The Role of Product Marketing in B2B: Strategies, Tools, and Metrics for Success

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We got Eric, we got Jason, we got Natalie here. Let's kick this off and first let's do a quick introduction. Let's go. Natalie. Jason, Eric, don't do the 20 minute marketer explainer. Tell me who you are, what do you do for work and what's your background as it relates to product marketing.

Is that we're going to get into the good stuff.

Cool. Hey everyone, I'm Natalie. I'm in New York. A little warmer right now than Jason Eric. I am head of growth at Novatic and I'm personally really excited for this webinar because I'm actually not a trained product marketer. Sorry. That's where Jason Eric come in. But I'm starting to do more product marketing at Novatic something this quarter. I'm really taking on. So I might have selfishly put on this webinar to learn from two of the best product marketers I know. So really I'm here along with you. So we're trying to figure out like, how do I structure a product marketing function right now?

Love that. All right, big words, gentlemen. Two of the best product marketers she knows. Jason, you're one of them. Who are you?

Hey, everybody, I'm Jason. I live in Collingwood, Ontario. So up in Canada, I've always been a founding pmm. So I've been that first product marketer at a startup and today I have my own business called Productive PMM. And we do, we help other founding PMMs. And I also create interactive demos with an agency called Demo Dash with my pal Eric.

Love it. All right, Eric, that's you, man. Eric has been known to send me great hoodies. Eric, what's your background?

Yeah, Eric Holland, Pennsyl Tucky or a little town called Carlisle if you feel like looking it up. Been a product marketer for about six years. Half of that was in big time manufacturing, half of that spend in tech and also dabbled in a little sales and cs. So I love it, but.

All right, gang is here.

Sorry, just kick me off. No one cares where I work.

That's all right. What are you doing now?

Just started a new role actually as a Senior PMM at BetterWorks and do a little podcast with we're not marketers and like Jason said, start a little thing on the side called Demo Dash.

Love it. And you all came to drive last year, which is great. All right, let's transition. Talk about the role in product marketing. So I actually just want to get on a little rant to kind of set us off for a second. I actually think that product marketing is the most important marketing function inside of a marketing team at a company. And the reason why is because more than ever, and I think this is especially going to continue to go nuts and accelerate with what's happening with AI because of how much software and building products is going to become a commodity more than ever. Positioning matters, differentiation matters. And having a strategic narrative that resonates with the key buyer in a market and you can rally the whole company around the story. And the reason I say it's the most important thing is because in order to truly build differentiation, that is not something that the marketer. We can't just get in a room and do one of those like, you know, brainstorms with the post it notes and walk around and, you know, everyone slaps a post and do that whole nonsense. Because the value and the differentiation from the company has to come at the company founder level, executive level. It has to do with the roadmap. Right. What is the product vision? And product marketing's job is to own that and execute on that. But it is truly a cross functional role. The hardest part about the role of product marketing is that you don't necessarily get to go shopping for any of the ingredients, but you have to cook the meal. And so you have to work with product, you have to work with sales, you have to work with marketing. And I think that's what makes it such a complicated role to like perfectly. You know, it's very easy to say I'm an SEO specialist, I know what you do. Right. If I say I'm a product marketer, well, that could mean a lot of things. And so maybe, Jason, let's kick this off with you. How do you define the role of product marketing inside of a company? What should product marketing do and own?

It's a good question. Yeah, I think it is. I say some of the core things I think product marketing should own in a company is understanding who your product, who you're selling to. So one of the core things of positioning is who is our target customer, who's our icp? I think one is understanding your target customer, understanding why your product is differentiated in the market. So understanding what makes your product unique and better than anyone else's, and then I think enabling everyone in your company to be able to deliver that message. Like in a nutshell, if I was to say at a very high level what it was. But like you said, like that can mean a whole lot of things for product marketing. But understanding your targeting, segmentation, understanding how your product is differentiated, understanding your product's positioning, and then making sure that everyone in the company can deliver that message effectively. I think it's probably how I'd summarize the role of product.

Eric, you want to build on that?

Yeah. I won't regurgitate anything from Jason, but what I really love, I heard it at an event about two years ago, is we bring the market to the product and the product back to the market. And so I think that turns into a lot of different ways. The easiest and most traditional way is like deliverables, content deliverables mainly. But then things like positioning, messaging I think is something we have to own. We have to be able to say, hey, this is the story that's going to resonate and make sure that the product we put in market actually stays There for a really long time. You know, I think really like I'm getting really excited now about the different ways to make product LED content. So historically it was kind of like you make a one page or whatever and now you can actually be like, hey, here's the product and part of the entire sales process before they ever actually get in to the demo and then well after they've seen that first demo. So I think those aspects really should be owned heavily within the PMM function.

Natalie, where you sit, right, thinking about growth and thinking about growing revenue and growing pipeline for the business. Like how do you see product marketing enabling that to happen? Like what would it improve? How would doing better product marketing help you generate more revenue, close more deals?

