Should Product Marketing sit in Product or Marketing? Do they deliver on business inputs or outputs? Does a Product Marketer have a communications degree, or an MBA? The answers to these questions are critical to defining the value a Product Marketing team can deliver to a business. In her talk, Tamara Grominsky will demonstrate how defining the right mandate can transform your Product Marketing team into your company’s best growth strategists and build alignment and impact across the organization.
Tamara Grominsky:
Welcome to the Product-Led Summit. My name is Tamara Grominsky, and I'm the director of product marketing at Unbounce. Today, I'd love to chat with you about the power and impact a good product marketing team can have on a SaaS business.
Tamara Grominsky:
First, for context, I'd love to share just a little bit more about Unbounce. Unbounce is a powerful landing page builder for small to mid-sized businesses. We were first to market over 10 years ago, and since then, we've really fine-tuned the path to conversion. In fact, we've actually facilitated more than half a billion conversions.
Tamara Grominsky:
Now, just a little bit more about me. as I mentioned, I'm leading product marketing at Unbounce. One of the reasons I wanted to join Unbounce is that I'm super passionate about empowering small businesses to learn, grow, and thrive in a world that isn't always built for them. I've also championed this cause at both FreshBooks and Yellowpages Canada. Throughout all of my experience leading product marketing and growth strategies, I started to identify a trend. I noticed that product marketing teams are almost always misunderstood and underutilized. This is a real shame, because I actually believe that product marketing is one of the most critical functions at any high-growth business. I'd actually go as far as to say that product marketing is the linchpin to sustainable business growth. Today, I'm going to make my case for this bold statement, and I'm going to show you how you can implement an impactful product marketing team in your own organization.
Tamara Grominsky:
But first, let's take a step back. Here's a look at some of the teams you might encounter at a SaaS business. For this particular example, I'm taking the lens of a SaaS business with SMB type customers. Let's start with marketing. Marketing is responsible for attracting new prospects and then turning those prospects into trialers. Then, depending on the average deal size, the sales team will step in to help with the point of conversion and welcome and onboard those new customers. From here, customer success will really make sure that customers are seeing value every step of the way, from day one of being a customer to the day that they decide to churn, and sometimes even after.
Tamara Grominsky:
Then we have two supportive teams. The first one is partnerships and business development. They're responsible for developing relationships with tools and partners that will bring additional value to customers. Then we have product management, and they're focused on building products that solve customer problems as well as market problems in order to attract new prospects. I believe that product marketing should be at the center of this wheel. If product marketing is at the center of the wheel, we can properly understand how each of the teams work and then align the team so that they can work better together.
Tamara Grominsky:
What happens if product marketing isn't at the heart of your business? Here's a look at three possible scenarios. What happens if your product team is building for small businesses, but your marketing team is prospecting much larger businesses? Well, there would be a huge disconnect in product value there. Then, what happens if the marketing team has set up a short trial duration period, but the sales team actually needs a much longer sales cycle? Or what happens if your product and business vision is solving a market problem that you discover your customers don't even have? In all of those situations, you get something that looks a little bit like this.
Tamara Grominsky:
In this case, you probably have high-functioning teams that are meeting their KPIs and they think everything is fine, but what might be happening is they're not necessarily aware of the impact that their team is having on the other teams around them. They're working in silos and they're working on individual strategies, not holistic strategies. This is where product marketing can step in. Today, I'm going to walk you through four simple steps to experience the power and impact of product marketing for yourself. Those steps are, create your mandate, define your role, position your team, and build alignment.
Tamara Grominsky:
Let's start with step one, creating your mandate. Why does your team even exist? What types of business challenges will you take on? This is super critical to start with. Product marketing means something different from organization to organization and even product marketer to product marketer, so being clear about why you exist and what you do is really important. The other thing is that product marketers actually have a super broad skillset. They're able to tackle all kinds of different challenges, and this usually means that we're pulled in all kinds of directions or brought onto tons of projects. Being purposeful about the impact you want your team to have will prevent you from letting others guide your direction.
Tamara Grominsky:
I like to think of it almost like this maze puzzle. You know where you want to get to in the end, you want to get to a high-growth business, but there's so many different routes you could take to get there. In this case, there's so many different business challenges you could solve to get you to the end, so how do you start focusing on the best challenge to start with? How do you prioritize all of the things? I like to think of it this way. I like to start by identifying what is the biggest business challenge, what's happening in the business today? Are we struggling top of funnel? Do we need to attract more leads, or do we need to improve conversion rate, or do we need to focus more on customers? Are we struggling with churn rate, or do we need to find more opportunities for monetization and expansion? Identify the one, two or three top challenges happening in the business, and then you can run them through your own framework.
Tamara Grominsky:
Take a step back and say, what is the most urgent problem? Are any of these things screaming to be done immediately? If so, that's usually a great place to start. Then you can move on to, is there a problem or challenge that your team is uniquely qualified to solve? This could be because of the key players you have on your team or the key skillset that you have on your team, but is there an obvious problem that you should be tackling first? Then finally, where could you have the largest impact? There might be one of the challenges that you're super eager to get into, but maybe it's going to have a smaller impact than the other challenges. Just make sure you're prioritizing the right thing to work on. Once you've identified the challenge you want to focus on, you're ready to get started.
