AMA: Motive Head Of Industry Marketing, Sina Falaki on Building a Product Marketing Team

It depends on what stage the business is at and what it's trying to do. Is the business in search of more demand? Are they trying to ensure a product launches without a hitch? Is there proper product market fit? Is there a bigger need for more strategy to properly position the product or audience in order to drive revenue? The answer here will ultimately gear you more towards either helping product, sales, marketing, or enablement. I do my best to always understand the level of complexity and difficulty for everything I take on. I try to score impact vs work needed to get the job done. At any given time, I'll take on a multiple easy items in order to make sure maintainence is happening for my given role, while picking up a few impactful items that take a bit longer in time, but ultimately drive the biggest impact and success. 

Let's start with the expectations: 1. Properly understanding cultural appropriations and cues 2. Working in different timezones 3. Evaluating product marketers strengths when hiring for that particular region - depending on the region, you may want to underly the right skills 4. Fostering the right work/life balance - especially abroad, truly understanding working styles and the best method of communication Unexpected: 1. Ensuring the product marketers in each region have a best in class way to communicate with one another and share experiences across the board. At times when its just one or two people, it gets lonely. 2. Organizational processes can often break. Having a strict set of processes across your teams, especially when distributed in different time zones, needs to be honed in on. 

Clear channels of ownership and a deep, relentless focus on prioritization is a must. I would have a product, product marketer on the product side in order to drive product adoption and assist in building the correct roadmap in order for customers and prospects to create stickiness and the other, on the sales and marketing side in order for a solutions marketer to help scale leads and revenue. 

To build a solid case to quickly grow a pmm team, a product marketing team must partner with customers and the entire product, revenue, and strategy org to: * Drive pipeline and top-line revenue growth, inclusive of new logo and cross-sell / up-sell (land & expand growth) * Partner with enablement to Ensure quota-carrying teams know what to say to whom and when * Bring customer feedback into the product and technology team in order to inform product roadmaps. * Prioritize, open, and adapt to new markets * Drive home differentiated and unique value Metrics that I look at to drive ROI are: 1. Industry/Segment NARR 2. Gross Pipeline 3. Win / close rates 4. Industry/Segment ASP

Messaging and revenue. But to be clear, here are the specifics: * Drive pipeline and top-line revenue growth, inclusive of new logo and cross-sell / up-sell (land & expand growth) * Partner with enablement to ensure quota-carrying teams know what to say to whom and when * Bring customer feedback into the product and technology team in order to inform product roadmaps. * Prioritize, open, and adapt to new markets and industries * Drive home differentiated and unique value

Great question - Because I am so focused on Industry Marketing right now, I have it divided between Product Marketing KPIs and Industry Marketing KPIs: For Product Marketing: * Conversions NARR * Attachment rates - new logo and cross selling * Product ASP - the sales price, keep a close eye on this Industry marketers on the other hand look at: * Industry/Segment NARR * Gross Pipeline * Win/close rates