Yeah, it's interesting. Early days at Novatic I was so focused just on like we need to get brand awareness out there. We need to get some early demand gen lead gen built up because people didn't know what interactive demos are really what Nevada was three years into being at Nevada now, not saying we've penetrated the whole market by any means. I'm sure plenty of you have no idea what we do, but there's a much better understanding and education out there for interactive demos and for Nomadic. So all that being said, we really realized last year that we need to focus a lot more on how we stand out. Not what are interactive demos or explaining the category, but how do we differ from other ones out there. There are now like 30 plus competitors in the interactive demo space, which is absolutely wild. And I think most software companies are in pretty competitive spaces right now. So that's why we decided to switch. Okay, Natalie, like you've been focused on the education and Legion portion. Now we really need to focus on telling our message, making clear how we are different from those competitors. And part of that is, you know, strategic launches and also kind of creating that narrative, but also working with sales team, obviously make sure they have the materials needed.

Jason, how do you do that? Any wisdom on this whole topic of differentiation? What do you do? Do you read April Dunford's book and then go do it? That's not even a dig. I think she's great. She's the probably the best book you can read. But it for whatever reason, all of the templates are out there, right? I could ask Chat GPT to make me a positioning statement and I can fill it in and it could still suck. And so how do you do this? How do you differentiate in a competitive market like Natalie's trying to do?

Yeah, I think differentiation I Think, like you said, the formula of it, like, the framework is pretty simple. I think it's just a hard thing for a lot of companies to do. So I think when you're trying to differentiate, you first need to get more specific about who you're selling to. So if you're trying to go broad and you're trying to, you know, you're not willing to really target a very specific type of company and type of buyer, then it's harder to differentiate. But if you get really specific with saying, we're going to go after these types of companies in this particular department within that company and people who have this particular problem, then being able to say why your product's different or better than the other alternatives out there becomes a lot easier. But I think a lot of companies aren't willing to do that.

Carl said in the chat, which I think is great. Segmentation leads to differentiation.

Yeah, well said. And I think that's it. I, like a lot of people, don't want to go after a very specific segment. But I think, like anyone who's listening to product marketing thought leaders on LinkedIn, I think it's something that people are starting to talk about more, and I think startups now are starting to focus more on that. So I think differentiation is basically like knowing why you're different or why someone should choose your product over the alternatives. But figuring out your differentiation becomes a lot easier when you can know specifically who you're targeting.

Do any of you have an example right now of a company that you think has nailed this differentiation in a crowded market?

Jason, I'm going to steal an example you gave me once, and I feel like you might have to say this. Basecamp, is that what you're gonna say?

No. That's an interesting one. No. Yeah. Like, go ahead. I'm curious.

Yeah, I just feel like productivity tools, like, there are so many out there, it's so obvious. But they decide to really segment down of, like, we're gonna be super simple to use. We're not gonna give you all the features. And I was gonna say what I think the hardest part of differentiation is just saying, no, like, being able to admit that you're not good at things. Any marketer I talk to early stage is always like, I want to differentiate. My CEO will not let me say that we're not good at something or we're better at something else. And I think Basecamp from the beginning was just like, hey, no, we're not going to do everything. We're just going to do a Few things really well.

Yeah, I like that.

Well, I'm going to throw a name in the hat. Everyone knows Clay, right? So the Fletch boys, give them a shout out. They reworked a company called Freckle and I just love that whole balance where they basically came right at the competitor that everyone knows, skipped all of the BS with all the context setting you have to normally do and was just like, here's how we're different. Or for non technical folks, which again, back to Jason's point was the segmentation and I think that Carl dropped that bar. Segmentation leads to differentiation.

So Freckle. I had to google freckle SaaS because if you just go to Google and type Freckle, it's SEO nightmare. So the headline says it's like Clay without the learning curve. Freckle is the clay alternative for non technical users. Unlock your best outbound campaigns with easy enrichment, research and cleanup templates for your leadless. This is a great example of a early stage company differentiating. Right. This gets harder though as the company grows. Right? You know Eric, you've done this at a bigger company. I've been through this where once the company grows and there's more pressure from investors and the board and the market to grow, you naturally add on more Personas and everybody kind of eventually goes to this north star of like, well, now we sell to all these Personas. Now we are the all in one platform. And that is where it gets hard. It's easy to differentiate when you're doing one thing for one person really well. Can you build a successful business that way?

You can, but you know what I'm.

Trying to articulate, like it gets harder as you're asked to add on more stuff. How does product marketing drive that internally? How do you stay differentiated as you grow and who's done it well that you can think of?

Yeah, I think it's a hard thing because I think when you're trying to sell a platform, your messaging does get broader. I'm trying to think of a company that's done it well. I think when you get to a point where you are a platform, then it's really a matter of either focusing on individual products and each of those individual products is differentiated in some way. And there's a very specific kind of go to market for each of those individual products or you're focusing on specific use cases. So hey, if you are looking to accomplish XYZ job or solve this particular problem, our platform is going to help you do that better. For these reasons, I Think a company like, I'm a big user of Notion, and I think one of the things that Notion does extremely well is they take a product that's so broad and they make it really easy to understand how you can use it for very specific use cases.

So they.

