5 Signs You Need to Hire a Product Marketing Manager -- Yesterday! With Brex's VP Product Marketing

I'm Emmy Hoffmeister. I am a product marketer. I currently lead the function for Brex, and I was previously at LinkedIn and Adobe and a number of other companies. And I think that product marketing is one of the most important functions that you can have inside of a scaling company. And I am obviously biased, but I'm not alone in this. According to LinkedIn data, there is twice the demand for product marketers as there is for product managers. Sales engineers, and even data analysts, just looking at the number of open jobs versus the number of people that could do those jobs. Additionally, last year, in the past year, 1 out of every 3 people in product marketing has taken a new job. So there is just a ton of demand for this function. So if it's something that you're thinking about or investing in, it's time to get on it. But first, really, what is product marketing? And some of you may know because you see it happening every day, and oftentimes it's happening in other parts of the organization. Organization, but product marketing is really the connective tissue between your sales team, your marketing team, and your product team. It's our job to understand the customers, the market, and the competition, and then use those insights to inform product strategy, to develop differentiated messaging, and also to arm sales with the right information so that you can actually bring a product to market successfully. In a lot of organizations, especially early on, the CEO or the founders primarily play this role. It's their job to know the customers and the market inside and out, and then bring that perspective back to the business so you can think about what you're building and how you're delivering it. But over time, the CEO hopefully has a lot more things to focus on, a lot more complexity within the business. And you need someone who can come in and be obsessed with the customer, be an incredible storyteller, and really get shit done for your business. And so these are the 5 telltale signs that you need product marketing inside your organization. First is you have a good product, but you're not seeing adoption go as fast. So another quick show of hands. Who of you has a great product? Everyone's hands should go up. Who of you would like to see that product be sold faster or sales accelerate? Great. So that's most of you. And if you said no, like if you're really happy with the rate of sales, I actually have Another reason for you why you need a product marketer, but we'll come back to that. But imagine the scenario, right? You launch a product, things are going great, you're getting a ton of press, a ton of traction, people love it. But over a couple of months or a little bit of time, you start to see pipeline slow and every deal feels harder to close. You got to figure out what's going on. Is it that maybe you don't have as good of a product as you thought? Maybe there's some features missing or use cases that you're just not addressing. Or potentially you're not targeting the right buyer. There's somebody else out there, whether it's company size or persona, that you haven't really nailed. You might also not be creating the right amount of urgency. This might be a product that a lot of people feel like is a nice-to-have versus a must-have. And it's product marketing's job to look across those different potential problems and complications and identify the right ways to solve so you can move forward and reaccelerate your business. Second sign that you need a product marketer is now you have actually found product-market fit and you are scaling. This is very exciting any time when you are investing in go-to-market. And so the question that you might be asking yourself here is, well, what's the tradeoff? Do I want to bring in another salesperson, an SDR? Do I need a product marketer at this time? And I would think about two considerations, and one is quality over quantity. And the equation might be different depending where you are in your business. But do you want 10 good salespeople and, and, and maybe hire another person? Now you have 11 or 12 good salespeople. Or do you want 10 great salespeople because your product marketing team is able to provide the right information, the collateral, the competitive de-positioning that actually makes every conversation that much more elevated? I think the other consideration here is around kind of protecting your future. Just because you're the first to market or the fastest to grow in market, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to win that market. And so you need a team or you need a person that is focused on building and defining your competitive moat and then like propagating that or promoting that to your customers. So really securing your competitive differentiation and then riding that trajectory. Third sign, your sales are going through the roof, right? So this is actually like best case scenario. The product is basically selling itself. You don't need any marketing to talk about this or what you're doing. And I think that there's— well, this is a great position to be in. This is also a good time to make a strategic pivot as an organization. So what I often see, and I've been in a couple of companies in this situation where sales are just going through the roof It's also the Wild West. Sales is kind of saying whatever works. And, and, you know, they're making promises that sometimes you can deliver on and sometimes you can't. So you need product marketing to really wrangle, wrangle in the team and start to have a more strategic foot forward. So two quick, like, personal anecdotes. I had the good fortune of being an intern at Google back in 2004. Now, there was no question that sales were going through the roof and they were having no trouble in this area. But I was there at a really interesting time when the sales team was transitioning from being more of a territory-oriented sales team to becoming vertically focused. And if you think about territories versus selling into territories versus verticals, you're moving from kind of being able to talk about a product, what it does and why it's beneficial, but a more transactional sale to being able to talk to an industry about how they should be thinking, what are the words they should be bidding on, what are other players within the space actually thinking about and doing. So it's a huge strategic pivot, even, even when your sales are going really well. I think the other thing too that I have observed is maybe you have a sales team of 10, 20, 30 people. You might be getting 10, 20, 30 different stories in the market. And this is when you need to wrangle the team via a centralized force of information and just insight into where your company is, where it's going, and why it matters for your customers. All right. The fourth, the fourth sign that it's time to get a product marketer in the door is your CEO is slammed. Earlier I said that the CEO is often the— plays the role of product marketing, especially in early-stage companies. As you scale, the CEO needs to divert their attention elsewhere. But knowing and understanding the customer is one of the most important things that you can do and keep your eyes on. As a company to make sure that you sustain your success. So you need somebody who has the time to focus on this. You need to give your CEO bandwidth, and you need to make sure that you don't lose sight of what the customer needs and wants. And the final sign that you need a product marketer is you're expanding. And if you're in this situation, you probably already have a product marketing team. But my guidance and advice is before you enter that new market, before you launch that new product, before you try to target a different persona, get, get the product marketer in the house to help figure out, well, how are you going to reposition the product that you have today? Or is this actually a compelling opportunity? Is this the right business? Is this the right business case to pursue for your organization? All right. So if any of those signs resonated with you, then maybe it's time to start building your PMM team. And there's 3 things that I'll leave you that you should look for as you bring in product marketing to your organization. The first thing that I look for is an amazing storyteller. And my favorite and the number 1 question I always ask is, tell me about the product— tell me about the product that you support today, or tell me about the business that you work in today. I'm looking for a clear, concise, and compelling description of what they do. Oftentimes, though, it can be kind of long and rambling, and I'm left with a lack of total clarity on exactly what their business does. So if they're able to give that clear answer, they're probably pretty good at their job. The second thing I look for in a product marketer is someone who is a data-driven decision maker. I ask them, tell me about a time that you use data to influence a decision inside your organization. It could be qualitative insights from the customer or quantitative metrics that they're, they're pulling from the product. But I want to know how they've used that data to drive outcomes within their organization. And then the final, the final thing that I look for is someone who is a curious and a first principles thinker. So I want, I want them to be more focused on the how and continually push on the why than just the what. And here a great question is, hey, I'm going to launch a product in 3 months. How would you do it? I want someone that says, well, here's what I would need to know in order to successfully launch that product versus just telling me how it should be done. So in closing, as you think about bringing product marketing into your company, you want to consider your company's stage or if one of those 5 signs applies to you. You want to build your business case for investment. What are the gaps? Do you need someone to plug the gap for your CEO? Do you need content and collateral for your sales team? What is the business case that you're building here? And then prepare to invest. As we talked about, product marketers are in high demand, so go ahead and pay them a little bit more.