosting your product adoption rate is the key to achieving customer loyalty and expanding your base of new users. 

This post explores the top product adoption rate metrics to help you analyze and improve your user experience. Let's begin! 

What is product adoption? 

Product adoption is the process by which consumers learn about your product and integrate it into their operations or daily activities to achieve set goals. 

When a user tries out a product, they take action towards moving from beginners to enthusiasts. Product adoption is the stage where users have learned enough about your product to use it well for handling their specific problems. 

There are different ways brands try to convince visitors to adopt their product. 

For example, Basecamp uses a ‘before-and-after’ page to make visitors use their project management platform at the evaluation stage. The page highlights what customers suffered before trying Basecamp, followed by testimonials.

Why is it important to track product adoption metrics?

Tracking product adoption metrics provides insights into how users interact with your product. The metrics show the aspects that resonated well with the users and the ones that require improvement.

Product adoption metrics also offer valuable insights that inform decision-making. They guide your product roadmap, help optimize user personas, and enhance user experience and overall product satisfaction.

Moreover, the metrics also help identify the features users struggle with so you can guide users for better feature adoption. 

12 essential product adoption metrics to track in 2024

1. Activation rate

Activation rate is a product adoption metric that measures the ratio of users who complete a specific set of actions or reach a predefined engagement level within a product. These actions or milestones are the initial steps that convert them into active users of the product. 

A high activation rate indicates smooth and successful user onboarding, whereas a low activation rate suggests the need for improvement to drive adoption. 

How to calculate the activation rate?

Once you've established specific benchmarks, take into account the number of individuals who fulfilled those benchmarks and divide it by the total number of users who initiated a trial.

Formula:

2. Product adoption rate

Product adoption rate refers to the percentage of users who integrated your product over time into their daily lives or business workflows.

Monitoring this metric shows if you are attracting the right target audience and if your onboarding process guides users to derive maximum value from your product. Additionally, the product adoption rate also helps evaluate product launch success, marketing campaigns, and user engagement efforts.

A high adoption rate entails fast acceptance and use of your product by users, whereas a low rate indicates challenges in attracting and retaining the right audience. In SaaS, 17% is the median product activation rate, whereas a few top-performing SaaS companies reached an activation rate of 65%.

How to calculate the product adoption rate?

Calculating the product adoption rate involves comparing the number of new active users adopting the product to the total user base within a specified timeframe.

Formula:

3. Product stickiness

Product stickiness measures your product’s capability to engage and retain users over a period. A sticky product indicates that customers return to your product over time, strengthening the brand-customer relationship.

In the SaaS industry, the average product stickiness ranges between 13 to 20%. You can consider this as your benchmark when measuring this product adoption metric.

How to calculate product stickiness?  

You can calculate product stickiness by calculating the Daily Active Users (DAU)/Monthly Active Users (MAU) ratio.

Formula:

4. Time to value (TTV)

TTV refers to the timeframe users take to derive maximum value from the product after their initial interaction or onboarding. Simply put, this metric measures the timeline between signup and activation, that is, when users become paying customers.

Tracking TTV helps you identify bugs in the onboarding process. The shorter the TTV, the higher the user satisfaction and overall product adoption.

How to calculate TTV?

Once you have the product activation milestone, measure the time taken by the user to reach the activation stage from their first interaction.

Formula:

5. Engagement score

Engagement score gives insights into whether or not your product worked for the users. It measures the interaction level between your product and the user.

A high engagement score suggests that a user is getting great benefits or their desired outcome from your product, which increases their product usage. On the other hand, a low engagement score hints at disappointed users at risk of churning.

How to calculate engagement score?

Set engagement events based on your product, user journey, personas, and other milestones users achieve on their way to product adoption. These events could be:

• Key product features used
• Frequency of usage
• Subscription renewal or upgrade, and more

Assign values within 1-10 to each engagement event (w), considering their importance, and determine the number of times the event occurred (n).

Formula:

6. Feature adoption rate

This metric measures the percentage of users engaging with specific product features and using them to accomplish their goals. Tracking the feature adoption rate helps you identify the most popular features and friction areas where users need support adopting the feature.

Using this metric, you can track how users like your product’s core features, how they adapt to the new features, and their response to the advanced features.

How to calculate the feature adoption rate?

Calculating feature adoption rate is similar to product adoption, but the formula applies to each product feature.

Formula:

7. Active users

The number of users who use your product or application regularly is called active users. A high number of active users indicate that your customers find value in your product.

Measure this product adoption metric on a daily or monthly basis. However, you need to set a benchmark to compare the number of active users depending on your product.

For example, the frequency of usage for a data analytics tool, invoicing software, and a designing tool will vary. While you must measure the Monthly Active Users (MAUs) for an invoicing tool, tracking Daily Active Users (DAUs) for the other two will help you understand how well your users adapted to the product.

How to calculate active users?

Formula:

You can measure the DAU/MAU for calculating product stickiness as well.

8. Average session duration

Average session duration measures the user’s time and attention span on your product. An extended average session duration isn't always a good thing because this metric is specific to the kind of product you're providing to the users.

For example, if the average session duration for the product research feature in Jungle Scout or Helium 10 is 10 minutes, it could indicate that users may be struggling to find or interpret the data they need efficiently, suggesting an opportunity for the platform to improve its user interface or data presentation. 

On the other hand, a 10-minute average session duration for the competitor analysis tool implies that users are spending a significant amount of time engaging with the feature, which is a good sign that it is providing valuable insights and a satisfactory user experience.

How to calculate the average session duration?

Once you set an ideal average session duration for your product, use the following formula for calculation.

Formula:

9. Product usage frequency

Product usage frequency is the number of times a user engages with your product to complete a task within a given timeframe. This product adoption metric measures the number of sessions, interactions, logins, or transactions of the user with the product.

Monitoring the product usage frequency helps you determine the highly engaged users who use your product more than the rest. Make a list of these customers and focus on improving their adoption rate and lifetime value to convert them into your brand advocates.

How to calculate product usage frequency?

Measuring product usage frequency involves determining the number of users who use your product within a specific period.

Formula:

10. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

The CSAT score helps you gauge the level of customer satisfaction with your product. It evaluates how your customers feel about your product and assists you in making the user experience better.

You can track this metric using CSAT surveys and implement customer feedback to improve your product experience. Use survey questions with a Likert scale of 1-5 to help you quantify your user feedback.

How do you calculate the CSAT score?

Gather the customer responses from your survey and use this formula to calculate the CSAT score.

Formula:

11. Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

CLTV is a product adoption metric that measures the entire revenue your business earns from a particular customer throughout their relationship with you. This metric considers not just the revenue from initial purchases but also repeat purchases, upgrades, upsells, referrals, and cross-sells over a customer’s lifetime.

The higher the CLTV, the better for your business. Prioritizing the customer base that best suits your offering and financial constraints helps you.

How to calculate CLTV?

The formula to measure CLTV generally depends on your product offering. However, it is the total purchases a customer makes minus your cost to acquire the customer.

Formula:

 12. Customer retention rate

The rate of customer retention indicates how successfully you can hold onto customers and lengthen their product lifetime. Increased customer loyalty and increased revenue from referrals are two benefits of having a high customer retention rate.

Tracking this product adoption metric also helps you measure customer satisfaction and make efforts to enhance it further.

How to calculate the customer retention rate?

You can measure the customer retention rate by comparing the number of customers you have at the end of a given timeframe to the number of customers you had at the start of the period.

Formula:

Wrapping up

Data is the only way to know if your customers are delighted with your product. Tracking product adoption metrics helps you measure how well users interact with your product, the product features that work best for them, and the ones that could be better.

All in all, product adoption metrics help you make informed strategic decisions toward improving product adoption. So, if you’re striving to make your product the best fit for your customers, prioritize tracking these top product adoption metrics.

Incorporating personalization methods into your product marketing strategy doesn’t have to be extremely complicated and tech-heavy. There are plenty of approaches you can take that won’t drain your budget or take over your workload.

Using this approach can have a significant impact on reducing customer churn and increasing retention rates, as well as product sales.

We’ll cover a variety of important points in this article, including:

• Why is it important?
• Types of personalization tactics
• How to use them effectively in product marketing strategy
• Common mistakes when using these techniques
• A personalization checklist

Why is personalization important?

There’s no denying that product marketing is an increasingly competitive industry. Left and right businesses are fighting to be noticed by their customers and are continuing to find different ways to capture their attention.

According to a recent study, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience. This means that by personalizing the way you market your product to your clients, the UX improves, and sales along with it.

There are a lot of different reasons why going above and beyond and implementing these tactics into your product marketing strategy will benefit both your business and your target audience.

Your audience will feel appreciated

Personalization within product marketing is a great method to ensure your user feels valued when using your product.

Increases the chance of renewals

If your customer feels like your business genuinely cares about them and their presence whilst using your product, they’re more likely to continue using it, reducing churn rate and increasing the probability they’ll buy additional features.

Your product will stand out from the crowd

How many times have you scrolled through your emails and stopped when you notice your name, or something customized towards your interests, in the subject line?

Amongst a sea of competing products, personalizing your material is a more effective way of ensuring you capture the attention of your audience. In fact, a study showed that lack of content relevancy generates 83% lower response rates in the average marketing campaign.

Builds a connection with your customers

Personalizing your material looks less robotic and injects a much-needed human element to your content.

Arik Abel, Head of Product Marketing at Pay-TV, highlighted how product marketers can enhance user experience with the incorporation of a human-centric design.

Crush CX with Human-Centered Design

In this article, Arik Abel shares seven human-centered design techniques that are proven to propel your customer experience (CX) to whole new heights.

Product Marketing AllianceArik Abel

A greater understanding of your customer base

The data you get from personalized campaigns can feed back into your customer and buyer personas.

Look at how they’re engaging with your content by identifying aspects like email click-through rates, and whether it's driving conversions and renewals. Regularly revisiting and refining your personas is an integral part of any product marketing strategy.

Improves product sales

According to InstaPage, 79% of organizations that exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy. This means that the majority of your sales are directly impacted either positively or negatively depending on how well you do it.

Examples of personalization tactics

There are many different techniques that you can use to make your user experience more meaningful.

We’ve put together a list of a few of the most important ones that everyone should use when marketing their products.

First impressions are everything

Making first-time consumers feel welcome whilst using your product is critical in determining if they’ll continue using it. Improve the customer onboarding experience by researching your target personas and any specific needs they may have when using your product.

Help them navigate your product properly, try to answer any questions they may have, show them how easy it is to use and they’ll be more likely to return.

Slack, the business messaging service, provides a super helpful onboarding experience that is the best example for creating a good first impression.

They created a little robot ‘guide’ called Slackbot that gives you a tutorial when you first join Slack on how to get started on the app. It shows you how to navigate the site and gives little tips on which channels to join and prompts you to give introductions to other members to help you avoid overwhelming yourself.