And they do that with templates. But I think they do it by saying, hey, we have this really broad platform. You can do a million things with it. But if you are trying to, like I know, for example, they're working with product marketers to say, hey, how are product marketers using our product for different product marketing use cases? And so you compare them to other project management tools, like a ClickUp or something like that, a Notion is out there saying, hey, for product marketers, we're a lot better. Our AI can help you with xyz. But here are all these templates that are going to help you do all these different product marketing use cases. And they go out and they partner with product marketers like Jess Petrella, who's building out different templates on Notion for product Marketers. I think that would be an example of a company that's gotten so broad that it's hard for them to be very specific, but they're trying to go after very particular audiences or buyers use cases, that sort of thing.

I got one. I'm a big fan of figma. Right? And you know, Figma, I mean, typically going against like Adobe products and stuff like that. I think last time I was on their website they're still positioning as the design tool for designers, but I use it all the time. Was just on a call with Toss Bober, shout out to us. I think you're on here. She was using figma too. I know the Fletch boys use figma. What's interesting is that their positioning doesn't seem to change. They're still focused on like designers, but I am very much not one of those. I know the other few folks I mentioned are not one of those. And so it's interesting that they've stayed pretty rigid with their positioning and who they're going, at least from a inbound perspective. You know, you got folks like me and other product marketers and other marketers using it for their own uses. So that's one I like to lean on specifically. I think a good story goes along.

It's also like as the company grows, maybe your facts and your ingredients change. And so maybe Notion can tout that they're the big, you know, maybe being the biggest matters, maybe having the most customization options for Templates matters, right? Maybe Figma has the most designers at other companies. Like you matter. Maybe the ingredients change a little bit. There's some good product marketers in this chat right now. All right, I want to ask a question from a different angle, which is what are some of the what does bad product marketing look like? It can be hard to articulate good because it's like, you know, what are good examples? Who does good look like? But let's flip this and say like bad product marketing. Most of the people here are B2B marketers. A lot of them in SaaS, but not all SaaS. Right? Let's take the flip side of that. Bad product marketers. What did they often do or chase?

I'd be happy to tell what we have been doing because honestly we haven't been doing good product marketing. So I'm willing to out myself and talk about why we decided to prioritize it. I think the biggest thing I've heard and that we've done too is just like reactive versus proactive. So it's a lot of like, okay, product launch something. And I've done this at other companies too. Oh my God. Let's scramble to put together some positioning messaging statement. Go make a few LinkedIn posts that are just like, hey, this is now live. That's awesome. Write a blog post and then be done with it and move on to the next launch. Like, everything feels so much last minute. It's not really planned. You're not aligned with your product team as far as, okay, this is what we're going to share. I think that's one end. Just like putting out way too much every time there's a new feature.

Gab says in the chat, you basically become an asset shipping function. Right? Like we need something turned to product marketing. We need to launch blog posts. Hey, we have this new feature coming out next week.

What can we exactly like? I've heard so many product marketers just talk like, I feel like a task taker or an order taker versus getting to be part of the strategic conversation. I'll say on the flip side, probably what I've been doing poorly at Nevadic is little product marketing. I've almost been so scared to do so much like new feature, new feature. Hey, look at this flossy feature that I haven't strategically woven our product into our messaging as much or positioning much as I should have. Very ironic for an interactive demo company. But I think being so scared to talk about the product because I didn't think about it in A strategic way, just kind of ignoring new feature launches. And we hear from customers all the time, wait, you guys put out this feature? You put out this feature? I didn't know about that. So either like two spectrums of over educating the market with one off features or undereducating the market and just like not letting them know about these launches.

Yeah. To build off that, I think you called it small product marketing. I think most product marketers, or a lot of SaaS companies in general, don't market their product enough and don't get their product out there in front of people enough. And so I think that when we think of a product focused campaign or we think of talking about our product in the market, it's usually tied to some sort of new thing, some. So it's like a new feature, a new launch, something like that. And I think that product marketers, what good product marketing would look like, but I suppose as an opposite, what bad product marketing looks like is when a product marketer is waiting just for new things to talk about their product in the market. So you can talk about use cases for your product. You can talk about success stories around your product. You can talk about success stories, use cases. There's all kinds of things. You could talk about your existing. Oh, examples of your existing product. You do that extremely well, Natalie. So I think that you look at companies like Clay and they have their Clay books. You're talking about different use cases for Clay chili. Piper does the same thing with spicy chili use cases. You look at you, Natalie, and you have showcases. You're talking about customers all the time. And you have your advisors like myself who are out there kind of doing videos about your customers. And I think that product marketers just aren't doing that enough at all. And so you're Jeff there and showing people your product.

