There are a host of good training options out there: 1. Sharebird - a great place to start. Here you can get real industry expertise and resources from folks in the field 2. Podcasts - Women in Product Marketing by Mary Sheehan (Sharebird Podcast), Product Marketing Insider are a couple of my favorites. 3. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It" by April Dunford. 4. Another best practice I like to follow is actually spending time on other brand sites (example B2B sites like- Gong, Airtable, Monday.com, Snowflake, Zendesk, Drift, Quickbooks.com etc.) to understand how they position their products, how they showcase their value prop, jobs to be done etc. 5. PMM Alliance - They have a comprehensive set of courses, content and how to guides that I have found extremely useful 6. Also, Linkedin is a great resource. There are some incredible marketers and product marketers that focus on covering messaging, positioning, super worthwhile to follow.

To showcase your work without actually showing your work, you can instead show your process. Any messaging work will have a before and after, even if the prior state was an unlaunched product. 1. Describe what you were given. What was the new product/feature or existing messaging? 2. What was your process for determining the new messaging? 3. Were there any disagreements or misalignments about your new messaging? How did you get alignment to launch your new messaging through sales and marketing assets? 4. What was the result? How did you measure results to know whether it worked? Spend most of your time on describing your process. The hiring manager isn't hiring you for the specific messaging or results that you produced in your past role. They're hiring you because you have a repeatable, but flexible process or playbook to create effective messaging. Use the messaging you created as an example of that process and spend your time on that instead.

We develop personas in three degrees depending on the need: lightweight, qualitative, and quantitative (statistical). Each of these populate a similar framework: demographic details (job title, geo if applicable, age range, etc), responsibilities/needs/jobs to be done, challenges/pain points, Worth mentioning that a companion framework, the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), is often created to establish firmagraphic targeting to complement. Competitive insights are typically not included in our persona frameworks (though I hold space for exceptions here in rare cases - i.e. if credentialing on a certain product is part of a job responsibility). Instead, generally, our competitive insights are cultivated and applied in conjunction with the above. From a Challenger model, we aim to reframe the problem, introduce new/improved impavt as a result, and ultimately reveal value. 

See my answer above - the KPIs that you choose when launching a new feature of an existing product should always be tied to business outcomes. When you launch features vs products, oftentimes the business goals can be framed in terms of product adoption and cross-sell / up-sell. Here's an example. Let's say you have two products: A and B. This feature is available on Product B only. Let's say launching this new feature may entice customers who have bought Product A to add on Product B. Your goals here would be to ensure that customers who have bought Product A are using this new feature (set goals around adoption, e.g. % of Product A customers who have activated this feature within 90 days), and create pipeline for customers of Product B (e.g. $XX pipeline from existing customers, 100 accounts from existing customers with open opportunities).

A go-to-market strategy is at its heart, an exercise in alignment. A good B2B GTM plan maximizes your exposure to growth by drawing a through-line across your market and its needs, your company, and its offerings in the most efficient way possible. It is built around 3 pillars: * Market Opportunity: Expressed as TAM/SAM/SOM, outlining where the fertile areas of opportunity exist where you can make money (Segments, industry verticals, buying centers/Line of Business) * Positioning: Your company's products / Solutions, expressed through value propositions that align with your buyer/user's most important needs and problem areas. * Distribution & Campaign: Outlining Route-to-market, channels, and investment/returns, as well as the competitive, messaging, and positioning needed to build compelling content and creative. As for alignment internally, this comes down to good teamwork and hygiene, starting with: * Many fingerprints: bringing in your cross-functional contributors, from GTM, as well as Product early and often will ensure you're building a strategy that everyone not only understands but believes in and is committed to. * Define what "done" looks like Establishing a shared understanding of success should be your number one goal in executing a new strategy. Clearly defined, shared goals keep everyone focussed on the money. As a general rule, I want my marketers to feel a level of discomfort in owning a big goal, such as a business's growth rate, revenue goal, or other indicators of business health. Vanity metrics that feel comfortable to marketing such as pipeline, or satisfaction rates can be helpful for measuring certain activities, but the measure of whether a GTM strategy is successful MUST be expressed in business outcomes - usually $$$ * Do the extra work to ensure understanding: Folks often recommend offering training sessions or resources to help team members understand the GTM strategy and their role in its execution. This is a good idea, but too often people misunderstand and seek to justify the quality of a strategy through too much detail. A folder of decks, or lengthy documents will remain unread, and poorly understood. Instead, take the time to craft your articulation of the strategy the way you would work customer-facing content and messaging. Shipping a 5-minute loom, supported by a well-crafted document will be infinitely more impactful in driving a shared understanding than the world's best essay or PowerPoint.