Tamara Grominsky:
But before you get into execution mode, I urge you to think about how you're going to measure your success. This is another challenge that product marketing teams often come across, which is product marketing teams are always measured differently. Here's three ways I often see product marketing teams measured, and those are revenue-based KPIs, adoption-based KPIs guys, or project-based KPIs. What you choose is probably going to depend on how you've set up your team, the role that you have in the organization, and even the challenges that you've chosen to solve, but just have a think about it before you move on to the next steps.
Tamara Grominsky:
Now we can go to step two. Once we understand exactly what challenges we want to solve and how we're going to measure success, we can think about the type of role we need on our team. What will the role of a product marketer even look like? One of the questions I get asked the most is what does a product marketer do anyways? Usually, someone's perception of product marketing is based on the old world of product marketing. In this old world, what happened was a product would get ready to be shipped and then it would be handed to the product marketer. They'd be responsible for writing value propositions, maybe putting some marketing materials together and possibly helping out sales. But over the past few years, we've seen this awesome shift to the new world of product marketing. In the new world, product marketing is a super strategic role.
Tamara Grominsky:
In this new world, we always start by understanding and assessing what's happening around us. What's going on in the market? What are our competitors doing or not doing, and how do these inputs help us build our own revenue and growth strategies? Instead of working with product managers right before a product's ready to be shipped, we're now starting at the very beginning of ideation and we're really a partner with product management in influencing the product roadmap and driving go-to-market strategy. Finally, one of the most exciting things is we actually get to work with all of the customer-facing teams to make sure that customers are seeing value throughout the entire customer journey. This means we're actually touching almost every part of the business.
Tamara Grominsky:
If we were to take these old world and new world activities and plot them on a spectrum, you get something that looks a little bit like this. You have strategy on the left side and execution on the right, with go-to-market planning in the middle. You can see that the skills required to complete the activities on the left are completely different than the skills required to complete the activities on the right. If I was hiring someone to do competitive analysis and business casing and monetization, I would want maybe a candidate with an MBA-type background. But if I was hiring someone to build messaging and create content and build sales enablement tools, I would definitely want someone with more of a content or a marketing background. Thinking about where your team is going to sit on this spectrum before you stack your team is critical to making sure that there's not a mismatch of skills.
Tamara Grominsky:
Here's a look at what a strategy-focused product marketing team might look like. You can see here, they're really focused on the left side of the spectrum. These are what I would call mostly business inputs, so figuring out what's happening, what are the things that we need in order to build our strategy, and then using that strategy to form a go-to-market plan. Really, at the go-to-market plan time is when they hand off execution to other teams, maybe it's a marketing team or a customer marketing team or even a sales team. If you've decided that you're going to be a strategic product marketing team, it's really important for you to know your boundary and know your role through this execution stage. This is your time to guide the strategy, make sure that everyone is focused on the same strategy and understands the strategy, but it's not your time to get in the weeds. That's someone else's job.
Tamara Grominsky:
Here's a look of what the execution-focused product marketing team might look like. In this case, they're very focused on the right side of the spectrum. They're probably starting somewhere around the go-to-market plan and someone else is doing the left side of the spectrum for them. This could be either product management or maybe a strategy team. Either way, they're building the go-to-market plan and then probably leading or even doing the execution themselves. This is mostly more representation of the old world of product marketing, but some organizations, especially some smaller startups, really do need product marketing to lean into some of these activities.
Tamara Grominsky:
It doesn't really matter where you sit on the spectrum, as long as you're clear and intentional about where you sit. In my opinion, I think that the most influential and impactful product marketing teams sits somewhere on the strategy side, but just be clear about where you sit and the types of activities that you'll take on and make sure all of your stakeholders know this, because you will probably identify areas of collaboration or maybe even overlap that you can smooth out before you get started.
Tamara Grominsky:
Once you know the challenges you're going to take on, what the role is going to look like, it's really time to think about where should you sit in the organization? What department does it make sense for your team to be a part of? The traditional conversation has always been should product marketing sit in product or should product marketing sit in marketing? I think that this is a super oversimplified view of the question, because if we go back to the beginning, we saw that product marketing actually sits at the heart of a ton of different teams. In this example, they're enabling five different teams of the organization. Let's map this a completely different way.
Tamara Grominsky:
In this view. What I've done is I've pulled out product marketing and product management because really both of these teams are enablers. Product marketing is enabling the four teams in blue, which is marketing, sales, customer success and partnerships, and product management is enabling the teams in yellow, so engineering and UX. The yellow and blue boxes might be named something different at your organization, but the function is really the same. Let's remove product management from the equation and let's just focus on product marketing. What do the four teams in blue all have in common? Well, they're mostly focused on customer growth, customer retention, customer expansion, something to do with customers. What do the customers and all of those things have in common? Revenue.