Jeff kind of built on this in the chat and said you can also keep talking about the products you launch. A product launch doesn't start and end on day one. And so I think launch market marketing is amazing and I think it's very underrated. I understand why a lot of the product marketers in here hate it because you don't want to be the just like, hey, let's launch something. But I think that launches are an awesome opportunity to go and retell your broader story to the market. And so like I work with a great founder once who would be like in our 101, he'd be like, all right, what do you got from the product team? I'm like, just this kind of, like, lame little update feature, like, new dashboards. And he'd be like, no, no, let's use this as the opportunity to tell the bigger story. It's like these new dashboards now allow this person to have more insight and visibility into X, Y, and Z. And so maybe, yeah, you can't write 1500 words just about that, but we could write an article that basically shows a new dashboard, a quick blurb about this feature, and then tells the bigger story about, like, hey, here's what we're building, and here's why this matters, right? Also building on your examples, Jason, of, like, things you can create, I actually think that sometimes we don't have launches. I like the forcing function of, like, nobody's giving us things to launch. Like, what can we do? And it could be like, let's make a killer deck and a video and an article about, like, 15 ways you can use clay that you didn't know you could use, right? And it's like, boom. Use case, use case. Example, example, example. So, like, the creativity and the freedom to be able to go and create those things and then using everything as an opportunity to go back to the market. I also think product marketing can be a momentum driver for the company. We did this at Drift, where we had this concept called marketable moments, which is once a month, we would do a launch. It was the first Tuesday of every month. No matter what it was on the calendar for a year, it was the first Tuesday of the month. Because we knew that based on our sales cycle, like, we wanted to stack that kind of momentum earlier in the month. We didn't want it to be later. And then we would sit down with the product team, literally in a meeting together, and we'd look at the first half of the year. From January to June. What product stuff do we have? And they're like, all right, well, in April, we're going to do this thing. February, we might have this. And then in June, we have this big launch. Okay, cool.

That's great.

I got three things now. Now I know I got to go fill in three other slots with, like, marketing driven stuff. And now we have a calendar that can be driven by product marketing. That is momentum for the company. It might not always be new product stuff, but I do think having that launch mentality allows you to have a constant narrative to the company. And last thing before I shut up on this is Marc Benioff has always done this really well. Say whatever you want to say about Salesforce now. It's easy to throw rocks at Them because they're the massive incumbent, right? But what they have done, they basically have the same three or four messages and they tell them over and over and over and over and over. It's like they do it at dinners, at road shows, at events in their website. Right. And so oftentimes just repetition and frequency matter. And so it's about repeating the same core messages and executing them in different ways versus always having to add new stuff to add on. Eric, did you want to chime in and say something on top of that?

Are hot takes welcome here?

No, Absolutely.

I saw something in the chat about making a PMM charter. I'm going to say that's a mistake and what you should do, what does that mean? PMM charter is typically like a slide deck that outlines what you do and what you're responsible for and what they shouldn't come to you for. My take is that those don't work. They typically sit on a shelf after you give the presentation. And what I found really effective, particularly in day two of week three at this new role, is spending about a week and a half, two weeks figuring out like, where are these, like gaps? Where are the things that I can actually maybe make some moves and then have start having functional conversations with those leaders that say, here's where I want to do some work. What do you think about this? The light bulb has been boom on and some of the follow up conversations have been like, I'm going to go let my team know that these are the type of things that they should be coming to you for in the next 60, 90 days and that everything else not to bug you with. I'm like, wow, that's what the charter's supposed to do. So my advice, hot take would be don't spend your first two weeks building a deck and giving a presentation. Just lay low, analyze, figure out where you can make some silent moves and then go have those functional conversations with the leadership teams who actually need your help to get some shit done.

Eric, can I add on to that? I think one thing I'd add that I did try to do early at Nevada too is don't ask the sales team what they want. Go talk to customers, go listen to recordings and go talk to customers in person during those two weeks. Figure out common themes, then create content for them because then they'll trust that you know you are anticipating their needs and will create that content. And every now and then they might have feedback or like, oh, can you do this? Can you do something else similar to this? Or for this Industry. But I, I used to be a little more of an order taker, my last job. And I found by being proactive and being like, here's the material, here's what I'm working on. Or if they ask for something, say like, oh, actually I Talked to like 10 customers. They've mentioned this use case is really important. So I'm going to prioritize that first. And they'll be like, oh, yeah, I hear that use case all the time. That's awesome.

Yeah, I think there's a balance with all that stuff. I think, like, if you come in new as a product marketer to a company, I think you do 100%, you want to get out and you want to talk to customers and you want to try and do your own assessment of what people are saying in the market and that sort of thing. But I think if you are not sitting down with everyone in your company and asking them what they. Now, I come from a world of founding product marketers, so the first one in the company, if you're not asking the question of like, hey, what are you struggling with right now? Where can product marketing help? And you're not prioritizing some of that stuff, I think you're missing out for sure. There's a balance of things that you yourself are being proactive and you're looking at like, what you're seeing. But then there's also some stuff you're hearing from within the company. And the thing I'll say about the charter. Cause I think you make a great point, Eric. I think the charter is something that you need to do, that listening tour, you need to get out and you need to talk to people within your company and outside of it. But I think the good thing about a charter, especially when you're, you know, you're stepping into this role and there's no playbook set out for you, is it gives you this kind of goal of I'm doing all these things. And sometimes the creation of this charter helps you kind of solidify your thinking and just get it down somewhere in the process of creating it. It's not like it's necessarily some artifact everyone's going to reference all the time, but sometimes these sort of things actually just help you get your thinking straight. Getting it down on paper actually helps. So that's why I'm big, like, why I'm a fan of those things. But that's just my perspective.

Yeah, I really know you love them, so I just had to.