This is a great question and a situation that many PMMs will find themselves in at some point in time! A few thoughts here: 1. Building trust takes time: Before you can be seen as a strategic partner, you need to build trust with the team and demonstrate you know and understand what they are trying to achieve. As quickly as you can, become an expert in the product, and your customers. You need to know both of them inside out in order to do the work to connect the amazing product being built to the audience you believe most needs & would best benefit from it. Don’t wait for someone to show you - dig in and set up demo accounts, schedule calls with customers, research the industry, and ask to join roadmap reviews / design reviews / sprint planning sessions / team retros. 2. Show your value. While you’re learning the product, the customers, and the team, you’ll probably uncover work that isn’t being done, or is missing. Go do that work! Find some white space where you can both be proactive and add value to the overall mission at hand. Share what you’re doing, why you think it’s important, and the results. Do this over and over again -- explaining WHY is incredibly powerful, as is showing the impact of your work (can be metric-driven or new insights, etc). As you deliver key insights about the audience, and offer opinions on what features you think might be most important to invest in (and why), and how you can capitalize it for the business, your value will become understood. 3. Educate, educate, educate. Product marketing as we know it today is a relatively new function. There will always be someone you work with that has had little exposure or experience with PMMs. It is probably useful to have a few slides in your back pocket that explain “what is product marketing” and “how to work with PMMs” that you can share with teams (over and over again!). Be sure to include the part about product marketers being key inputs into product strategy and roadmaps, too :-).

A new feature within a product would usually fall under a Tier 2 or 3 launch in my book. That means they are getting attention, but not quite everything you have up your sleeve. Tier 2 or 3 launches often include: 1. Website updates 2. Launch blog 3. External comms 4. Employee comms & employee activation 5. Light field enablement 6. Internal FAQ document 7. An ammendment to the core product messaging & positioning, as needed Salesforce has historically done fantastic job launching new features in products on a recurring & predictable schedule, meeting the customers where they already are, and showing the feature value. For overall product marketing, marketing, and category creation education, definitely check out the book Play Bigger. It puts a new spin on thinking differently and creating differention in the market. And of course, give Clari a follow and see how we are activating our channels across social media, product news, web, and more! 

I do think this is highly dependent on the type of product you are taking to market, but here are some go-tos I use. 1. Keep it simple: Make sure you focus any training decks in the simplest, most customer centric language. It’s often easy to use technical terminology and/or internal acronyms and names that will not help that sales rep learn or relate to the customers they are interacting with! 2. Stay value-focused: It is also really easy to go into deep detail on product features and find yourself building a demo-ish presentation. Put yourself in that rep’s shoes, they need to be focused on values and benefits for their buyer over the minutiae of clicks in product. It is your job as a PMM to be able to take all the feature-level details and package it up into meaningful value that a rep can communicate to their prospects. 3. Don’t forget sales is a customer: I have seen too many times, training decks that just focus on tangible product experience or messaging. I think one of the most important perspectives to keep in mind as you work through a new training is that sales will be thinking “what’s in it for me?”. You should always be thinking and framing any enablement content on how this is going to help your sales team reach their quota or whatever target they are pacing toward. If you can’t draw this connection, your average rep is not going to use this material. 4. Bring VOC into your training: By the time you are ready to release a new product, you have hopefully had a healthy amount of customers test the experience. Find simple ways to inject the voice of the customer into your training—zoom meeting clips, emails with feedback, beta slack channels—there are tons of sources! If you can incorporate this as proof into your training, it brings that much more energy for the field teams.

My PMM team is built like a funnel. Our focus is to land new customers, which we only count when those customers start to pay. Therefore, the job of my PMM team ranges from raising awareness of our brand to getting new customers to upgrade to our paid editions. I have three groups focused on the following parts of the funnel: * Buyer Journey: This team focuses on connecting our marketing efforts at the top of the funnel through to the product. This team is goaled on Day1-6 Daily Active Instances to ensure high-quality sign-ups come into our funnel and they are happy when they get there. The teams' activities include running marketing paid campaigns, SEO, website optimizations, messaging & onboarding. * Core product: This team focuses on keeping our customers informed of new product releases, updating our core product messaging, and partnering closely with our product counterparts on product & GTM strategy. * Monetization & Expansion: This team is focused on driving our upsell motions within the product experience, driving customers from free to paid licenses, and cross-sell driving users to try and use other products and apps in our ecosystem. It's important to note that my team is primarily focused on SMB self-serve motions.

1. There are a number of foundational research reports and insights you can provide to your product partners before they delve into the development process. These include: 1. A broader overview of the competitive landscape and market landscape 2. As well as a closer look at the health of your brand and how it fares against it competitors over time through brand trackers and CSAT (consumer satisfaction) surveys 3. In terms of users and target audience, they can draw on segmentation and persona research 4. And I find that my product partners greatly appreciate and rely on value proposition research to frame their design decisions and utilize messaging insights to better frame the end product to our users. 2. In terms of how we present these insights, we find it helps to give a preview to Product leaders first to clear up questions or reframe as needed given their feedback so they can become early supporters and proponents of the research. Also, when sharing out more widely to the product org, as calendars can be hard to manage, I find it easier to be added on as an agenda item on a recurring Product team meeting, as most of the team will be in attendance. Another way we are currently experimenting with having Product partners ingest and internalize insights at Glassdoor are through immersion workshops. This allows them to digest insights we currently have before developing new hypotheses, like incorporating new segmentation research. In this case, we can develop a shared understanding of the unmet user needs, break down the jobs to be done and identify user pain points of our target audience.