This simple service that they provide helps you get the most out of the experience, whilst making you as comfortable as you can be.

What is also very important is that they’ve ensured your customer experience with their product remains positive because you can message Slackbot directly anytime afterward and it will answer questions you may still have about the app.

(Join the Product Marketing Alliance Slack community for more juicy hints and tips👇 )

Nurture existing customers

There are a lot of ways you can nurture your existing customers to show your appreciation.

Get ahead of the game by researching the customer rather than waiting for the customer to provide this information for themselves. They’ll appreciate the attention to detail and extra effort you’re putting in to improve the UX.

A survey discovered that 81% of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them and when not to. So, identify what they like about your product, where they’d like to be contacted, what times they’re typically available online, etc to decrease your churn rates.

Develop a relationship with your customers by regularly analyzing customer feedback (reviews, polls, how often they’re on your site, bounce rate, what they click on most, etc) and refining your product so they continue to gain the maximum benefits.

It’s important to maintain consistent correspondence with your customers. Check in with your customers, whether that is through emails, weekly newsletters, customer calls, or invites to business events to establish a proper relationship with them. This gives you the chance of ensuring brand loyalty- customers are less likely to stop using a product if they feel a part of the business.

Properly track your data

Make sure you’re keeping track of what resonates so that you can keep the content you produce relevant.

As a B2C brand, Amazon is a great example of personalization within its product. Their website collects your data within their website, tracks which link you follow, your location, things you have recently bought, and plenty more to make it as personal as possible.

Then, on their homepage, they include these bits of information so it’s entirely tailored to your requirements. The experience with their product is made simple. You as the customer don’t have to remember the little things, Amazon shows that they care enough about your use of their product to do it for you.

You can also use data tracking of your customer to develop a score of whether they’re most likely to remain a consumer of your product (lead score) or leave (churn score). Using these scores, you can determine how to tailor your content to meet the requirements of that specific customer. This gives you the chance to personalize your content to what they prefer to build on/save the relationship.

Check out different tools with built-in lead-scoring software to improve your customer experience. Here are a few:

• Pipeliner
• PLATFORM.ly
• HubSpot Marketing Hub

Take a look at some more detailed articles that will help you with different strategies and tips on how to reduce customer churn and retain more customers.

How to use these personalization techniques

Once you’ve identified the kind of techniques that you feel would benefit both your product and your user in the best way, it’s time to put them into practice and apply them to your product marketing strategy. We have compiled a few ways you can do this:

Personalize your mail lists

To try and get a better understanding of how some B2B companies use their own personalization techniques to improve their customer experience, I signed up for some products using my PMA email address.

Here is one response that I think is a perfect example:

In expressing an interest in their services, I entered their buyer funnel as a warm lead. Therefore, instead of sending me a generic email with the same link they use for everyone else, they took the time to actively show their interest and appreciation for my inquiry, ensuring I felt welcome.

Of course, this level of personalization perhaps would only work with smaller businesses. Typing out an entire customized email isn’t feasible if you have hundreds of clients. But, you can still use other email tools to automatically customize your mail list that make it look personalized. For example:

• You can use customer segmentation and split your email list into specific categories, such as gender, age, interests, while you can also use geographic segmentation to send correspondence that’s specific to customers in a variety of locations. This gives you the opportunity to personalize your emails even further based on these categories and direct certain emails to each category to ensure a more customized experience for each user.
  
• Save the settings on your mail list to address each client by their first name. An audience is more likely to engage with an email if they feel the content is specifically for them, and what better way to show that than putting their name at the start?
  
• Create a subscription to weekly emails that you can then send to the masses. This gives your customer the opportunity to sign up to the email instead of automatically being bombarded with unwanted attention. This creates a more positive and personalized experience for them and will build a happier relationship between your business and your client.

Rebecca Lawson, Freelance Content Creator and frequent Writer for PMA, has created a handy list of recommended customer engagement tools for product marketers which will help you develop your customer experience and engagement.

Social media interactions

Social media interactions can really help to build and develop relationships with a customer. This is because it’s an effective way of reminding the audience that there is a human behind the brand.

The audience then begins to develop more of an emotional and loyal connection with your business, making it more likely they’ll continue to use your product.

It’s also a helpful way of gathering information, for example, by asking for comments, sharing experiences or photos, and using polls. Plus, leveraging user-generated content (UGC) is powerful - 42% more effective than your own branded content.

Advertising

Use the data you’ve gathered on your customers to refine the advertising you send them. For example, there's no use sending them an ad to sign up for your product if they’re already an existing member.

Sending irrelevant content will only cause frustration amongst your clientele and damage the reputation of your brand. Sending ads for products they don’t need will give the impression you haven’t listened to them and don’t care about their customer experience.

Tamara Grominksy, Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce, agrees with this sentiment. In her presentation on Turbocharging your growth in segmentation she explained,

“Relevancy isn't just great for your customers, it's great for your bottom line as well and we see this across the entire customer funnel. From an acquisition perspective, we saw that PPC here had a 24% lift when they implemented segmented Google ads. At Unbounce, when we went from one generic buying flow to three-segmented flows, we saw a 15% increase in the number of new trial starts that came through the door.”

It’s important that your customer feels like they’re in the right place with your product, otherwise, you’ll send them straight to a competitor, who has more personalized advertising and product experience.

Common mistakes when using personalization techniques

It can be quite easy to make mistakes when using these methods within your product strategy. So, we’ve put together a few of the most common ones that are easily avoidable.

Getting too personal/overdoing it

There is a fine between personalizing your material and overdoing it. It’s important to keep it professional, considering you’re still a business, and overstepping with your customers can be off-putting and have a negative impact. Keep in mind you're trying to gather the information that'll improve their professional relationship with your product, rather than things like employees’ home lives.

Conduct competitive intelligence and research your competitors to establish how other companies are personalizing their products, and how effective it is for them to determine how you can implement your own strategies effectively.

Using inaccurate data

Getting information wrong will give the customer the impression that you don’t care enough to get it right. You need to continue refining and updating your research to ensure your customer data is as accurate as possible.

Using ‘noreply' emails

Sometimes using ‘noreply’ emails can be off-putting because it feels very robotic, impersonal and like your business doesn’t want correspondence with your customer.

It’s also a lot harder for your customer to find how to contact your business if they can’t reply directly to your email and creates a negative user experience. Avoid creating a one-sided relationship and make it easier for your customers to contact you.

A personalization checklist

We've put together a simple personalization framework that'll help you introduce these tactics into your product marketing strategy:

Research your target audience and answer the following:

• Who is my target audience?
• Who uses my product? Is this my target audience?
• Does my audience have a successful experience with my product?
• What could be better with my product?

Define your and their goals

• What do I want to get from this product marketing strategy?
• What does my audience want from this product?
• How can we align these so we both get maximum benefit?

Identify and gather data

• What tactics work best for other companies?
• Which ones will work best for my company?
• Which will work best for my target audience?

Identify opportunities

• Where can I include these techniques in my product?
• Where else can I do this: email, social media, newsletters, etc.

Create content

• Incorporate your chosen tactics into your messaging and other product marketing strategies.

Test, measure, and refine

• Look at internal and external feedback you receive from customers.
• See where you can improve your personalization within your product further.
• Implement your changes to refine and improve your product.

Want to learn more?

Product marketing is and always will be a customer-centric role. A core part of your job is to value the voice of the customer and advocate for their wants, needs, and pain points. It’s your responsibility to make them feel heard. Therefore, customer marketing is an integral part of what you need to do to ensure that you’re staying true to this.

The Customer Marketing Certified: Masters course has been designed to give you invaluable, practical insights into streamlining your customer marketing approach so that you can ensure that:

• Your customers are happy,
• Your products are the best they truly can be,
• Your brand reputation is consistently positive, and
• That you bring in increased revenue for your organization.

So what are you waiting for?

This article is based on Emma Stratton’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in San Francisco. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

One of the best things about product marketing is how many of us stumbled into it by chance. PMMs come from all walks of life – myself included. Writing messaging for B2B tech? Never crossed my mind!

About 13 years ago, I was living in the UK writing creative copy that helped humanize packaged goods so people would connect and buy. It was a blast getting to work on iconic British brands like the leading toilet paper, a cheeky sausage newcomer, and even the country's top-selling sex toy – yup, I wrote copy for the Rampant Rabbit!

I was loving that consumer branding life until I had a baby and we decided to move stateside. With a little one at home, I needed a short commute, so I figured “Why not give this B2B marketing gig a try? The office is just a short drive away and, anyway,  marketing's marketing – how different could it be?” Oh, how wrong I was...

I went from waxing poetic about vibrators to drowning in enterprise data management jargon. On day one, I'm staring at this 15-page messaging framework full of inscrutable tech gibberish, thinking “What have I done? I'm in over my head here – this was a huge mistake. These B2B buyers must be robots to understand this stuff!”

That launched me into full-blown imposter syndrome. That is, until the CMO pulled me aside and said, “Emma, our messaging is a disaster. We're different, but can't explain how. Can you help us?” That's when the lightbulb went off – I could humanize their messaging!

The power of human messaging

So why does having a human connection in your messaging even matter for tech? I mean, we're talking software and hardware, not touchy-feely consumer products, right? 

Well, here's why it matters: your product and your customers exist in totally different dimensions. You might know every single product detail and be able to reel off a side-by-side comparison of your product’s features versus your competitors’, but meanwhile your prospect is just going about their life, not thinking about your product at all.

It's messaging's job to bridge that massive divide between technology and the human being. 

This is exactly why so many tech companies struggle with messaging today – they're hyper-focused on articulating their differentiation, but that's not enough to cross the huge chasm to the human on the other side, so the message just falls into the void.

Human messaging goes beyond just product details. It's about truly connecting with the person you're trying to reach. It’s about making them feel seen and understood, so when they read it, they think, "Yeah, they're speaking to me." If you can nail that, my friend, you’ll have an insane advantage.

I know this because, over the years, I've worked closely with over 100 high-growth B2B tech companies like Outreach, Loom, and Miro. I've seen firsthand the immense impact human messaging can have on growth. 

So, I decided to teach product marketers how to do this and scale the impact. I created a curriculum and have taught over 600 PMs to write more human messaging. 

The good news? You don't need to be a magically talented writer to make this work. There are simple techniques you can use to humanize your messaging in ways that will tremendously benefit your marketing. I'm excited to share three of my favorite techniques today.

The best part is these techniques work for any type of messaging - whether you're writing about your company, a feature, a use case, a solution, you name it. These are the techniques we’ll cover

1. Translation
2. Keeping it real
3. Loosening the tie

Let’s dive in.

Technique #1: Translate it

The first technique is about translating your product so people understand what it can do for them. 

A while back, I was consulting with the leadership team at a really cool developer platform. The head of product kept talking about “carrot-based workflows.” I thought maybe that was some developer lingo I don't get – but also, when has a vegetable ever had such a starring role in messaging?