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Let's talk at the Executive level. Let's not talk about like early stage startup and individual contributor. I want to think like you're talking to the CEO. The three of you are hired consultants to tell the CEO and the founder and whoever runs marketing, maybe the head of sales, cfo. How do we think about the value of product marketing and how do we measure product marketing success? And I ask that because, you know, whether you're trying to be the order taker or not, it does end up like a lot of output. New sales decks, new examples, new collateral we don't often have in product marketing like this, this one metric, right? We start doing content, content person could say, yeah, traffic has grown, you know, 47% bit harder to show that in product marketing. How would you coach a CEO, founder manager with the goal of I want to help people manage up here, what's the right way to think about measuring?

Yeah, I can go ahead. So there are a few things that I would recommend to people. So like one and someone just tossed it in the chat there. OKRs. Like I've always been a fan of OKRs and when it comes to OKRs within product marketing, I like to think of it as okrps, meaning the objectives like that high level, not as measurable, more aspirational objective. And it could be like laddering up to something that's a company objective. Your key results are things that are measurable, time bound, specific. But then the projects, because project marketing is project based, quarter in, quarter out. You mean working on specific initiatives and projects and knowing what projects ladder up to those key results and then up to those objectives is going to help. You know that. Okay, this list of projects that I have this quarter, how do I prioritize it? Prioritize it based on how it ladders up to those objectives. So I think the OKR method I think is definitely one thing.

But can you give me some examples? What would like just example objectives and key results for a product marketing team.

And so like an objective example could be like hey, this year we want to break into the financial services industry. A key result of that might be that hey, in Q1 we want to sell, we want to close $200,000 in revenue or maybe we want to get 200,000 in pipeline for those types of deals. And then within product marketing, you know that okay, well for us we have to work on an enablement project because we need to make sure that our sales team, like that particular segment team is able to one has the collateral that they need, maybe an updated pitch deck. We've done the enablement training with them so they understand the messaging, that sort of thing, those things on their own. It's not like there's a metric tied to them other than you get the work done. But if you were laddering that up to oh, this is helping impact a certain revenue number for that particular segment, then lat ladders up there.

Right. But like what's great and challenging about that is what Jason just said, like that that can't happen unless the product marketing team, if that plan is not fully integrated with the company plan because product marketing doesn't have the keys to just like run campaigns and generate pipeline. So that needs to be like in partnership with Rev Ops and demand Gen and whatever and like support them on this mission of booking 100 meetings in this segment this quarter. That just is an initiative that you're going to help work, right?

Yeah. And that's why things like the okrs you would do on a quarterly basis and usually it would be you're sitting with your marketing team and everyone is figuring out the okrs for the quarter. And so you know what you need to ladder up to, you know what other initiatives that you're supporting in some way that kind of ladder up to that. I see a lot of chat here as well around KPIs, I think in terms of like numbers that a product marketer wants to tie themselves to. So revenue impact is ideally as a product marketer, if you can tie yourself to revenue, that's amazing. And a couple of ways that you could do that would be one, if you're doing a product launch and it's a net new thing, something that has its own revenue tied to it, then making sure that you have revenue targets for a product launch, maybe it's a quarter after the launch, six months after the launch, that is revenue that you can tie yourself to. And when you go for your, you know, your annual review, you can bring those numbers and you can say, hey, I've impacted this much revenue. Another one would be things like competitive win rate. So Eric knows a lot about this one, coming from his past roles. But if as a product marketer I think one metric you can really kind of own is not just close rate because so much goes into close rate, but your competitive win rate would be something where you versus other competitors. A lot of what you're doing as a product marketer, if you're working on things like competitive intelligence, you are working on sales enablement around how to differentiate, if you're working on competitive comparison pages, all those things that are going to Help your team compete better. Tying yourself and being the one who reports on your competitive win rate is a metric that you can really own. The last one. And this is something that I think product marketers, not everyone wants to get into, but it would be things like deal support or deal influence. So Clara Smith is an awesome product marketer. She worked with Slack and she was more on the CI side. And one of the things that she did is she got really in depth with deal support. So she was the expert on them versus teams and all this stuff. And she would get in and she would help, whether it's helping strategize on a deal, creating content for that deal, right, like being a sounding board or a go to person for the sales rep. And she would tie herself to every one of those deals. So she had a target every quarter that she was focusing on. And so I think like one thing a product marketer can do is even if there's a field on the deal, some way that you can say that you helped influence that and maybe a pick list where you can go through and talk about the different ways that you helped influence it. If you're getting very specific, I mean if you're getting embedded in sales and really help influence deals, then that should be a number that you tie yourself.

One thing going on in chat, people kind of asking like, how do you track that sales is using these assets? How do we track assets utilization without signing like a broken record? How do you tie collaterals between sales, collateral between revenue? How do you all answer that?

I hate the answer because honestly, at least from my experience, it's going to require some budget. But there's a lot of different ways. Software is maybe not particularly for product marketing yet we want this whole tool suite. But there's a lot of things that you can do where it just plugs into your CRM and then you work with rev ops and the magic happens there.

So you're saying there are tools that like just like a website we can track, like oh, did they use X in this deal? Right.