Tamara Grominsky:
My recommendation is that the best place for our product marketing team to sit is within a larger revenue department. This allows you to pull product marketing out of the execution weeds of marketing, and also out of the technical details of product management. At Unbounce, we look a little bit like this. We have both a chief revenue officer and a chief product officer. Product marketing sits under the CRO and product management sits under the CPO. Really, product marketing and product management are partners, representing and uniting both sides of the business.
Tamara Grominsky:
What does the separation do for product marketing? The first thing is that it really creates an unbiased neutral product marketing team. Because you're not skewing towards marketing or you're not skewing towards product, you can actually make decisions that are the best thing for the business, not for a particular team. Another key benefit is because product marketing is so close to revenue decisions, it really positions the team as a key function of the business, which means you're almost always included in or are leading core growth activities, and that's just exciting. Again, because you're not sitting in any of those particular revenue teams, but instead you're enabling all of them, it allows you to build these streamlined communication channels between all of the different teams in the organization. This streamlined communication is what will help you build alignment and momentum.
Tamara Grominsky:
That takes us to step four, which is actually building alignment. Let's take a look at how the first three steps come together to help you connect the rest of the organization. As a reminder, this is the situation we want to avoid. Remember, in this case, we have high-functioning teams that are doing their jobs, but are often working in silos. They have individual strategies that are connected to the bigger business goals, but they're not all working on one holistic strategy.
Tamara Grominsky:
Product marketing can step in to align efforts and then build the momentum you need for your business. I recommend doing that in this three-step process. Step one is collecting feedback and inputs from all of your stakeholders. Step two is taking all of these inputs and building one holistic company strategy. Then finally, step three is sharing the strategy and guiding execution.
Tamara Grominsky:
Let's take a deeper look. First up, collecting feedback and inputs. It doesn't really matter what this looks like in your organization, but you need to create some type of ritual that will connect the product marketing team with the customer-facing teams. I've seen it be a weekly meeting or a monthly meeting, whatever it is just be consistent and be purposeful about the ritual you're creating. This will allow you to build relationships with those customer-facing teams and really understand their perspective and the perspective of our customers, because we can't always be talking to customers.
Tamara Grominsky:
The second point that really goes closely with this ritual is create one centralized area where you can store customer feedback and user feedback that's gathered from all of these different teams. Is your support team collecting feedback from tickets in one area, and maybe you're doing interviews with customers and you're storing those interview notes in a different area, create one centralized space where everyone knows they can go there to access it. It kind of democratizes the data for everyone and it gives you a full view of what customers are saying.
Tamara Grominsky:
Then the third piece is make sure with all of these different stakeholders that you're aligning on one definition of a customer and where you're going to pull all of your customer metrics from. You just want to make sure you're not using different churn numbers or maybe different teams have different definition of conversion. Align on one definition and one place to get those metrics.
Tamara Grominsky:
Then you can take all of the information that you've collected, all of your feedback and all of the insights you've gained, and bring them to the table with your product management counterparts. They've probably also done their own research and hopefully you guys have identified similar trends. From there, you can build one holistic strategy. I'm not talking about a separate product strategy and a separate go-to-market strategy, it's one combined holistic strategy. This really is the key step. Because it's one strategy, you should also be aligning on one definition of success, because if the product team is succeeding but you're not succeeding, then really neither of you are succeeding. Be clear about what are the metrics you're both going to follow and when will you know if you've succeeded or not.
Tamara Grominsky:
Then finally, once you've set up the strategy and your metrics for success, make sure you're socializing that strategy with all of those other stakeholders that you guys are enabling. A, make sure you're getting stakeholder buy-in, but also, B, make sure you're building excitement. It's time for you to be the cheerleader of the strategy. Make sure everyone knows how important it is and how they can contribute and how will it make sense for them in their role. Then from here, it's really important that you take a step back, especially if you've decided you're going to be a strategic product marketing team. You have other teams that are better at executing than you are, and so let them do what they do best and then your rule really becomes just keeping everyone aligned and keeping everyone connected.
Tamara Grominsky:
If you're able to build this feedback cycle and build this alignment, we're going to be able to take those situations that we saw at the beginning of the presentation and change them into really positive scenarios. Instead of building features for small businesses but marketing those features to larger businesses, we're going to connect the product team with the marketing team and we're going to be building features and then marketing them to the exact type of customer that they were built for. This is going to have a huge match in value. Then the marketing team and the sales team are going to connect, and we're going to understand exactly how long the sales team needs in order to close a deal. Then we're going to build a trial duration period that matches that. Then finally, because we have one strategy instead of several different strategies, we're confident that we're solving for a market problem that we know our customers absolutely have.
Tamara Grominsky:
Just to recap, we talked today about how you can build a product marketing team that has a huge impact in your organization, and there's four steps to do that. It's create your mandate, define your role, position your team, and then finally, build alignment. Thanks so much for chatting today. If you'd love to talk more about product marketing, you can find me on LinkedIn or you can send me an email. If you're curious to find out more about Unbounce, I urge you to visit us online where you can sign up for a free 14-day trial and see for yourself what the power of landing pages can do for your marketing.
Tamara Grominsky:
Thanks so much.
