Benjamin Blackmer

I like to think about goals when talking about plans. You want clarity in your priorities, particularly because it’s difficult to know what to say yes and no to when you’re new. (Your manager should help with this as well.) 30 Days * Get to know who your closest colleagues are. Bonus: learn how they operate and how best to work with them. * Get a feel for the quarterly rhythm of your company. Is this a reggae-beat company with a regular clockwork of quarterly business reviews, product releases, and all-hands meetings, or are you playing free jazz and improvising along the way? Bonus: start adding your riffs on what the rhythm should be. * Internalize what your company’s biggest goals are and create your own goals that align. Bonus: what are marketing and product goals, and how can you contribute to achieving them? * Meet with as many people at your new company as possible, act like a Hoover, and vacuum up as much information as possible. Start creating a mental model of where the traditional functions of a company sit, like different marketing and product functions. * Start deep diving into the product. You want to be able to do a credible demo at the end of 90 days. 60 Days * You should be meeting with customers regularly at the end of 60 days. At a minimum, this could be reviewing Gong calls to understand what customers are asking about and responding to. Ideally, it is with live customers and prospects so you can internalize their requirements and the language they use. * You should be in most regular meetings and starting to contribute. * You should be at an intermediate level on your product. What’s your elevator pitch? How does the pricing work? What does the marketing and sales funnel look like, and where are the gaps? Start asking deeper “why” questions. * You should have a plan for what you will accomplish for the rest of the quarter. Are there product or feature launches that you can take over? Get into the weeds and drive something on your own. Now is the time to get your hands dirty and get something done. 90 Days * You should know your product well at the end of 90 days. This could include giving a sales pitch to a prospect plus a short demo. (You've been practicing, right?) * You should have a plan for your next 3-6 months. For example, what’s coming down the pike from the product team, and what do you need to do to prepare? What will marketing need to hit their goals, and is that in your plan? * What’s the one major goal you need to accomplish over the next 3 months to be successful? Do your colleagues know and agree on what this is? Even with all of this in mind, please don’t feel like you’ll have it all covered at the end of 90 days. Use your newbie status to continually uncover internal insights and approach problems with a beginner’s mindset. The Curse of Knowledge is real; your new company should and will appreciate asking fundamental questions about why they do things. If the answer is just because they’ve always done it that, that’s a huge opportunity to ensure it’s the right or best way.

One quibble with this question: I’d start with the assumption that product marketing is a part of the marketing team because product marketers are more marketers than product professionals. PMMs should work closely with the rest of the marketing team to ensure alignment across all outbound marketing. I think the core responsibilities of product marketing are the following: * GTM management. Lead the launch of new products and features. * Sales enablement. Train your sales teams to be experts in selling your product. * Market intelligence. Be an expert on your competition and how your product stacks up. With this in mind, product marketing becomes the go-to expert for product and customer intelligence within GTM teams like marketing and sales. PMM creates the foundational materials to enable the rest of the marketing team to execute their core functions. For example, PMM should own the positioning and messaging that fuels the rest of the marketing organization.

The goal of a positioning document is to align your company on how to talk about your product. In its simplest form, a positioning framework should include three things: 1. A positioning statement 2. 2-4 benefits 3. The reason reasons to believe your product can deliver the benefits Let’s break these down a bit. A positioning statement is a paragraph that describes what your product is (category), who it is for (target persona), what it does (how it works), and why it’s better than the alternatives (competition comparison). Your benefits should be two to four improvements that your customer will gain when they use your product. For example, will they do something faster, cheaper, easier, or less risky? Your reasons-to-believe (RTBs) should match your features to your benefits and are the reasons why your customer should believe that you can deliver your benefits. Relatedly, I particularly like the homepage and messaging guide from Emily Kramer. It is here for reference: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/homepage-copy This guide focuses on how to create an effective homepage that states what your product does, but to get there, you must already have a structured story. The main questions to answer are simple but powerful: 1. What problem do you solve? 2. What is your product? 3. Who is it for? 4. Why is it better? Emily includes three additional questions to consider, which I think are important. 1. What are the benefits of using your product? 2. What are the most common use cases? 3. How does your product work? These are the key questions that your target persona wants to know about your product or company, and it is a great lens through which to view your product.

This is a great question and very much depends on the functions that exist in your company. A PMM should be prepared to create any asset that a marketing or sales department might require, particularly for smaller companies with limited marketing resources. Still, there are a few assets that are squarely PMM’s responsibility: * Positioning documentation * Demo script * First call sales deck * Sales 1-pager * Competitor battle cards The positioning doc is the foundation for everything that a PMM does. It is the boiled-down story of your product or company messaging to the market. Without one, everyone in the company will create their version of the product story, which leads to market confusion. PMM is also responsible for how to demo the product. If the PMM can’t demo the product, it’s unlikely they know it well enough to create the correct positioning. Vetting positioning requires gathering feedback and input from your stakeholders while driving the process forward. There are two suggestions for this: 1) timebox the creation of positioning with a sprint model. For example, say you will run a two-week sprint to create or update your positioning. This gives your stakeholders a deadline to work against. 2) Create a draft for your stakeholders to react to. It is unlikely that your stakeholders will know how to create positioning on their own, so you will need to guide them with a draft. The best way to vet your sales assets is to use them yourself in front of customers. Presenting your materials and getting first-hand customer reactions will give you the evidence and data to 1) create the best assets possible and 2) give your stakeholders confidence that your assets are right. Once you have some data from customer interactions, you should present your sales assets with your stakeholders in a few live meetings, share your findings and data, and get their feedback.

The most important thing for a launch is to align your company on the number 1 goal of the launch. Boiling down a launch to one more important thing is tough, but goal alignment will ensure you can optimize your launch activities to achieve your goal. There is also a tendency for companies to throw layer multiple goals onto a launch, but this only serves to dilute the potential of the launch. Here are some examples of launch goals: * Attracting new customers * Upselling existing customers * Converting free customers to paying customers * Growing awareness of the company or product * Increase average contract value * Reduce churn Each of these goals will drive different activities during your launch. If you include more than one, multiple downstream effects will dull the impact of your launch. Happy launching!

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) concept is excellent for an enterprise B2B sales motion, and it is beneficial to think about why someone would buy your product. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. Speaking just about the job works well when your audience is responsible for actually getting the job done. For example, developers might need a CI/CD pipeline tool to deploy code, or marketers might need an email marketing tool to send email to customers. With these audiences, you can speak about how your product directly accomplishes what needs to be done. As you move up the leadership stack, people will need to know that your product can get the job done PLUS why they should pick you. Senior architects, VPs, and C-level executives will want to know how your product impacts their lives as they won’t do the job themselves. In these cases, just telling them how your product accomplishes the job won’t be enough. For example, do you increase their revenue? Do you reduce their risk? Do you reduce their costs? These are questions they will want answered. JTBD is great, but please keep your target audience in mind while creating your messaging. P.S. Make sure you’ve read at least one article on the Jobs To Be Done idea. Pop quiz: who was the original well-known author of the Jobs To Be Done idea, and where was it published?