So I asked, “Hey, what are these carrot-based workflows you keep referencing?” He smiled and said, “Oh, that's just what we call our special style of automation. We came up with it – isn't it great?” I had my doubts.

This is something I come across a lot – teams trying to explain what makes their technology so special. The natural reflex is to dive into explaining the intricate details, but then we risk confusing people by bombarding them with abstract language and obscure analogies. This is one of the biggest hurdles we face when writing about tech products.

Let me give you an example. Picture the phrase “high-performance” in your mind. What do you see?

An athlete?

A race car?

An energy drink?

Chances are that everybody pictures something different. That's the problem with abstract language – it’s open to misinterpretation. 

The opposite of abstract is concrete – using specific language. For instance, if I say “V8 engine,” we're all likely picturing a big powerful engine on a race car. Concrete language doesn't leave much room for interpretation, so people can picture what you're talking about. 

You want to apply this same idea to your messaging. It’s about translating abstract ideas into more concrete terms.

How to translate abstract ideas into concrete messages

Let me show a real-world example from a former client. They were describing how their portal “streamlined communications” – a very common but vague phrase you may have used yourself. It's not terrible, but it’s also not clear what it actually means. Will there be more communication or less?  Is all your communication consolidated into one platform? Who knows? 

If we get concrete and specific about what “streamlining communications” entails, it becomes: “Get the constant calls, emails, and texts under control.” That's much more tangible.

So, how can you start translating abstract ideas into concrete language? The key is to see the benefits of your product or features through your customers’ eyes. 

For example, let's say we have a platform for finance pros that offers “real-time visibility” – I kind of know what that means, but I don't really care. So, let’s get concrete: “Get an instant view across all your financials.” Now I can picture someone viewing up-to-date graphs and numbers on a screen. Suddenly, I understand why that benefit matters.

Here are three steps to put this technique into practice:

1. Think about what your customers' lives look like before your product – what challenges are they facing and how do they think about them? 
2. Brainstorm concrete examples of what life looks like after using your product. 
3. Contrast the “before” and “after” in your messaging.

In this episode of Product Marketing Maestros, guest Mark Assini, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Jobber, shares insights from his early PMM role in a video game studio, and how he navigated his first big project: analyzing pricing for in-app purchases. 

Key takeaways

• Balancing customer impact and business outcomes: Mark emphasizes the need for product marketers to carefully balance the impact on customers with business goals. In the case study they discuss, the initial focus on optimizing pricing for business outcomes led to a frosty reception from players. This highlights the importance of considering the customer experience alongside quantitative analysis.
  
• Quantitative analysis for informed decision-making: The episode underscores the significance of thorough quantitative analysis, especially when dealing with pricing in digital goods. Mark's deep dive into customer behavior, value perception, and willingness to pay revealed crucial insights that informed strategic decisions. Dumpster diving into the numbers provided actionable insights for optimizing pricing structures.
  
• Long-term gain from short-term pain: The case study Mark discusses illustrates that despite the initial challenges and negative player feedback, the pricing adjustments resulted in long-term gains. By strategically rebalancing value across different price points, the studio achieved improved revenue predictability and a shift in player purchasing behavior. This takeaway encourages product marketers to consider the long-term impact and benefits of strategic decisions, even if they encounter short-term challenges.

About Mark Assini

Mark Assini is a Senior Product Marketing Manager with over 9 years of combined experience in product marketing, marketing, and sales. 

He has helped bring technology (both products and services) to market, be the voice of the customer, and then some (as Mark puts it, PMMs wear many hats after all). 

From establishing buyer personas, creating go-to-market plans, and to positioning and messaging, Mark has worked directly with product, sales, customer experience and, of course, marketing, to drive demand, adoption, usage, and retention. 

Get involved

Eager to dive deeper into product marketing mastery? Our thriving Slack community is the ultimate hub for leveling up your product marketing prowess. With over 10,000 members, it's the largest crew of product marketing aficionados around.

From positioning and pitching to pricing and personas, we tackle every facet of strategic marketing. Share your wins, workshop ideas, and tap the collective wisdom of our community. The conversations flow 24/7, along with a steady stream of templates, playbooks, and lively banter. Consider it your portable conference, minus the price tag.

Stay tuned for more episodes of Product Marketing Maestros: Tales From the Front Lines.

I never thought getting into this role would be easy, but I couldn't have imagined it would be this hard!

Stepping into a management role for the first time can be daunting. But with the right preparation and perspective, you can thrive in your first year as a new leader. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Nayax who recently took on managing a team, I learned a lot during my initial foray into leadership. 

In this article, I'm sharing the five insights I wish I had known before starting my first year of managing others. My goal is to provide you with helpful tips and tools as you embark on your own journey in a new leadership role. 

With the lessons I gained from my experience, you can move forward with confidence and master this transition. 

1. Don’t wait for the stars to align - ask for the role you want
2. You’re not a colleague anymore - managing your teammates 
3. Making the hardest call as a manager - changing the team
4. People will always talk - managers are in the spotlight
5. Motivate, celebrate success, and look forward - establishing your team within the organization

Don't wait for the stars to align - Ask for the role you want

It might sound basic, but I've learned the hard way that if I don't ask, no one is going to offer. And yes, there may not be an open position at the moment, and you may not see it happening anytime soon, but your manager has to know that this is what you want. They have a different view of the organization and what's ahead, as well as an impression of your abilities. 

When I told my manager I wanted to advance into a managerial position she responded with the following:

1. Good to know. I can see you as a TL (team leader) in the future.
2. There will be a possible position probably in the next 6-12 months.
3. For you to be a TL in this organization, you need to work on A, B, and C.

This gave me a clear understanding of how long it would take and what I needed to do to get there.  As we moved forward, some things were easier to achieve, and some more challenging, and a TL position opened about 6 months after this conversation.

In my case, there was a reorg within our product marketing team which meant that it wasn’t the smoothest transition. I believe this may be the case for some other first-time managers, so hopefully, this can help. 

You’re not a colleague anymore - Managing your teammates

It’s official - I’m a manager! Since it was an internal promotion, and we're a small team, that meant that I was going to manage my colleagues. 

To measure our success, I had set in place 30-60-90 goals for myself and the team. Looking at skills and achievements. And, these were my key takeaways (AKA first lessons as a manager):

Your job is to lead 

Your team will be affected by your attitude. My #1 lesson was to learn how to motivate my team and part of it was to showcase my motivation, to frame tasks in their bigger picture and present their impact, and to make sure we’re enjoying the journey. 

Finding everyone’s preferred way of working 

Everyone works differently - some people will prefer to work alone, some in teams. Some like to brainstorm, some have their own visions. Here the DISC assessment helped me and provided me with tools to better work with my team.

Consult your HRBP and see which tools they can provide you with! We had a managers workshop where I learned about the DISC assessment and got a lot of other practical tools. 

Measure outcomes, not outputs 

Measuring success is a challenging KPI, especially for PMMs. It took us almost two years as a department and a year for my team to find the relevant KPIs to measure impact (i.e. outcomes) beyond the number of items we’ve created (i.e. outputs.). This helps to motivate the team to look at the results their work garnered, as well as show the team’s impact within the organization. 

While this is nice in theory, the practical challenge was to shift from conversing with my teammates, blowing off steam, and sharing my frustrations to motivating, leading, and forging the way. 

Since I’m still human, I’ve found other managers in the organization, at my level, for the “I’m only human” parts. Make sure you have your forum, otherwise it could get lonely. 

Marketing inside out: Put your team first

Think marketing is all about your customers? According to Tim Parkin, marketing advisor to a portfolio of multimillion-dollar brands, you’re thinking about it all wrong. Instead, you need to be looking inwards and focusing on marketing internally to get everyone engaged, motivated, and on brand.

Product Marketing AllianceWill Whitham

Making the hardest call as a manager - Changing the team

In my first year as a manager, I’ve rebuilt the team. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve made. Replacing employees comes at a high cost - you lose knowledge, relationships that have been established, and familiarity, and, of course, it also hurts morale. 

After a challenging year of trying to position the team while also firing, hiring, training, and working all along I can say that it’s definitely worth it. When you have the right people by your side you can accomplish more than you’ve ever imagined, or, at least that’s how I feel. 

Having a strong team means becoming a stronger leader. The more you can count on each other, the more room there is to grow. When I started interviewing, my manager gave me the best advice “Don’t be afraid to hire strong people. People you can learn from, and people that will challenge you are the kind of people you want on your team.” 

To be honest, this was the hardest yet most rewarding part of my job thus far. Highest cost and the greatest reward.   

How to effectively disagree with superiors at work

Disagreeing with your superior isn’t about challenging authority by saying, “You’re wrong and I’m right.” It’s about contributing positively to the decision-making process and overall success of the organization.

Product Marketing AllianceMelissa Garcia

People will always talk - Managers are in the spotlight 

Managing people means that everyone will have an opinion of you. This was yet another serious shift for me, someone who used to shy away from the spotlight. 

For better or worse, people will talk about who you hired, how your team presented, and even if you look tired, giddy, calm, or happier than usual. Of course, your team will talk about you, and not to you, as well. 

The takeaway here is what I would tell any human being - be open to feedback, and don’t take it personally. Some comments will just be comments without merit, and some will be substantial and things to look at and pay attention to. It is what it is. 

Be approachable, and keep an open line of communication. When you get feedback, make sure you’re not automatically defensive, even if you disagree with it. 

At this point, I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, and I’m sure I’ve hurt others. All I can do is listen, apologize, learn, and go from there. 

Motivate, celebrate success, and look forward - Establishing your team within the organization

So, you have built a team. What’s next? It’s time for the fun part - positioning the team within the organization. 

I can’t say I have this part figured out yet, but here’s what I’ve been working on: 

1. Talk about progress - whether it’s work or professional goals, reflect to them what they’ve achieved. 
2. Be vocal about their successes - talk them up to managers and other stakeholders. Make sure relevant stakeholders know their impact. 
3. Relate to their career aspirations - check in and see if their day-to-day aligns with their career goals, and if not, align to create a path for them. 
4. Make sure they’re in the room where it happens - if their impact is seen and known across the organization, this will happen organically. If not, make sure people in the organization understand the role of a PMM and why they should be there “even before we have a product.” 
5. Keep it fun - it may be a simple offsite, holding your 1:1 at a coffee shop, or an actual OOO activity. Don’t let budgets deter you. There’s always an opportunity at a low to no cost to change the atmosphere and do something different. 

This is just the start for me on my managerial path, and although it sometimes feels like I’m making more mistakes than right decisions, I’ve already learned so much. 

I hope this helps others who are just starting or considering a managerial role. And I can’t wait to see what year two as a manager has in store. 

Why we need more women at the top of product marketing

Businesses need a blend of male and female leadership if they’re to thrive. That’s why we need more women to ascend to the top in marketing.

