AMA: Morningstar Head of Product Marketing, Elizabeth Brigham on Collaborating with Sales and Marketing

Hi everyone! Great to be here with you today! Thanks for sending me so many thoughtful questions...digging in now! This is a tricky one as I've seen 3 different models in my recent career history: * Mid-sized tech company where product marketing and demand gen were separate groups, yet connected at the hip * Small start up where I ran all marketing functions and thus we were one :) * Morningstar, where my team has both product marketing and demand generation responsibilities, although we do share pipeline goals with others across marketing and of course sales. Regardless of how you choose to organize the teams, I would say the key to success is a maniacal focus on a business goal. For example, do you need to close xxx new deals in a time period? Or do you have aggressive regression rate goals? If product marketing, demand gen, sales, products and support are all aligned to this goal, it doesn't really matter the size of the team as long as everyone knows what he/she is responsible for. Everyone is bought into success. From a tactical perspective, my team uses a framework influenced by the Crossing the Chasm, Pragmatic Marketing, SiriusDecisions and CEB models (we've all gone through them all and have picked the pieces we like most) to develop the go-to-market plan in conjunction with our product partners. Once that's locked - what's the business opportunity, total addressable/saleable market size, value prop, pricing, positioning, packaging, competition, etc. - then we host a larger kick-off meeting with our executional partners across marketing. From there, we host several workshops, leveraging best practices from human-centered design, to develop our content strategy and major themes. After that, we will generally meet in smaller groups (product marketing, products, demand gen/marketing) to develop larger campaigns and tactics to support the GTM and content strategies. We work in an agile format, so eventually these plans will get turned into epics and individual tickets in Jira. Happy to provide more detail on any of the above where needed, but the thing to keep in mind is: Bring the cross-functional team together quickly and get focused on a shared business goal. Then, determine how/when/where you're going to execute and clearly outline responsibilities. You don't have to be as formal as a RACI chart, but everyone benefits from knowing where they can be the most effective in helping the team achieve their goals.

The most important KPI is closed won business. If your sales team knows to whom, how, what and at what time to sell (e.g. when to walk away), you've done your job. Other internal metrics to consider are: * Managers' qualitative review/certification of sales ability to pitch and demo (the demo piece may vary based on the size of your business or product complexity) * How often sales teams are using marketing materials in sales cycles, how clear they are to prospects and if any were critical to closing the deal (there are fancy tools now that give you the ability to send docs to prospects and track engagement/usage as well) * How many questions you receive, or don't (this can be a flag), during sales training * How many additional requests you're getting to come back to various groups and redo the training or augment I'd be curious to crowd-source this one a bit more as well as I've seen a variety of definitions for sales enablement.

I'm not sure I'm fully understanding the premise of the latter half of this question, so I will address the first part. For those interested in this question, if you can provide me more explanation around what you mean by "support revenue growth reactively," I'm happy to respond. On the former, how can product marketing own more of the funnel strategy. I'll highlight how we're working at Morningstar on my team in the three areas you laid out: 1. Acquisition - Product marketing has a particularly strong alignment to acquisition strategy, IMO, especially as it relates to new product launches. Typically, you're either launching into a new market segment with an existing product or launching a new product into an existing market segment...or, if you're really brave, you're creating a new category by launching a new product into a market you've not served previously. Product marketing's role is to determine what the growth opportunity really is and build a strategy to capture that, which is fundamentally aligned to acquisition. 2. Conversion - here's where we product marketers need to remember how important empathy and market understanding is; then, we need to unleash our inner marketing scientist. Improving conversion (and here I'm defining conversion in terms of the sales funnel vs. conversion rates on your website, for example) stems from deep market understanding and empathy. The more you understand your audience, the more likely that will emanate in your positioning and messaging, thus the more likely someone will be interested in what you have to sell them. However, deeply understanding your audience requires testing and research, not just of the focus group variety, but in leveraging things like paid search and multi-variate testing on your website to determine what is resonating the most with your prospects. Similarly, I find holding a weekly or bi-weekly feedback meeting with your sales teams to garner these insights as well is particularly helpful. Lastly, I read through every comment on our NPS surveys to see what customers are telling us they like and don't and how that might be improved in our storytelling and customer experience. One caveat here is that you can get into research hell without putting something out in the market quickly. I tend to err on the side of pushing out an MVP of our messaging and then testing, learning and iterating from there. Again, embracing the agile mindset. 3. Retention - Retention seems to be the long lost cousin in the product marketing world for some reason. We marketers are always coming up with new names for something, so I've found the new shiny way to talk about retention falls somewhere in the realm of growth hacking or may fall into the world of product management. Here's where I think we have an opportunity, especially in B2B tech, to integrate product usage data into our marketing automation tools to identify patterns and then test campaigns to increase the behavior we want to see and leads to higher customer lifetime value. For example, if you have historical data that points to XYZ behaviors are more closely correlated to higher customer lifetime value or lower churn rates, then develop campaigns/programs to perpetuate that behavior. I know, seems obvious, but there are few B2B tech companies that I've see do this well. Also, think about borrowing from the new trend with gyms and products like Peloton (admittedly a huge fan) that aggregate your personal usage stats and then packages them up in an email or text tapping into your inner competitive nature to drive the behavior that you know will engender more usage and loyalty. I think of product marketers as business owners; as such, we need to make sure that we're looking holistically at how we're growing and preserving the business. Depending on the lifecycle stage of your product or market, you may prioritize activities that are linked to one of the three above. However, I believe a comprehensive strategy encorporates them all in some way.

I find the root cause of this problem is a lack of trust. Everyone wants to get involved because either they don't feel like their voice will be heard otherwise or because they don't trust what has been delivered in the past. This is a tricky problem, but here's how I'd break it down: 1. Product Marketing has a responsibility to clearly articulate and hold themselves accountable to delivering on their promise to the organization, full stop. 2. Spending time with, listening to (really listening to), and developing relationships with all key stakeholders first will lead to future success. Then partnering with them to co-develop the process of when you'll need their input, how things will be packaged and shared with all levels of the organization, and how often you're going to report on progress are key to demonstrating your commitment to making decisions efficiently and effectively. 3. Depending on the size of your organization, this process could take a couple days or a couple weeks. Really what you're trying to achieve is a month or so of leeway to get a win - launching a campaign, a product, a program, anything that will help start to build that trust. With each win, or frankly, an honest admittance of a mistake and how you're going to fix it, you buy yourself more goodwill to keep focused on what you think is right for the business. 4. Your continued success is predicated on clear, simple strategies, transparency, action plans with owners and reporting progress. I've followed this path in companies as large as Disney and as small as a 40 person start up. The only variable that really changes is the timeline and how many people you may need to involve. Happy to provide more specifics if there's interest.

Hmmm...I actually haven't had the experience of PMM not having budget to spend, so not sure I can really speak directly to this. I have worked at a start up where we basically have no budget at all, but that's another story on scrapiness. In general though, any time I've had to write a business case to get funding for an initiative, I typically follow this format: * How will my initiative materially affect the business? Revenue growth? Cost efficiencies/economies of scale? Market expansion? * Why am I asking for this now, why is this a priority over other things we want to do? * What other options did I consider before arriving at this recommendation? What criteria did I use to arrive at my recommendation? * What additional resources (time, money, people) will I need to successfully execute on this initiative? * What risks do I foresee with this initiative and how do I plan to mitigate them? * Then I'd add a project plan/timeline and when either money will be spent or additional resources will need to come into the project.