100%. I've been very fortunate. Basically inherited Novatic while I was at Clue and was able to use that for nearly a year. And that was the one of the big aha moments for me was like, I no longer have to like guess. Also, if your company has deal rooms, I haven't had the fortune of using them myself. But that's also a great way because you can actually put in your content into these deal rooms and then the sales team is using them and you can say, look, when they're using this content or this playbook, we have this conversion rate or this competitive win rate.

And then isn't there like the low budget option? I see this in the chat. Like the way to not. Okay, so most of the. If you're asking about the budget for it, we can make the assumption that you're probably an early stage company and therefore you're not going to spend on it as you grow in the later stages. Like you. Absolutely. The way to track it is to buy a tool and to use the tool to track it. Like that is how we do it. It's like not knowing what's going on. So you got to make the investment at some point. But let's just say earlier stages. Wouldn't the answer be like let's make less collateral, let's make more meaningful collateral. We improved the website flow. Or here's a specific one, we improved. I know you all hate the sales deck. We improved the sales deck. We made a way better demo discovery and demo called deck. We rolled it out across the sales team in Q2 and win rates went up 17%. Would that not be one way you can measure the success of the impact of product marketing?

Yeah, 100%. I actually would recommend that too is like there has to be a sense of discipline in those early stages in the content you make so you can measure it. Right. Because if you've got 15 pieces of content out there in the ether and you make changes to all of them or even a few of them, it's so much harder to say like this one or even this one or two made a difference. And so I completely agree with that sentiment. Is there has to be the responsible here in the room that says hey, we're going to cool it on how much we output. We're just going to make these few assets really, really good and then measure.

Yeah. Another one that's pretty tactical too is you here probably have a call recording tool, something that's a little more tactical. But most people have dong. Most people have something like that. Those are pretty good now at picking up on is a slide on the screen. And so it's pretty helpful if you. Especially if you make a change to a sales deck.

Right.

Like so you launch a new product or you do some positioning change and now there's like an altered one or two slides halfway through the deck and that's how you explain your narrative. Right. And I think that's something that you can pretty easily track. And not only track if it's being Used, but then actually listen back to those calls and be like, is the messaging also being used? Not just the sales deck, like this slide itself. So that's a good one too.

Matt from our team in our private chat said, I like Jason Chill, Canadian product marketing guy. He, he's from Canada. It's a big. Apparently it's a different country and there's a bunch of different, you know, things that happen up there. It seems great. Seems great.

They don't have Trader Joe's.

They don't have Trader Joe's. And I try to send Matt some swag from Exit 5 for being like a kick ass team member and I had to write like a 13 page essay to send that stuff up there.

It's crazy.

Anyway. But yeah, you all are great. Canadians are great. All right, we're gonna go to Q and A. Y' all can hang out and feel free to just come off mute and you know, shout if you feel like you have a strong answer to these. We're going to just spend the last session of the Snot webinar, which is y' all are doing an awesome job. Great vibes in here today. This question is from Sophia. How much of the positioning and GTM strategy should be led by product marketing vs brand marketing? Great question. I've seen it done by both.

Companies I've worked at that have a brand team. They have not owned positioning or go to market strategy. So I'm just going from my experience here, I think brand can support product marketing, can support the marketing team in these things. But I think it's. Yeah, product marketing owns both.

Cool.

Yeah. I might have a. It might be simpler, it might also stir the pot a little. But like I've never seen the brand team hang out with product or the engineers or honestly even sales. So I think like, how are you going to have that cross functional go to market approach if it's just siloed to marketing would be my question more than anything.

Yeah.

And who would have time to like make any branded swag if the brand team was doing product marketing? It would be a huge issue in the company.

Yeah, someone's got to make that stuff look good.

Yeah, yeah.

Product marketing.

Yeah.

I ran a brand team for a bit. I can say that. Haha. Inside joke.

I do see in the chat there are some people who are saying like I have seen product marketing own brand, which is interesting. Like Mark Huber. I know, like Jeff.

Yeah. I think there's like a bunch of different definitions of brand. Like there is brand as in like you Know your logo, the look and feel. And then there's brand, which is like the narrative. Like, actually when I. Towards the end of my run when I was at Drift, I moved into a role where I was running the brand team. There was a separate product marketing Org, but they did that with me because they wanted to have me lead the story and the narrative for the company and then, like, the visual execution of that. And I would work with product marketing to do that. And I think it's just a unique. It's come up time and time again on our podcast and everything. There is no. There is no perfect formula for team building. Right. Everyone does it differently. And so it's based on your ingredients, who's at your company. Maybe there's this amazing copywriter and storyteller that happens to sit on the brand team and she leads the narrative exercise. Right. I think a lot of that is just nuance. Okay, let's take this next one. How can a PMM shine in a SLG company? So I thought this was sales led, but then somebody else in the chat said, state and local government. I don't know what it is. We're gonna assume that. I think the more wide. I don't think that the person who asked this is. Okay, all right, they said sales led.

All right, great.

Boom.

Clarified.

Thank you. Someone else who didn't ask the question. Classic us, right in the chat was like, no, it means this. All right, so how can product marketing shine in a sales led company other than just pounding martinis with the, you know, old school field sales team?