Product Marketing AllianceMelissa Garcia

Ready to become the best leader you can be?

Becoming an amazing product marketing leader doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by habit. 

The importance of leadership simply cannot be disputed. Product Marketing Certified: Leadership has been built alongside the world’s best-known brands with one goal in mind: to deliver leadership training that’ll transform you into the best leader you can be.

This course will help you: 

🔥 Define what it takes to be a great PMM leader 

🧱 Build and scale your own team

👉 Successfully manage an existing team

📊 Clarify how you should leverage data

🗣 Become the voice of the customer 

🙌 Increase your influence and standing within your organization

🎉 Outline how cross-functional teams should work together 

🔋 Supercharge and refine your strategic thinking 

Join pioneering product marketing leaders from elite organizations like LinkedIn, Hotjar and Shopify and transform yourself into the best leader you can be. 

🗓️ Date: Wednesday March 27th

⏰ Time: 9am PDT | 12pm EDT / 5pm GMT

🧑‍🏫 Duration: 1 hour

Product Marketing can be an occupational hazard. We are capable of working wonders in positioning and selling for others, but often fall short when it comes to working on ourselves. In this session, PMA Ambassador & long-time advocate, Amit Alagh, will uncover the tools and best practices you can leverage to identify your key strengths. Together we'll be exploring these insights to elevate yourself personally and professionally, to find your dream role, and/or enhance your team’s performance.

This article is based on Richard Shotton’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in London. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

Hey there, I’m Richard Shotton and I've been immersing myself in the exciting field of behavioral science for the last 15 to 20 years. I've even written two books on the topic: The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice.

Today, I’m going to talk about the power of behavioral science and how you can apply it to your pricing strategies.

Let’s get into it.

What is behavioral science?

If you're not familiar with this phrase, don’t worry – it's nothing too complicated. It's essentially what we used to call social psychology – the study of how people actually behave, rather than how they claim to behave. 

If you're new to behavioral science, the best summation probably comes from Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychologist, who describes people as “cognitive misers.” 

Her colleague Daniel Kahneman puts it a bit more gently: 

“Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it, but they'd rather not.“

Neither psychologist is trying to be rude; they're well aware that people have phenomenal rational and logical capabilities. However, for most of human history, energy has been a scarce resource – and thinking requires a lot of energy.

So, when we make decisions, whether personal, consumer, or professional, we usually don't think things through in a deliberate, considered way. Instead, because we're trying to conserve mental effort, we often make fast, reflexive decisions. Psychologists, rather pompously, call these mental shortcuts “heuristics”; you might prefer to think of them as rules of thumb.

As a product marketer, it’s your job to persuade people to change their behaviors, so you need to understand these rules of thumb. People are prone to biases; if you're trying to persuade someone and you're aware of their biases, you're working with human nature rather than against it. 

Behavioral science is essentially a giant catalog of mental biases, with hundreds if not thousands of experiments into their nature and how they can be harnessed.

Of course, I can’t cover thousands of behavioral science experiments in a single article, so today I’m going to focus on one specific area of persuasion: how you can apply these insights to shape perceptions of pricing and value. 

In other words, I’ll aim to answer this key question: how can you make the same product, at the same price, seem like a much better value?

Three core components of consumer psychology

We can base our decisions on data, science, and laws if we look at the world of consumer psychology. We’ve spent hundreds of years working to understand how consumers’ brains operate. By applying this understanding to product marketing, we can significantly improve our results.

Product Marketing AlliancePhill Agnew

Using price relativity to shape willingness to pay

One broad theme you’ll notice throughout this article is that people don’t assess value in absolute terms. When considering a product, most people don’t systematically weigh its benefits against its costs – that would be a ludicrously complex calculation! 

Instead, because they’re cognitive misers, people unconsciously replace complex calculus with simpler comparisons. More specifically, when evaluating value, people tend to use a relative framework: they quickly think of a set of comparable products and then compare your offer to that set. 

In other words, if your product is more expensive, it seems like bad value; if it’s cheaper, it seems like good value. This phenomenon is called price relativity.

The idea that perceptions of value are relative should interest all of us. Why? Because it means that if you can shape your customers’ mental comparison set, you can dramatically change their willingness to pay.

Price relativity in action: The Nespresso example

If we look at the commercial landscape, we see many examples of huge brands skillfully applying behavioral science principles to great effect. I’d argue one of the best examples from the past 20 years illustrating the power of shifting comparison sets comes from Nespresso.

Consider Nespresso’s product launch. They didn’t just stuff coffee grounds into two-pound bags and sell them on supermarket shelves next to tins of Folgers. If they had, Nespresso would look astronomically expensive compared to the competition. 

A two-pound bag of Nespresso at current per-ounce prices would cost over $100! Who would pass up a $15 tin of Folgers to grab a $100 bag of espresso? It wouldn’t just seem expensive – it would seem wasteful and even morally questionable. No sane consumer would consider it.

Of course, that’s not what Nespresso did. Instead, they sold coffee in pods, shifting the comparison from bulk coffee brands to a single cup of specialty coffee. As Rory Sutherland has pointed out, this meant that instead of comparing Nespresso to grocery store staples like Folgers, they compared it to coffee chains like Starbucks. 

Suddenly, Nespresso’s $1 pod seemed like amazing value next to the $5 Starbucks charges for a latte. It’s the exact same per-gram price, but by subtly shifting the comparison set, Nespresso massively increased people’s willingness to pay.

This simple insight, creatively applied, has generated billions in revenue for Nespresso. And guess what? You can take similar principles and apply them in your business setting to significant benefit.

Harnessing price relativity in an established industry: The trains example

Of course, Nespresso executed this strategy during a new product launch when no preconceived notion of value existed. It’s easier to shape perceptions from scratch; however, with just a dash of lateral thinking, even the oldest product categories can apply the principle of relative pricing.

Let me give you an example from the world of trains – an industry that’s been around for about 200 years. Back in 2019, Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway, wanted to convince citizens to take vacations domestically rather than flying abroad. To do this, they scraped people’s Facebook and search data to see where they were looking at holiday destinations. 

If someone in Berlin was checking out trips to Colorado, Deutsche Bahn would show alluring photos of a site like Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River, overlaying the real-time airfare of €1,156. Then, immediately below, they’d display a remarkably similar-looking location in Germany – in this case, the bend of the Mosel River near Bremm – with the real-time train ticket price of €19. 

Now, what would most marketers do to persuade tourists to stay domestic? They’d probably just show pretty pictures of German destinations with the train fares listed. 

That’s logical, but what’s the natural comparison? For most people, it’s likely the cost of a tank of gas for a road trip – and €19 (about $20) doesn’t look like great value versus fueling your car. But by introducing an international flight as the reference point, suddenly €19 looks like a rounding error! 

That’s price relativity in action. When you change the comparison set, you change customers’ willingness to pay. 

In this episode of Product Marketing Life, host Collin Mayjack speaks with Grant Duncan, VP of Marketing at HST Pathways to discuss his journey to become VP of Marketing in just 3.5 years.

About our guest

Grant Duncan, VP of Marketing at HST Pathways

Grant is a self professed strategic thinker, problem solver, and GTM lover with plenty of experience within the product marketing and marketing space.

He says, "I'm someone who's extremely passionate about business, technology, and helping things grow. It's to the point where I nerd out reading business books for fun, coding side projects in the evenings, running marketing for others, advising students on career and vocation topics, and thinking up new ways to grow existing businesses or create new businesses. I also love people and building relationships, personally and professionally."

Key takeaways

• An overview of his career into a senior marketing leadership role
• When he decided to switch to VP of Marketing, instead of moving through the product marketing ranks
• His take on the argument that "PMMs shouldn't become CMOs"
• His very own messaging and positioning framework
• Advice for those looking to break into product marketing

And much more!

Get involved

Keen to join the conversation?

Why not take a look at our Slack channel? Not to boast, but our Slack community is the biggest gathering of product marketing enthusiasts on the planet (okay, that was a bit of a boast 😉).

We discuss everything from sales engagement to messaging strategies, and there’s a constant flow of templates, resources, and even the odd ‘roast’. And it's completely free to join!

Don't miss a beat – you can catch all of your favorite product marketing episodes right here: Product Marketing Life.

The struggle to sell to an enterprise evolves every year with newer wrinkles. 

To help you empathize with the chaotic nature of B2B enterprise selling, let’s look at a cross-section of three issues below, and hopefully, at least one resonates with you.

We’re seeing longer sales cycles with more people in the mix

You have to graduate from selling point solutions to making the platform sale at some point in your enterprise software journey. This sale becomes harder and harder as companies squeeze their budgets. You have to worry about not only the traditional user and buyer but also a whole set of new groups. 

Don’t want to take my word for it? Gartner estimates that 6 to 10 people, on average, are part of a purchase decision in most B2B enterprises. 

You also notice many non-traditional buying centers - I’m referring to a function or department that holds the budget when I say buying center here. Sales folks are unsure how to speak to every one of them. These buying centers sometimes have conflicting objectives. But your product still needs to be relevant to them somehow.

It’s easy to win small deals, but bigger deals are hard to come by

Different people or teams own fractions of the budget you’re after - another reason for enterprise tool sprawl. You’ve only truly won over the teams in a company if you get them to standardize on your product. 

Additionally, you tend to leave money on the table - both in terms of opportunity and share of wallet - especially if your category is historically under-monetized. A good example comes from the world of developer tools. 

According to Battery Ventures, the budgets for developer tools fall in the $1-5MM range on average. It is the average because not all companies prioritize investments in developer tools. If you’re a developer tool company, you’re at the mercy of the maturity of your customer. 

The step-level changes in spending automatically bring in more scrutiny, too. If you want to graduate from $100K to $500K to $1MM in ARR from an account, the journey depends on how comfortable you are working with so many talking heads in the same room/meeting. Graduating from one level to another immediately triggers additional checks, sign-offs, and purchase policies. 

Sales reps (sometimes) struggle to convey product value

A great way to check if your sales enablement efforts hold any weight is to offer the ‘day in the life’ test to every sales rep within the company. Ask them if they can describe a single day in the life of each of the key personas you lose sleep over. If they’re unable to, you know you have a lot of work left to do.

You want your sales reps to be prudent enough to narrow down to the use cases that matter based on the prospect in front of them. Ideally, you don’t want salespeople to try to boil the entire ocean by discussing every use case in your product. 

Finally, can your sales reps share assets and talk in a way that moves the prospect closer to a decision? All they need to do is create a spark. An interest. Or the initial wedge that forces the prospect to want to explore more. 

I want to offer a two-step playbook to tackle all the prickly issues above... 

A two-step playbook to tackling sales issues

Step one: Start mapping your buying centers

One must appeal to multiple departments with sometimes conflicting interests. Try this mapping exercise if you’re new to the idea of buying centers.

