Aligning Your Product Marketing With the Rest of Your Company Jeff Hardison, Director of Product Marketing

Clearbit's company, geo, and demographic intel enables our sales and analytics teams to function at maximum capacity. I don't know what we'd do without them. Efficiency beats brute force every time. Simply put, data-driven companies come out on top. Thousands of SaaS companies rely on Clearbit’s marketing and sales tools Ilya Volodarsky, Cofounder, Segment Taylor Oliver, Director of Sales, Flexport

What is Product Marketing?

You Probably Learned Something Like This in School — or Wikipedia

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Challenge is, product marketing rarely works out neatly like that in reality.

Sales-driven cultures are likely to shape PMM as more sales enablement-oriented

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Self-serve cultures may push for more customer development/research

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Companies with weak revenue- or data-driven marketing may look to you to shore up the department

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Our responsibility is to analyze the business, the competitors, and the customers to form a vision of what we think product marketing should be.

Is your business self-serve, sales-driven, or both? How are people resources allocated? How large is PMM versus Product, Sales, Marketing? Do you know more about your customer — e.g., you work in martech — than some of your colleagues? Are any other departments flailing? Ultimately, how can you help grow the business?

Next, you’re going to need to get curious with the other departments: Product (Engineering and Design) Sales and CS Marketing CEO Bonus Points: Don’t just talk to leaders

“Oh, you cut out the middleman Get free from the middleman You got no time for the messenger Got no regard for the thing that you don't understand You got no fear of the underdog That's why you will not survive” - Spoon, a band from Austin, Texas

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We’re really the Department of Empathy

Your plan should include: Overview of what PMM will handle Percentages of time spent in each discipline: customer development, marketing, sales enablement, etc. Proposal for how to handle disputed areas (e.g., pricing) What you want from them. You’re not a services dept.

Present your initial ideas to stakeholders Get their feedback Come back with your mutual ideas in a joint plan And then, if possible, present to the entire company what is PMM When new leaders join, present to them.

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Alignment never rests.

Your hypothesis will probably be wrong or adjust dramatically as your company evolves. Be adaptable.

Thank you Jeff Hardison Clearbit @jshardison [email protected]