So I have a cool example of. So when I was at klu, I got to work a lot with this guy, Dan Hamilton, who was. He was VP Competitive intelligence at Salesforce at the time. I think now he's corporate strategy. But I remember one of the things that really stuck with me. He said that one of the reasons he was invited into executive meetings with Marc Benioff and was valuable in those meetings is because he was so involved in sales deals. So he would be the guy who, even as VP at Salesforce, he was, like, involved in pretty high stakes deals. He was the one who was helping them on the competitive strategy side. And he can walk into these meetings and be like, I know exactly what's happening on deals. I was on one yesterday. We won for XYZ reason. We lost for XYZ reason. And that was his unique insight that he was able to bring to the table. I think for product marketers that want to get a seat at the table or be Someone who's seen as strategic and be invited to or, you know, be seen or make their way into leadership, all that stuff. I think if you're in sales LED company, it's like, get in the weeds with sales. So it doesn't mean you have to be their, like, servant and just kind of jump on every request that they give you. But if you can be the one person in the company who's like, I'm listening to sales calls all the time. I get involved in sales conversations and deals, and I can tell you why we're winning and losing deals, or I can tell you what prospects are actually saying on the phone. I think it's going to be, you'll shine.

I had a VP of product marketing on my podcast a couple years ago, and he. It was like a $500 million SaaS company, cybersecurity. He ran product marketing. I asked him about KPIs, because it always comes up. He said, you know what my number one KPI is? How well does the sales team know the product marketer that serves them? He's like, I've had a segment where they don't even know the name of the person who serves them in product marketing. And I was like, seriously, that can't be a metric. He said, no, I'm dead serious. Like, if they know Jason, they know what he eats, they know what he likes, they know his senses. That means he is in there working with them. And I think there is something in all of the metricification and autonomous growth and all the nonsense that we want to do. Like, can you roll up your sleeves, sit down with the sales team and say, hey, what do you like, everyone gets so defensive about, like, you know, we don't want to become the collateral makers. Well, don't. That is kind of the job. You can't make 100 pieces of clutter. But you do need to sit down with the sales team and say, hey, what do you all need to close more deals? And how can I be the person to help you do that? That is the way to get them to become truly a partner together.

Too many.

So, Natalie, I haven't heard your voice for a while, so I want to give you opportunity to jump in.

Before now, you guys are honestly, I'm just learning. I'm just sitting back with the audience learning from you all. Learning from the chat.

Yeah, bro, she invited you to come on here.

You guys do the work.

Yeah, we're writing a review as we speak.

I've already.

Doesn't die until I do. Okay, Dave, So what I was going to actually say to this is like, one thing that I have really been fortunate about is I've always been in like a sales led motion of some kind. And typically there is some type of friction with the buying process because sales, there's typically like an intro call and then another call and then another call. Then you might get the demo as an example. Typically timid to show pricing. So there's things that I think you can do monumentally that like, they may not even come to you for. They're not going to say, hey, put pricing on the website, but if you can like really dig in and say, hey, these are some really good examples of where people lifted pricing on their website, how that led to more opportunities for the sales team to go feast and what it turned to the conversion rate on the win rate side. That is something that I think is, you know, in any product marketer's capability. Same thing with the messaging. You know, it better works. Right now, universally, everyone's setting a different pitch. They're a little bit unclear on what is the value that they should communicate and the problem that we should dig into that is fully in my control to go help and figure out and massage. So there's a lot of things that I think we have the opportunity to do in a sales led organization that really can make us shine. But you've got to be looking at things from both angles. I think. What does sales need to shine but what can also make their job easier so that the buyer just naturally wants.

To say yes, easier.

All right, Natalie, this one's for you. Your fans are in the chat raving for more of you. So this question's from Noelle. It feels like nobody uses our one pagers anymore. Is there a new format people will use or what's the next one pager replacement? Just curious. As someone who's getting deep in the product marketing world right now, what assets are you creating? What are you delivering? Is there a replacement for the one pager? Is there a deck? What are you making?

Yeah, I love this question because I have told my team I don't want to make them any one pagers. I will say so I'm going to caveat this. It's like an enterprise sale and you are going for a bigger buying committee. And I'm curious, Jason, Eric's point of this too. I think there is maybe if it's a more old school sale or larger, they expect polished, formal one pagers. That is the case. I've told my team I will make them A DICE one pager enterprise. Everything else. I want it to be dynamic. Obviously I'm going to give a little plug for demos, but I don't really care what form of dynamic content it is as long as it's something that I can update on the Fly. It can't sit in a folder somewhere and get outdated. So I think we mentioned like deal rooms. You can use those kind of to replace one pagers and have multiple pieces of content. Obviously I've used demos almost as a way to replace even slideshows rather than a slide deck that has a bunch of pictures of product images, just walk them through the different parts of the product with an interactive demo. But really just anything that I can update on the fly doesn't have to be just let out once and forgotten about. That's the biggest thing because I've seen so many one pagers live and die.

Oh, or then they just keep asking you to update it. I'm like, you didn't even read the last one.

Yeah, that's why it's like when you do get to a point where you can have something like HighSpot and actually see how much they're getting used, then you have a good answer for that. But until you do, you can't really. I'm not a big fan of PDFs because I just think it's like a content form there. Why have a PDF when you can just have it on a landing page or something like that.