1. Which buying centers do I usually speak to or bump into?
2. Which new buying centers do I see pop up in my deals?
3. Can I categorize them in some way - for example: by role?
4. How do these buying centers connect to each other in a sale?
5. What are (if any) conflicting interests between these buying centers?

You may recognize this mapping exercise as a variation of stakeholder mapping from your MBA classes. 

Who do you lean on to answer these questions?

Start with the teams that interact with prospects and customers day in and day out. Sales, customer success, solution architects, professional services, and support teams are safe bets. As always, do your own research too! Explore third-party research sources, editorials in your space, competitors, and, more importantly, your in-house customer research or product insights team. 

Step two: Create a cheat sheet per buying center

Once you’re done mapping the buying centers, use the template above to create a cheat sheet for each buying center. Let’s say you uncover seven buying centers from the mapping exercise; proceed to create a cheat sheet for each of those seven buying centers. 

Let me walk you through the sections on the template using an example.  

Relevant buying center 

To reiterate, a buying center is a function/department that holds the budget. Depending on your enterprise product, ‘Security’ can be a buying center, and we’ll use that as an example. 

Top three recurring titles 

Identify the common personas within the buying center across levels here. Rely on past sales interactions to fill this out. Otherwise, you do your research to fill this in. It’s also possible that not all titles within a certain buying center are the personas you care about. 

In the case of the Security buying center, the personas can be CISO, VP of Security Engineering & Development, and Global Security Architect. 

Core functional JTBD statement 

Create a product and service agnostic statement using the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) mindset for your buying center. This statement should effectively describe what the buying center is trying to achieve or accomplish in a given situation.

Sample JTBD statement for the Security buying center - “Develop, implement, enforce enterprise-wide security, governance, resiliency policies to enable and advance business objectives.”

Pains 

Compile all the pains preventing the buying center from getting its job done, i.e., preventing them from executing them on the JTBD statement. Prioritize them. Use the prioritized list to pick the top three pains you can address. Again, compile pains, prioritize pains, and select the top three from the list you can address well. 

Enriching personas with jobs-to-be-done

Georgia Diaconsescu, PMM at What3Words shares an actionable nine-step plan & learnings around enriching Personas with Jobs-To-Be-Done.

Product Marketing AllianceProduct Marketing Alliance

Implication metrics 

Identify the top three to five metrics you can link to the pain. Said differently, what are a few metrics that get hurt due to the existence of the pain? Specifically, choose the metrics your prospect directly or indirectly owns. You want to show how your product moves the metrics in favor of your prospect. 

Examples of implication metrics for the security buying center, depending on the pain, can be breach lifecycle, data breach costs, downtime of critical applications, to list a few. 

Relevant use cases 

List the specific use cases from modules under your platform that resolve the pains. There are different definitions for use cases out there. Strictly think in terms of how the user is using your product to get to a specific goal. 

Discovery questions 

Ask yourself the top three potential questions that can come in handy for your sales rep to surface each pain in question. 

Here are a few essential pointers on how you can think about structuring these questions. 

Ask assumption-busting questions. Try building questions around your assumptions about the prospect's pain, the job they're trying to do, the hurdles they encounter, etc. Assumption-busting questions force you to validate/invalidate your positioning of the product, uncover better areas for your product to focus on, prioritize specific messages over others, and much more.

Switch between conversational lenses for more productive questions. A couple of lenses worth a try to give you some initial ideas - 

• A day in the life lens - e.g. What are your typical day-to-day interactions? Who do you work with? Which metrics do you send to your boss?
• The ideal world lens - e.g. What would happen in your ideal world? What would the perfect process look like? What's the gap vs. now?
• The success lens - e.g. When do you know you're successful? What are the benefits of removing the impediments to success?

Relevant capabilities 

Highlight the modules under your platform linked to the use cases. 

How does every product marketing team benefit from this?

Enterprise-wide selling

You think bigger than personas and unravel the whole landscape, forming the crux of enterprise-wide selling. You identify missing pieces while making your case for the complex and elaborate sale.

Discovery process

You pay attention to not only the users and decision-makers. You consider ratifiers, champions, and influencers. 

Competitive positioning

You own the mind faster and proactively better than the competition. 

Content strategy 

Prioritize your content. Customize it to speak to the interests of the buying center. Does it move the person I’m talking to closer to a decision?

Sales strategy and feedback

You reduce the onboarding time for new sales folks and improve the effectiveness of existing ones. Furthermore, you can create a feedback loop for your team to understand what resonates or doesn’t in the field. Also, rely on sales feedback for updates to cheat sheets and to uncover new buying centers. 

Check out the presentation on this topic from the PMA Chicago 2023 event.

After such a successful run of events last year, we’re making no attempt to slow down now!

We’re thrilled to be back in the saddle and sharing indispensable insights with product marketers at venues around the world.

Scintillating Summits? You got it. Fabulous Festivals? You betcha. They’re all coming your way very soon…

So, grab your diary, check out the upcoming schedule, and brace yourself - you’re in for a treat.

March

Product Marketing Summit | New York City

When: March 21 - 22

Where: Convene 117 West 46th Street, New York City

Attend the largest Product Marketing event on the West Coast at the Product Marketing Summit: New York. Here, you’ll learn actionable insights and gain methods and frameworks that’ll enable you to stay on top of trends, learn how to drive consistent growth at your company, and reach new heights in your career. 

And don’t just hear it from us! Justin Lee, Director of Product Marketing at Firstbase attended the NYC Summit and said it was, "the best conference made by product marketers for product marketers. Highly recommend. You'll learn a ton and meet a lot of great people!”

Product Marketing Summit | Paris

When: March 26

Where: Salons De l'Averyon, 17 Rue de l'Aubrac, Paris 

This year, we’re putting more pins on the globe than ever before. Starting with a brand new Summit in Paris. 

Join some of the best minds in the biz as they reveal their best practices, challenges, and experience with one mission in mind: getting you to reach your full product marketing potential. 

Learn from the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, Revolut, and more to learn fresh approaches, and gain ideas into how you can revolutionize your own product marketing frameworks for success. 

April

Product Marketing Summit | Denver

When: April 10 - 11 

Where: Doubletree by Hilton Hotel Denver, 3203 Quebec Street, Denver

Network, learn, and thrive in your career by attending the Product Marketing Summit in Denver. 

Check out some of the agenda topics below for a sneak preview of what to expect… 👀

• How to be best friends with your product team
• Optimizing the self-serve funnel through customer education, onboarding, and key metrics
• Being an internal champion and driving impact 

Let’s not stop there! Hear what last year’s attendees had to say about the Summit in Denver. 👇

#GTM24 | Los Angeles

When: April 24 - 25

Where: Conrad Los Angeles, 100 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles

In the rapidly evolving SaaS marketplace, where can sales, marketing, product and customer success leaders turn to secure their next big win? Enter #GTM24, the ultimate gathering of experts who'll convene to redefine GTM standards.

Join your peers as they share their tried, tested, and proven strategies that you can adopt right away.

May

Product Marketing Summit | Amsterdam

When: May 16 - 17

Where: Okura Hotel, Ferdinand Bolstraat 333, Amsterdam

Home of gorgeous tulips, fascinating historical attractions, and the fantastic Product Marketing Summit, Amsterdam. 😍

Join an incredible 2024 Summit within mainland Europe, and be amongst a mixing pot of culture and art while learning how to excel in your career as a PMM. 

Make meaningful connections with the world’s biggest product marketing community, benchmark against the best of the business, and discover new talent to scale your team. 

Ben je er klaar voor?

June

Product Marketing Summit | Atlanta

When: June 05 - 06

Where: Twelve Midtown Autograph, Atlanta 

Move over Real Housewives, it’s time for the Real Product Marketers of Atlanta. 

We’re welcoming speakers from the likes of IBM, GoDaddy, Meta, Google, and Adobe to discuss a whole host of product marketing strategies for success, including:

• Navigating complex go-to-market strategies and improving launches for faster market penetration
• Crafting effective storytelling-driven messaging and positioning your product to resonate in crowded markets
• Unlocking the power of ideal customer profiles and segmentation to empathize with your customers

Product Marketing Summit | Seattle

When: June 12 - 13 

Where: Grand Hyatt Seattle, 721 Pine Street, Seattle

The fun doesn’t stop in Atlanta. 😏

We’ll be rubbing shoulders with product marketing experts from over 150 companies who’ll be joining us from around the world at the Product Marketing Summit in Seattle.

Wanna learn more about building your team? You got it. Not sure how to define your audience? Come on down and learn from the best. Check out the full itinerary and see what you’ve got to look forward to.

With the likes of Microsoft, ClickUp, and JP Morgan in attendance, you’ll be in very good company.

"I’m glad I attended the Product Marketing Summit; it’s rare I get an opportunity to focus solely on the functions of Product Marketing outside of the day-to-day. I’m walking away with a plethora of ideas I want to implement across my team."

Director of Product Marketing at Trimble Inc.

September

Product Marketing Summit | San Francisco

When: September 04 - 05

Where: San Fran Marriott Marquis, 780 Mission Street, San Francisco

The Product Marketing Summit | San Francisco is set to welcome a range of speakers plying their trade. Last year welcomed speakers from companies such as Google, GitLab, and Microsoft.

The diverse agenda will focus on a breadth of topics, such as being a customer-obsessed PMM, how to enable sales teams, nailing your product-market fit, and a whole lot more.

Actionable insights are guaranteed.

October

Product Marketing Summit | Boston

When: October 03 - 04

Where: The Westin Copley Place, 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston

The perfect treat in the build-up to Halloween, Product Marketing Summit | Boston will welcome another group of product marketing speakers to share their invaluable experiences.

Last year, we were spoiled with an ensemble of experts from the likes of Loom, Klue, and Shopify. 

This year promises to be even better, with masters in the craft discussing key topics, such as understanding the customer, positioning, messaging, product-market fit, and more.

Product Marketing Summit | Sydney

When: October 30 - 31

Where: TBC, Sydney

On Halloween, we’re upping the PMM standard Down Under, at the Product Marketing Summit | Sydney.

But don’t just take it from us. Hear how last year’s Summit in Oz went from the attendees themselves. 👇

November

Product Marketing Summit | Singapore

When: November 06 

Where: TBC, Singapore

With guests including LinkedIn, Stripe, and UPS, we’re going above and beyond to deliver an APAC experience bigger than the Guoco Tower. 😎

We’ve covered everything you need to know, and then some, with presentations on making AI your most effective colleague, best practices for customer advocacy, building value for your sales team, and much more.

We challenge you to leave this summit without some newfound knowledge in your pocket. 🤷‍♂️

Product Marketing Summit | Chicago

When: November 13 - 14 

Where: TBD, Chicago 

I​​n Mid-November, we’re heading to the Windy City to host a Summit that’ll blow you away.

