Product marketing is a heady and high-impact role, especially in fast-growing and/or competitive markets.  You're responsible for leading all go-to-market efforts by identifying customer needs, finding product-market fit, and establishing competitive differentiation.

Done right, the messaging you produce fuels revenue growth by accelerating the entire buying journey - from prospecting to close, and beyond.  

However,  unlike other marketing functions, attributing the revenue impact of your work remains a black box.  This inability to measure messaging effectiveness poses several conundrums:

  • How do you come up with the right messaging in the first place?
  • How do you cut through opinions and align product, marketing, and sales?
  • How do you show revenue impact and accelerate your own career trajectory?

Wanted: a scalable feedback loop

Gone are the days of putting ‘product’ at the center of product marketing.  To come up with the right messaging, product marketers must be experts on the end-to-end buying journey:

  • What problems are customers trying to solve?  Why now?
  • What decision criteria are they using to evaluate solutions?
  • How do they perceive our strengths/weaknesses vs. competition?
  • What value are they getting post-purchase? What’s making them renew/expand?

When it comes to messaging & positioning,  there’s usually no dearth of opinions! What Product Marketers really need though is data-driven feedback that satisfies five key criteria:

1) Ready to consume

You shouldn’t have to manually wade through interview reports, surveys, CRM fields or call recordings to find actionable feedback on your messaging.

2) Nuanced

You shouldn’t have to peanut butter insights obtained from a small fraction of your deals - wins vs losses, personas, verticals, segments, and regions - just because of budget or resource constraints.

3) Direct

You should get the direct voice of the customer, captured “in the moment” during the back-and-forth with the account team (not, way after when memories have faded).

4) Timely

Markets and competition are changing rapidly; you don’t want to work off of stale feedback captured several quarters after the customer first entered the market.

5) Tied to metrics

You want insights to be tied to revenue metrics, enabling objective prioritization, which is hard to do with standalone data such as analyst reports, product reviews, and screen scrapes.

Missing: a single source of truth

Piecing together intelligence on why and how customers are buying, and why you’re winning or losing is detective work at best, and a fair amount of data collection grunt work at worst. Clues are scattered across surveys, buyer interviews, CRM, call recordings, emails and documents - often never to be found.

The revenue tech stack is missing a 'Customer Journey Object' - a single source of truth on the messaging underlying all wins, losses, and expansion journeys.

Not surprisingly, product marketers struggle to pinpoint what’s working in their messaging, and what the gaps are.

There’s hope - in a galaxy far, far away!

Meet Sarah, a product marketer working for Acme Co., a database company in a galaxy far, far away.  Acme is behind on its revenue targets in the EMEA Enterprise market (yes, there is an EMEA in our galaxy!).  

Sarah sees an opportunity to make an impact and meets with:

  • The Demand Gen lead, to plan an ABM campaign. With a click, they review top-selling use cases, pain points and purchase triggers, ranked by closed-won revenue of recent wins.  Great ammo to attract best-fit prospects and grow the sales accepted pipeline!
  • The Sales Enablement lead, to ensure sales training content addresses key personas and what they care about.  Another click surfaces top-of-mind decision criteria from similar deals - across product, positioning, pricing, and customer success.  Coming up with a killer sales playbook that grows and accelerates deals is a breeze from here!
  • The Product Management lead, to review an actionable SWOT analysis of our win rate - revealing what value props are resonating (or not) against our top competitors.  Timely inputs into our battle cards and product roadmap to win bigger.
  • The CMO, to review the above integrated marketing plan and get budget approval.  

There’s more!  

Once launched, Sarah starts sharing the campaign’s revenue impact with GTM leadership with a click, including key metrics such as won amount, deal size, win rate, and time to close. Sarah is the star of the show!

Is this galaxy really that far away?

Watch this recorded PMA webinar to hear Product Marketing Leaders from Nutanix and Workato talk about how they’re removing guesswork from messaging & positioning. If you want to learn how machine learning is already helping solve these challenges, schedule a demo now!

May the messaging force be with you!

tribyl.com

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