But I've always thought that if it's like the best product marketing asset is your public facing website. Unless you have trade secrets that you can't show there, it should be a website.

So sure.

I've had sales reps on the call just be like, oh yeah, go to, you know, drift.com. you know why Drift and that Boom. We move the deck to the landing page.

I wonder if it has something to do with, you know, maybe reps like to attach something to an email and they don't like to just link out to things.

I will, I won't say. I've heard my rep say I want it to feel like I made it for them. Like they sometimes want something that feels custom made, which I mean you can make it.

Yeah, you're getting the case.

It would be off brand and messaging would be all over the place.

Yep.

Yeah, we are getting to a point though because like I worked for a while, there was a startup that was doing something like that where basically they would come in and a rep could go to them, shoot them a message, say Hey, I have a call tomorrow or I'm. I just started to deal with XYZ company and they would take a one pager template and they would personalize it to that company's messaging and all that stuff. And it was all done by just people like product marketers doing it instead of some type of AI. The plan is, was eventually get it to AI.

Have you seen that new thing, what's it called? Deep Seek. It's over man. We're all Deep Seek.

I've. But I think that's where you are going to get to. It's like you have a one pager template. It looks into Salesforce, it knows what's going on with the deal, where they're from, what their industry is. It can look up their website and it like tailor spits it back out.

For a rep. That'd be sick. Back in my day we called that an intern. But yeah, I'm ready for the new wave. Okay, I got, I have a final question and then we're going to throw the poll. So real quick, how do you hire a good product marketer? We're not talking about recruit like how do you build pipeline but like what are questions to ask? What would you go with through in the interview process to identify?

So it's hard. I can't come from that perspective. But I do want to give two notes. The last two like full time roles that I've had, it wasn't like an application process and it was much of a I know this person and I know their work and so maybe not directly answering your question but as a hiring manager I would definitely keep that feel out there and just be willing to ask people, hey, are you open to an opportunity? Because I think you'd be surprised how many folks are and if you already kind of know their work and their reputation because you follow them and like their stuff, it's definitely moved along both of my last two processes in terms of the role and it's made a lot easier I think coming in on those first few weeks on here's my skill set, here's the things I'm good at and here's where I want to start digging into.

Nice. I think one thing that always I really liked doing was I found like almost like an assignment and things like that I wasn't really getting a lot. Like I basically what I started doing was say hey, we're gonna have a call and I want you to bring examples of stuff you've done and I want you to walk me through it and I Wanted to get a sense that it was good in a couple ways. One, I get to see stuff they'd actually done. So I got to see, you know, what the writing looked like or, you know, a launch they might have worked on or a sales deck they made, that sort of thing. And then I also got them to walk me through it so I could hear about the process that they went through making it get a sense for like how much of this actually came from them versus someone else. But I always found it was like pretty good. Part of the interview process was that call because I really walked away with like a better understanding of what they were capable of. And I think again, I'm coming, like, usually it was like, I'm hiring my first other product marketer and because I was the first one there and I'm still looking for a generalist. Like, I'm not looking for a specialist or someone who's like, oh, I know packaging and pricing really well, or I'm a competitive intel expert. I'm looking for someone who can do a little bit of everything at that stage.

I don't have for specific product marketing, but I can answer just two questions I really like to use in the interview process. One I always like to ask is like, what is something from your old job that you loved and you want to bring to this job? And what is something that you didn't like as much that I think you'll get a sense of, like, if they liked strategy or they liked long term campaign planning, but if they didn't like being an order taker, that's kind of a good idea if they are strategic or not. And then the second question I always love is, what is something? Let's say you took this job, it's a year later and you're reflecting back and you're so happy you took the job for X reason. And if they say, like, I made a strategic impact on the business, I helped launch a brand new product, or if they just say, oh, I learned some things, or like, I can kind of get an idea of how strategic they are through those two questions. And the best part about them is they don't usually get asked in that way. So people can't just like robot answer with their set answers. So go steal those two questions. Hopefully that helps.

All right, give it up. Wherever you are, give it up for my panel of product marketers. Great job. Thank you all. We wouldn't be product marketers ourselves if we didn't ask for feedback. So real quick, right before you sign off and Continue on your day. Throw us a quick response to this poll on the screen right here that my producer Danielle has thrown up 10 out of 10. Gab says yes. Aaron says thank you. Lots of fives, couple fours. You know, it's all good. Really good. Really good. Informative session. This was so great. Thanks, y'. All. 100 out of 10. Leslie, what says it's a four? That's all good. It happens. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Amazing session. Thank you. Beautiful people. Thank you. Oh, four is pretty good. I thought it was four out of ten. All right. I'm not. My bad. Jason, Natalie, Eric, find you on LinkedIn. This will be a podcast episode on our ever popular B2B marketing podcast. And so check it there. Check us out in the Exit 5 community. Thank you to Natalie Novotic for doing this, for bringing us this crew together. Shout out to you product marketers. Keep doing the damn thing, helping your companies grow. Close more deals, less KPIs, more shipping work. And here's to a great 2025. Good job, Y'. All. We'll see you later. Adios.

Thanks, everyone.

Later.

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