Product Marketing Summit | Chicago promises to be an event to behold, with event speakers from industry-leading companies. 

You know the drill … tune in to how others enjoyed their stay in ‘23. 👇

What are you waiting for?

Product Marketing Summit | Toronto 

When: November 20 -21

Where: TBC, Toronto

The Product Marketing Summit | Toronto is the final scheduled summit for November! 

Joining us in Toronto is an influx of product marketing virtuosos, from Product Marketing Managers to Vice Presidents of Product Marketing.

And as always, we’ve set the standards pretty high, with speakers from elite companies.

Different Summit. Different city. Same killer content. 🔥

December

Product Marketing Summit | London 

When: December 04 - 05

Where: InterContinental O2, London

We’re then celebrating the end of the year with an event on Product Marketing Alliance’s home turf. 

Product Marketing | London’s all set to be larger than Big Ben and sweeter than an English cup of tea, with speakers fit to lecture at Oxford University.

We’ve moved mountains to bring some of the best talents in the industry to speak in the English capital. It’s an event fit for royalty.

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“You know what we need… is a Go-To-Market plan.”  

Did you feel a shiver down your spine, like someone just walked over the graves of your past failed product launches?

Go-to-Market (GTM) plans are a hallmark of every new product introduction, and yet all too often, organizations don’t have a clear concept of what a GTM plan should look like… or worse, the “plan” is just a tactical checklist of deliverables, campaign webinars, and maybe a few website updates.

A great GTM plan becomes the backbone of any product launch. It provides a framework that specifies the most important elements for all functional areas involved. It answers questions like: 

• What are we selling? 
• Who’s going to buy it? 
• Why would they buy it? 
• How much will we expect them to pay? 
• How will they find out about it? 
• Who’s selling it? 
• How will we measure success? 

Getting all these common sense elements aligned seems like it should be easy. Yet, it’s surprising how many conflicting opinions, miscommunications, and unresolved questions lurk in the shadows when it comes to assembling this information.

Before we talk about what’s needed for a rock-solid GTM plan, though, let’s establish the basic components of any GTM plan for a product launch. After that, let’s take a deeper look at what’s required to go beyond the templates to make your GTM plan a true backbone for your launch.

Getting from “blank page” to a first draft of a plan

Here are the six components that should be part of any GTM plan – especially for B2B and enterprise products:

The target market

So, who’s buying? Identify your ideal customer profile and understand your buyer persona: their pain points and challenges, their preferences.

To collect that market data, run surveys, talk to internal stakeholders, interview customers, attend events, conduct win-loss calls, and engage with analysts and industry experts. Group your personas into segments based on commonalities in buying behavior. Oh, and when you’re done, don’t forget to test your hypotheses, too.

The value proposition

Why are they buying? Put together an internal messaging framework that communicates a primary message, key benefits, and true differentiators. Align features, proof points, and customer stories to reinforce those points. Prune away any marketing fluff or inconsequential features that well-meaning extra chefs try to toss into the product descriptions you’re baking.

The pricing and packaging

What are they paying, and what do they get for their money? Understand your costs, your revenue targets, and the levers you have within the product. Then look for a pricing strategy that matches your goal of scaling up as you deliver more value. Compare what you assemble to the alternatives to make sure you’re not way over or under market expectations.  Do what you can to test the price point before launch.

The promotion

How do they hear about it? The world won’t beat a path to your door for your better mousetrap. Find out what the product has for a marketing budget, or work backwards from targets and propose one. 

With messaging and budget in hand, go to your demand-gen team to devise initial campaign plans, be they driven by digital, print, social, event, direct mail, or account-based marketing. Get an idea for what content is needed to support that marketing mix, especially once you need to convert prospects from the shiny top-of-funnel campaigns to the middle of their buyer journey.

The selling channels

Who’s selling it? Call out approaches for options like value-added resellers, partners, white-labeling via OEMs, or pure digital sales.

Consider multiple groups within your organization: account managers, business development, sales teams targeting your segment, or maybe that new SWAT tiger team that’s hitting up your base for upsell revenue. Recognize these answers may change for anything sold beyond your country’s borders. 

Measuring success

What’s the score? Track progress by assembling a set of quantitative measurements, however you formulate them: KPIs, OKRs, SMART goals, or simply key metrics. Define tools, methods, and clear ownership associated with collecting and analyzing that data – ideally via an accessible, actively refreshed report or dashboard that doesn’t depend on an external group to pull your results.

Whew.  

As you see above, there’s a lot of information to gather for just the fundamental components of a GTM plan. It’s not something you whip together the weekend before that Monday kickoff meeting. Fortunately, templates (from the PMA and elsewhere) can help you capture and represent these elements until you develop your own favorites.

Getting from “first draft” to a decent plan

Following the templates can be a great way to get started as you collect all this information. Nevertheless, if you don’t also put some thought into the exercise, the templates can lead you astray. Go from information collection to creating a decent plan by taking into account these considerations.

Consider the “jobs to be done” 

No one disagrees that making data-driven decisions is a good thing.  With so much data available these days, however, it’s possible to miss the forest for the trees. 

If you are poring over product adoption metrics, analyzing market sizes, or compiling demographic and psychographic persona data, you might not learn your customers’ “jobs to be done”.

Ask yourself and your teams: what problem is this product solving? What value are we delivering? What’s the “so what” that our customers care about? Identify that kernel and use it to drive your value proposition and the rest of the messaging framework, which is the linchpin for the rest of the plan.

Collaborate with your product and sales teams

Avoid the temptation to create everything from within product marketing. Your product managers and developers may have already spent a lot of time talking to customers. Mind you, their focus has been on the users, while yours is on the buyers… but their discovery process still finds insights into what your customers are trying to solve. 

Likewise, your sales teams and their supporters are on the front lines, talking to customers every day. They have insights into larger trends, shared pain points, and other customer commonalities. They won’t be shy about pointing out flaws in your GTM plan.

Invest your time in “outside-in”

Above all else, make sure you get out of your organization’s ivory tower and talk to customers yourself. The info from those conversations with your product teams, sales reps, support teams, and industry analysts may certainly help, but the groupthink of your managers and peers from within your organization can lead you to unchallenged assumptions about what your customers value. 

Ultimately, there’s nothing like sitting down with a customer or potential prospect for a sanity check on what you think is true. So join sales meetings, give your presentations, handle win-loss calls yourself, be in the booth at that industry event, and set up individual interviews with customers and prospects outside of the sales cycle.

Getting from “decent” to a rock-solid plan

All of the above is common sense not commonly practiced. Still, it’s not too different from what you’d read elsewhere about go-to-market planning.  These last three points, however, can make the difference between a “decent” GTM plan that is at risk of faltering, and a rock-solid plan that your teams can rely on.

You may own it… but that doesn’t mean you do it all.

The easiest trap for product marketing to fall into is to attempt to be in charge of everything in the GTM plan.  Other functions are famously capable of hand-waving away tasks and tough questions with a dismissive “oh, that’s for product marketing.” This abdication can bury the product marketing team under the weight of unachievable expectations for a launch. 

The role of the launch leader is best described as making stone soup. Identify a team of stakeholders – ideally functional leaders or their designates – who will take ownership of their sections of the GTM plan. 

Put the onus on them to provide the strategy ingredients for readiness, and ask them to track their list of deliverables and milestones themselves or use a shared project manager. Working together with contributions from each team gets a final product everyone is proud to be a part of.

Once your organization is mature enough, help establish a launch team outside of product marketing to be in charge of project management so you can focus on the GTM strategy as well as executing on product marketing deliverables. 

Use checklists… but don’t slavishly rely on them

GTM plans often manifest as cookie-cutter spreadsheets with a grueling list of deliverables.  Oh, and almost every item on that checklist is assigned to product marketing by default. “Sorry, everyone, but that’s what the checklist says! So can we have those datasheets and videos by Thursday?”

To paraphrase Captain Barbossa, checklists are more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Use them to make sure you’re not missing any good ideas from the past, but resist the temptation to rely exclusively on them.

It’s painfully easy for launch managers to fall back on tried-and-true checklists, and to dive into the tactics of a launch, without considering the larger context and strategy of a go-to-market plan. Each launch is different. Deliverables must have a purpose and a priority, or else your team is just committing random acts of marketing.

Get executive sponsorship, input, and buy-in… or force their hand.

If you’re fortunate, your leadership team uses a new product introduction process to greenlight new ideas. They vet new product ideas at their inception, commission others to elaborate on the project scope and feasibility, then follow progress through delivery, with check-ins or stage exits along the way.

Smaller or fast-moving companies, however, may not inject such rigor in their product introduction process. That means it’s dangerously easy for products to make their way forward from a development team without alignment on their raison d’etre. 

Find the executive who cares about this product’s success. Maybe the CTO or head of product has been championing its on-time delivery for months.  Perhaps your head of sales is depending on the product for her third-quarter forecast.

Your CEO may even be the one watching closely. Get them to validate your strategy, to articulate target metrics, and to wrangle other executive stakeholders who disagree. Failure to do this puts you at the mercy of unattainable expectations.  

But what if you can’t find an executive invested in this product’s successful launch?  Then it’s time to question why you – or anyone, really – are spending any time on the project in the first place.

You can’t guarantee success, but you can mitigate risk

No GTM plan is truly bulletproof.  Market conditions change. Products get delayed. Executive sponsors change their mind. Companies pivot. 

Nevertheless, armed with a rock-solid, documented go-to-market strategy, you’re better able to navigate those unforeseen obstacles and reduce chaos.  

Why? 

As President Eisenhower once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” 

The process of gathering information, exploring options, and achieving alignment results in a plan of record – one that cross-functional leaders and execs have contributed to and agreed is the source of truth. 

When circumstances do change, cut down on the corporate game of telephone with some effective change management, and drive everyone back to the plan. That way, you’ll give your product launches the best opportunity to succeed.

Go-to-Market Certified: Masters

Having a strong go-to-market strategy helps to elevate and align Product, Marketing, and Revenue teams to established goals, narratives, and motions related to new product offerings; it ensures everyone understands exactly what you’re doing, why you’re doing it when you’re doing it, who you’re doing it to, and how you’ll do it.

That’s why it’s so important to get right. And what better way to truly optimize your GTM strategy than taking our Go-to-Market Certified: Masters course?

This course will help you:

• Grasp a proven product launch formula that’s equal parts comprehensive, repeatable, creative, and collaborative.
• Gain the expertise and know-how to build and tailor an ideal product blueprint of your own.
• Equip yourself with templates to facilitate a seamless GTM process.

So what are you waiting for?

Pratham Sharma, Co-Founder and Product Manager at Neutrify, is an electronics engineer turned R&D Software Engineer turned “product person.” He has 3+ of professional experience and has built many zero-to-one and scalable products across domains from ed-tech, climate, and software IT. 

He’s always been fascinated by the business side of the products. So, when the opportunity arose to sign up for the PMM Scholar Program, he jumped at the chance! 

