Dave Daniels

30 days - Learn the market and competitive landscape. Visit as many customers and non-customers as possible. Read every Win/Loss report you can get your hands on. Talk to as many sales reps as possible. Use the Steve Jobs line of questioning: "What's working here?" "What's not working here?" Warning: don't assume you're the smartest person in the room. Network and leverage as many brains in the organization as you can. 60 days - Formulate a GTM strategy. Be prepared for a lot of "We don't do it that way here". Be persistent and focused. Use facts to inform your decisions not fantasies. 90 days - Execute, execute, execute. 

Start with these: 1. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) - it measures how long a customer stays with you and how much they spend during that time. It's a good early warning metric. 2. Win/Loss Ratio - of all the deals you have the opportunity to win, the number you win and the number you lose. It's a great tracking metric to help measure the effectiveness of things like sales enablement. 3. Retention Rate - the king of metrics in SaaS. What is the rate at which customer are staying (or the opposite - leaving). If your retention rate goes south, it means you have to sell that many more deals to get ahead.

Another reason is burnout. Too many organizations perceive PMMs as lead gen people. That puts them into a highly tactical mode. Without so much tactical work, there's never enough time for strategy. Which leads to more tactical work. Here's one of my blog posts that might help - https://www.brainkraft.com/product-marketing-if-a-product-manager-is-the-ceo-of-their-product-what-is-a-product-marketing-manager

Product positioning/value propositions/messages are developed for people (personas) in markets. The first step is to identify the personas that influence a buying decision for your products. When you understand that, you can dive into the problems each persona is experiencing and develop a value prop for each. A message for a technical buyer won't resonate for an economic buyer, as you point out. Trying to create one message that resonates with both may be impossible (and will be too generic). Building on what Matt said, once you know the people you can engage in conversations to understand them better. Hopefully, you are doing this long before the product is ready. Example: breakfast cereal for children. They eat it but they don't buy it. You need one message for the kids and one message for the parents. You want the kids to annoy the hell out of their parents so they buy it, and like it so much they tell their friends. You want the parent to believe they are making a good dietary decision. 

In a word - results. Your product managers should have a goal defined for the product you're supporting. It may not be the most realistic goal, but there should be a goal you can anchor to. Take that goal and break it down into bite size pieces. Think about what it's going to take to get a buyer from Attention to Acquisition (assuming a new customer goal). Break a purchase into individual buying steps. Identify the buyers (on average) that influence a purchase and find out what they need. Then measure like crazy. Use my favorite - Win/Loss - to track as many deals as you can. Find out why they bought and why they didn't. Use that to refine your understanding of a buyer's journey. If it's not a revenue goal but a retention goal, find out why they renew and why they don't. Then recommend a course of action to fix it. I have a class on this to help you build a Buyer's Journey Decision Map (self-paced video). Take a look and if you have questions I'd be happy to answer them. --D

The short answer is product marketing defines the go-to-market strategy to achieve a return on investment. The Marcom team executes the tactics in support of the GTM strategy. 

The strategies will differ based on the maturity of the market segment and/or product category. For example, if you are dealing with a mature, risk averse market segment you need proof. Buyers will kick tires all day, waste your resources, get everyone excited, then won't buy. They are skeptics and need proof. Visionaries are risk takers that won't need proof, you just have to deliver on your commitment. See the book "The Diffusions of Innovation" for more detail. 

First, don't think of Win/Loss as a project to be done at certain times of the year. It's like a lifestyle change that has be worked into your organization's priorities (like exercise or losing weight). Second, salespeople should never conduct W/L interviews. Never. The purpose of W/L is to figure out how buyers make a decision (in the aggregate) and salespeople are not the best resource in this regard. To get a sustainable W/L program you need to bring something to the table: reasons why you lose deals and recomendations to fix it. Once your organization experiences the benefits of W/L it will stick. I wouldn't worry so much about the infrastructure as much as collectng the insights. --D

Be in the driver's seat. Product marketing managers are the CMO of the product. Launching a product is a campaign ("series of connected activities designed to bring about an accelerated result"). When you think about launch that way it changes your entire perspective. You define launch goals, put metrics in place, develop a campaign strategy, build campaign elements, identify/close readiness gaps, etc. Be large and in charge. Take the reigns. Go big or go hom. [Other trite corporate-speak saying goes here]

1. Have a clearly defined launch goal. A metric, a quantity, and a timeframe. "Sell as much as we can" is not a goal. 2. Have a launch leader. Succesful launches to launch by themselves. 3. Good product/market fit 4. Identify a good target market segment 5. Prepare your team 6. Prepare your market 7. Build alliances 8. Measure and adjust More on my blog - https://www.brainkraft.com/7-tips-to-prevent-product-launch-catastrophes