Aligning your product marketing with the rest of your company

Transcript

1. Aligning Your Product Marketing With the Rest of Your Company

   Jeff Hardison, Director of Product Marketing

2. 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

3. What is Product Marketing?

4. You Probably Learned Something Like This in School — or

   Wikipedia
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6. Challenge is, product marketing rarely works out neatly like that

   in reality.

7. Sales-driven cultures are likely to shape PMM as more sales

   enablement-oriented
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9. Self-serve cultures may push for more customer development/research

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11. Companies with weak revenue- or data-driven marketing may look to

    you to shore up the department
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13. Our responsibility is to analyze the business, the competitors, and

    the customers to form a vision of what we think product marketing should be.

14. 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?

15. 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

16. “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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18. We’re really the Department of Empathy

19. 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.

20. 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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22. Alignment never rests.

23. Your hypothesis will probably be wrong or adjust dramatically as

    your company evolves. Be adaptable.

24. Thank you Jeff Hardison Clearbit @jshardison jeff@clearbit.com