Join us in our chat with Pratham about his experience with the program, including:

• How he found out about the program
• What his motivation was for enrolling
• What he enjoyed most about the program
• What topics he found most insightful
• What type of resources/activities he found the most helpful
• How he utilized the resources/learnings in his work
• How this program has helped him network
• How the program compared to other programs
• Advice for those considering enrolling in the Scholar program

How did you find out about the PMM Scholar Program?

I discovered the PMM Scholar Program through my involvement in various product communities. While searching for product management communities online, I came across the Product Led Alliance community. 

And then during my exploration of The Alliance website - the parent organization of both Product Led Alliance and Product Marketing Alliance (PMA)- I became an insider member of PMA, and I found the community intriguing. 

Consequently, I joined the PMA Slack community, which stood out to me for a number of reasons: not only was it free, it was easily the most active of the communities. I appreciated the community's high engagement and the dedicated community managers for each segment under The Alliance. 

I subscribed to the free monthly newsletter and eagerly participated in open AMAs and events. Eventually, I was redirected to the PMA website via email, where I discovered the Product Marketing Scholar Program, and then applied and was accepted. My journey with PMA began from there.

What was your motivation for enrolling in this program?

My background in electronics engineering and previous roles as a Research and Development Software Engineer and Technical Product Manager had primarily focused on technical software development and product building. 

However, I harbored a keen interest in understanding how companies effectively market their products, generate excitement through compelling copywriting, and persuade users to engage or purchase. Having collaborated with Product Marketing Managers in previous organizations and doing exactly the same thing at my startup, I found a gap, and I felt the need to nourish this area. 

I questioned myself as most PMMs that I worked with typically have MBAs, others were content writers before, or had business education majors. Having none of that and still getting accepted into the program gave me confidence, and I challenged myself to break that barrier and fill the gap. 

Also, I sought to leverage my technical expertise in marketing, particularly in the B2B realm. Basically, getting the expertise and nourishing the skills of technical knowledge and then translating and communicating with business language was something I was initially seeking. 

Enrolling in the PMM Scholar Program presented an opportunity to delve into product marketing management and broaden my career prospects in this domain.

What did you enjoy most about the PMM Scholar Program?

It's challenging to pinpoint a singular aspect of the program that stood out, as every facet - from classes to mentorship sessions - contributed to its excellence. 

One highlight was our instructor, Div Manickam, who incorporated brief two minute mindfulness sessions into our cohort sessions, providing a valuable pause amidst our busy schedules. 

Additionally, Div's curated TEDx talks, directly or indirectly related to product marketing, added depth to our discussions. 

Beyond that, I appreciated Div's willingness to share resources, stories, and insights from her personal experience, resources and learnings that her previous mentees shared with her, enriching our learning journey and going way ahead to answer all queries, be they silly or relevant/irrelevant.

Which topic have you found the most insightful and useful?

The "Essay/Writing" module proved to be both insightful and challenging for me at the same time. Despite initial apprehension about crafting a 2000+ word article without prior experience in product marketing management, I found this task immensely beneficial. 

I chose to explore various communities in product marketing, platforms for mock interview practice, mentorship opportunities, and even established my own community, MockMeister. 

The article, which was a part of the coursework, still serves and will serve as a valuable resource for aspiring and current PMMs, supplementing the knowledge provided by PMA. In the final article that I wrote, I put in many hours of work and research, and it turned out very useful. Even my mentor Div appreciated it. 

I went one step ahead and created a series of posts on LinkedIn that can help PMMs in my network. A lot of people appreciated my work and found it super helpful. 

At the same time, I liked the “Communication” module after the “Writing” Module, which helped me to interview PMM leaders and learn more about their expertise and what’s going on in the industry.

What type of resources/activities have you found the most helpful?

Weekly mentorship sessions and virtual local events have been particularly beneficial for me. These engagements not only kept me motivated but also facilitated networking with PMM leaders worldwide, each offering unique expertise and insights. 

Last but not least, separate community access for everyone in our cohort; I loved it as it turned out to be a medium to ask questions and stay engaged after our weekly mentorship calls throughout our program.

How have you utilized the resources or your learnings in your work?

I've applied the learnings from the program, particularly in positioning and messaging, to my current role at Neutrify, a startup. This includes refining our product's positioning and messaging to resonate effectively with both B2B and B2C customers.

Has this program helped you to network? If so, how, and have you built any new connections?

Absolutely! The program's diverse cohort, despite varying time zones, fostered meaningful connections. I made a conscious effort to attend every session, building relationships with fellow cohort members and learning from their experiences and expertise to industry knowledge. 

I was fortunate enough to establish an accountability partnership with someone in my cohort, which ensured the completion of coursework timely and asking questions and discussing topics with them.

How do you see the value of this program in comparison to other professional programs you're part of?

Unlike other programs, which may focus solely on specific topics or offer one-on-one mentorship at a high cost, the PMM Scholar Program provides a comprehensive learning experience with community and mentor support. 

Its well-rounded curriculum, video (OnDemand and live sessions), coupled with the supportive community, distinguishes it as an exceptional opportunity for aspiring PMMs.

What would you say to fellow PMMs considering enrolling in PMA’s PMM scholar program?

Consistency is key. Make the most of every mentorship session and prioritize completing coursework regularly to maximize learning and networking opportunities. 

Embrace the program and its community wholeheartedly - it's a unique chance to elevate your skills and expand your professional network. You would want to make sure to keep a balance with learning, networking, and focusing on coursework, too.

Any final thoughts or comments you’d like to share about your experience?

Stay curious and embrace new learning opportunities. The PMM Scholar Program opened doors to the world of PMM for me, for which I'm incredibly grateful. If you weren't accepted into the recent cohort, don't be discouraged - consider reapplying. You never know what opportunities may arise. 

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or for a virtual coffee chat, whether to discuss PMM, food, hiking, or dogs. Let's keep learning and growing together!

Apply to be in our next cohort!

Twice a year, we open the doors to 25 new or aspiring product marketers and put them through a part-time, 12-week program. By the end, you’ll have all the knowledge, tools, and training needed to start a successful career in product marketing.

But it doesn’t stop there. By being part of our Scholar Program, you’ll automatically be put in front of leading hiring companies, primed to kickstart your career in style.

What you get when you’re accepted: 

🔖 Product marketing certification (providing you pass the exams)

👩‍💻 Live, weekly workshops with industry leaders

✅ Marked, practical tasks to test your learning

👣 A platform to build your personal portfolio

🌎 Exposure to some of the world’s biggest brands

🔥 Official accreditation from the industry’s go-to association (aka, us!)

🆓 All of the above for free (worth $3,500 RRP)

Compelling content marketing tells a story that accomplishes three objectives.

• First, it generates clicks in digital marketing campaigns and drives the target audience to your landing page.
• Second, the report or white paper prompts the reader to think about their own situation and wonder if they should consider a change.
• And third, it links the need for change to the potential benefits of your solutions.

While these are the goals, research-based content often falls short. Instead, the end product is a hodgepodge collection of profiling metrics: What solutions does the market use? How many people work in the department? What information sources do they rely on?  

How does this happen? 

While the specifics of every situation are unique, a common root cause of this phenomenon is hoping that a story will emerge from the data instead of proactively identifying the data needed to tell a predefined story. 

The frameworks in this article outline how to identify compelling stories to tell, before you start writing your survey. We also offer guidance on using content marketing survey data to demonstrate your product's value. 

Common pitfalls to creating content marketing surveys

Before outlining the frameworks, let’s review the pitfalls that often befall the content development process, which include:

• Serving too many stakeholders
• Starting with survey questions instead of a story
• Fishing expeditions
• Flat line trends
• Too much focus on what’s hot

Serving too many stakeholders

Often, there are too many cooks in the kitchen. The content marketing team wants to ensure that the data are useful to internal audiences, so they solicit feedback from multiple stakeholders. 

Unfortunately, these stakeholders can lose sight of the purpose of the final output and want to use the survey for their own needs. For example, the product team wants to add a few questions about which features are most important. The strategy team wants to know what vendors are used and why. Sales wants to know who the decision-makers, influencers, and champions are. The few questions from each stakeholder group add up quickly, leaving little room for potentially more compelling topics.

Starting with survey questions instead of a story

It is easy to put the cart before the horse and start writing survey questions before developing possible storylines. When a content marketing project kicks off, it often comes with a sense of urgency. 

The team feels pressure to get something in a shared document that stakeholders can react to. Under this pressure, creating survey questions feels more like progress than brainstorming storylines and themes. And the questions that come easiest to mind are descriptive demographics and firmographics. 

Fishing expeditions

Some content marketing reports end up as a fishing expedition when the survey includes too many topics – the team is throwing lots of things out there to see what sticks. This produces a disjointed set of data and insights that lack a coherent theme putting the content writers in the position of trying to figure out what story they can tell with the data they have by chasing the elusive "Aha.”

Flatline trends

Many content marketing surveys are designed to demonstrate market trends over time. This requires asking the same questions year after year. Unfortunately, the reality in most B2B markets is that little changes in a year or even in two years. As a result, the trendlines in the report end up flat, which isn't that interesting for readers nor motivating for them to take the survey again the following year.

Too much focus on what’s hot

Content marketers feel pressure to talk about the topic du jour, regardless of their solution’s connection to it or their company’s point of view. 

Yesterday it was the impact of the hybrid workforce. Today it's AI. Tomorrow it will be something else.  

Without a unique story about today’s hot topic, the content isn’t differentiated enough to stand out among the dozens/hundreds of other articles on the same topic. And the shelf-life may only be a few months if interest in the topic cools quickly.

Qualitative vs quantitative research

Data analysis is a broad and often complex subject to get to grips with, it can overwhelm even the most capable of product marketers. In an attempt to simplify these misunderstood methods, let’s break them down into two different types of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Product Marketing AllianceEmma Bilardi

A better approach to content marketing surveys

If you have the time and internal support, a better approach to content generation is to first define the compelling story you want to tell and then structure the research questions and data to flesh out that story.

This is more likely to generate unique content, provide an opportunity for your company to present a POV, and garner interest and clicks from the target audience. It can also provide guardrails for the survey development process and help reign in stakeholders outside of the content marketing team. 

Framework 1: Identifying stories

The first step is to develop two to four stories your company wants to tell. These stories should connect to the themes your company uses in its other marketing and product marketing efforts.

Once you develop the story ideas, break each one into four broad components to help identify specific questions to ask in the survey. Consider the following example for an IT support services company.

1. Broad story: What is the problem? Why is it relevant?

Younger remote workers don't turn to their corporate IT support function when they have a problem, and this pattern of behavior creates a range of potentially serious problems for IT.

2. Market dynamics: What causes the problem?

Younger employees expect an immediate response and feel the help desk is too slow. As digital natives, they can't tolerate being down for any length of time. Their first instinct is to try fixing the problem using their resources instead of going to the corporate IT department.

3. What are the consequences/implications?

Younger employees find a "solution" that introduces malware or worsens the problem, which takes longer for the help desk to fix, puts company data at risk, etc.

 4. Connection to offering

Processes and solutions help address these challenges directly and indirectly, such as…

Once a rough storyline is in place, develop survey questions to provide supporting data. Using the example above, the survey can explore the difference in perceptions between employees and the helpdesk regarding wait time. 

It can collect data on how often employees try to fix their computers themselves. It can explore the potential negative consequences of employee behavior.

Framework 2: Ranking the stories

In the process of developing storylines, one story may emerge as a clear favorite. In other cases, you may have multiple potential paths but are unsure which will resonate most with your audience.

When it is unclear which story to pursue, use a second framework to rank the possible stories. Start by scoring each story in seven dimensions. Tallying the scores provides a systematic way to compare stories on their likelihood to engage the target audience.

1. Relevance to the target audience: How likely will the audience find this topic interesting? Do they talk about it today? Do they have questions about it? Will they recognize it as relevant to them? 

2. Value to your organization: To what extent does the story support your company's overall marketing? Is it consistent with the stories and themes used by sales and product marketing? 

3. Differentiated: To what extent has this story been told by competitors, analysts, and other information sources? For example, much of what is being said about the impact of AI is so undifferentiated that much of it sounds the same.

4. Leading, but not cutting edge: Is it something organizations are starting to think about and struggle with without being too far ahead of where they are today? Themes that get the most attention are those that the mainstream is on the verge of adopting. Most companies are more concerned with being left behind than with being out in front.

5. Alternative stories: How many different stories and POVs can be generated from the data? If the data doesn't fully support the core hypothesis of the story, are there ways to pivot and apply the data to a different (yet still compelling) narrative? 

6. Work within limitations: How likely can a survey provide the data you need based on the practical realities and constraints related to budget availability, response rates, etc.? For example, does it require data from the C-suite, who is unlikely to participate in your survey?

7. Gestalt: Like most things, themes are more than the sum of their parts. To what degree do you feel this is a good direction for content marketing and thought leadership?

We present these two frameworks as conceptual strategies for identifying and evaluating potential themes for your next content marketing campaign. You may find different evaluation criteria more useful. 

The most important takeaway is to use a systematic approach to identifying what to include in your survey to avoid the common pitfalls encountered when developing survey-generated content.

Using content marketing survey data to demonstrate value

A common storyline involves using survey data to support content that shows the value of adopting a solution, through efficiencies, cost-savings, customer satisfaction or other metrics. 

When someone downloads a white paper, they have entered the top of the funnel. Content marketing teams want to use this opportunity to highlight the difference between firms that use a solution or solution category and those that do not. 

In surveys, they ask respondents to rate their company’s performance on key performance areas such as productivity, efficiency, and collaboration. They expect that companies that use a solution will rate themselves higher in these areas than those that do not. 

But when the data comes back, it often tells a different story. The self-reported performance ratings for businesses that use the category aren’t higher than those that do not. Sometimes, they are lower. This not only doesn’t validate the story the content marketing team wants to tell – it contradicts it. What’s happening?

Put simply, companies that adopt more advanced processes and technology have a different mindset than those that take a “good enough” approach.

For clarity’s sake, we will refer to companies that use advanced solutions as Vanguards and those that use good enough solutions as Conventionalists.

• Vanguards demonstrate characteristics of a growth mindset that draws them to new solutions. They measure themselves against what they want to accomplish, not where they are today. They are always looking to do better. What worked yesterday isn’t what they need for tomorrow.
• Conventionalists tend to be less critical of their performance and often describe their solutions and processes as “good enough.” They recognize that there is always room for improvement but feel they perform as well as they can with their available resources.

When asked in a survey about their performance in areas such as productivity, collaboration, or efficiency, Vanguards and Conventionalists often give themselves the same ratings, even though from an objective perspective, the Vanguards likely perform at a higher level on whatever the metric being measured.

Fortunately, you can mitigate this through survey design. 

One option is to ask about concrete performance metrics your solution impacts. For example, if your solution improves fulfillment time, ask, “How many days does it take on average to fulfill a customer order?” Vanguards should report that they fill customer orders faster than Conventionalists.

Another approach is to focus on progress the Vanguards have made instead of comparing them to Conventionalists. With this approach, you ask Vanguards how the solution improved their processes. 

For example, “How much did the adoption of the solution category improve your… (time to market/collaboration/ability to retain customers/ability to manage workflows, etc.” Even if they feel they could be doing better today, they will recognize how things improved when they adopted a solution.

As with selecting the best story, the key is to be deliberate and thoughtful in your survey design.

Isurus Market Research delivers research-based insights for product marketers in B2B SaaS companies to inform GTM strategies. To learn more about how we help create more compelling content marketing stories or address other product marketing questions, visit our website or contact us here.

This article is based on Aya Tange’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in London. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

Do your product managers toss new features over the wall, expecting you to suddenly figure out how to launch them? 

Does your product roadmap seem to appear out of thin air, with no input from product marketing? 

Are you struggling to build an effective partnership with your product teams?

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Lack of collaboration between product managers (PMs) and product marketers (PMMs) causes problems at organizations large and small. 

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. In this article, we’ll take a look at two contrasting models of PM/PMM engagement. You’ll walk away with actionable tactics for bringing these functions into strategic alignment to build products your customers truly want.

First, a little context

To set the context, let me tell you a little about my background. 

I was born in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to the US at the age of 18 to attend Harvard University. There, I studied economics, sociology, and psychology to better understand human behavior and decision-making. This sparked my interest in marketing. 

After graduating, I worked on Microsoft Teams at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington. A couple of years later, I joined Apple's iCloud product marketing team in Cupertino California. 

More recently, my partner and I moved to London, where I transitioned from big tech to a hardware-as-a-service startup called topi. I’m currently their Product Marketing Lead.

Today, I want to share a story about topi and how I applied the lessons I learned at Microsoft and Apple there. 

Demystifying product marketing

When I came on board as the organization’s first-ever product marketer, most of my colleagues had no idea what product marketing was. They looked a lot like this guy. 👇

Sound familiar?

Eventually, one brave soul told me point blank, “Aya, I have no idea what you do. Can you please help me here?” So, I ended up running an intro session to demystify product marketing for the company. 

To put everyone’s minds at ease, I shared some figures from PMA’s State of Product Marketing report. Turns out, most cross-functional stakeholders have, at best, a shaky understanding of what product marketing involves. Just 4% of the PMMs surveyed for this report said their stakeholders fully understood product marketing, while a quarter said they didn’t get it at all. 

From a collaboration standpoint, that’s a huge problem. If people don't understand what you do and how to work with you, effective engagement is off the table.

I realized that as I was building our product marketing function from the ground up, I had to make sure that my stakeholders – especially product managers – understood what I did and how to engage with me. 

Two models of product marketing

As I mentioned, I've been lucky enough to work at two of the biggest tech companies in the world, where I’ve experienced two very different approaches to product marketing. To keep it simple, I’ll contrast two models: Model A from my time at Microsoft, and Model B from Apple. 

Let me set the stage with a couple more results from the State of Product Marketing survey. PMA investigated what product marketers spend their time doing. They uncovered that most time goes, in descending order, toward the following activities:

• Positioning and messaging 
• Sales enablement 
• Customer and market research
• Storytelling
• Website management
• Reporting on product marketing success 
• Content marketing
• Onboarding customers
• Product roadmap planning

While I wish product roadmap planning ranked higher, I’m not surprised that it’s at the bottom of the list, with only 18% of PMMs citing it as one of their key responsibilities. 

This is pretty typical of product marketing Model A, where PMs and PMMs barely collaborate. Let’s dive deeper into what that looks like with a case study from Microsoft.

Model A of product marketing: No collaboration between PMs and PMMs 

When I first joined Microsoft, I wasn't involved in product planning at all. Instead, product and tech teams immersed themselves in the roadmap, baking in brilliant features. Then they’d toss them over the wall, saying, “Hey product marketing, here’s this awesome feature I built – get it out to market.” 

Cue fire drill to figure out value props, messaging, ideal customer profiles, and more. It was a huge scramble. We had to quickly figure out what the product was, and then tell a convincing story to the public. That was my reality, and it sucked.

In this episode of Product Marketing Maestros: Tales From the Front Lines, host Nitin Kartik, Director of Product Marketing at Carbyne, is joined by Yi Lin Pei, Founder and Career Coach at Courageous Careers.

They discuss a time where Yi Lin helped a client land a job in product marketing within two months during a challenging job market.

Key takeaways:

• Strategic targeting and fit: Yi Lin underscores the critical importance of identifying and aligning with candidate market fit. The client's journey involves targeting specific roles within early-stage startups in the construction technology industry. This strategic approach extends to outreach efforts, where Yi Lin emphasizes the need to go beyond traditional application processes.
• Effective outreach and preparation: A key takeaway centers around the significance of strategic outreach and meticulous preparation for interviews. The episode delves into the preparation phase, emphasizing in-depth analysis of interviewer backgrounds and the use of structured frameworks for responses.
• Community support and time management: Yi Lin provides valuable insights into optimizing time during the job search. Additionally, the episode highlights the importance of community support for individuals navigating the job market.

So you want to become a product marketing manager?

From key skills needed for career progression to how to choose your next role and more, here’s how to break into product marketing management.

Product Marketing AllianceLawrence Chapman

About Yi Lin Pei

With over 12 years of experience spanning B2B/B2C SaaS, IoT, CPG, and consulting, Yi Lin leverages her diverse background to equip clients for success. Since 2021, she has helped over 150 professionals land roles at leading companies including LinkedIn, HubSpot, Uber, and TikTok.

Yi Lin began her own career pivot from transportation engineering to tech marketing in 2016 despite lacking relevant experience. By developing a strategic approach, she landed her first role in marketing at Autodesk. From there, she rose to become a senior product marketing leader and a top 100 global PMM influencer.

Having personally overcome the challenges of switching careers, Yi Lin makes it her mission to help driven professionals achieve their dreams. Her customized coaching focuses on resume branding, interview preparation, salary negotiation, and onboarding success. Yi Lin also provides ongoing career growth support tailored to each individual.

Get involved

Eager to dive deeper into product marketing mastery? 

Our thriving Slack community is the ultimate hub for leveling up your product marketing prowess. With over 10,000 members, it's the largest crew of product marketing aficionados around.

From positioning and pitching to pricing and personas, we tackle every facet of strategic marketing. Share your wins, workshop ideas, and tap the collective wisdom of our community. The conversations flow 24/7, along with a steady stream of templates, playbooks, and lively banter. Consider it your portable conference, minus the price tag.

Stay tuned for more episodes of Product Marketing Maestros: Tales From the Front Lines.