By Poornima Mohandas | 3 min read
“It’s all very overwhelming,” said my friend who recently started a new product marketing role at a B2B SaaS company during this extended lockdown. The onboarding was of course all remote.
“I kept mixing up people’s names,” she said. Building that personal connection is hard when everything is virtual.
“Somehow, it feels like this whole responsibility of getting up to speed is yours,” she said. Luckily for her, her manager put her in charge of a team building exercise that helped her build relationships quickly.
Building rapport and relationships is super important in product marketing because a lot of your work gets executed across teams merely on the basis of interpersonal relationships.
When you are about to start a new product marketing job like I did last month, there is always this nervous enthusiasm that comes with it. You want to hit the ground running. But this is more difficult to do in a role like product marketing vis-a-vis digital marketing for instance. More so now with everything being remote, removed, and less personal.
Building up Intellectual Capital
Building relationships is one thing but there is also the intellectual capital you need to build. Before you take on any major initiative in a product marketing role, you need a thorough understanding of the space and your customers. So how do you go about building that knowledge quickly? Here’s a checklist of things I like to follow to build up my market intelligence in the first 30 days at a new job. I’ve found it immensely useful to ramp up fast.
Print out and tick off this checklist (also available as PDF for download) in your first month at a company.
| CHECKLIST FOR A NEW PMM ROLE |
| ⬜ Consume all the product training material, collateral, and online tutorials available. |
| ⬜ Find the organizational chart so you can easily see who does what. |
| ⬜ Schedule meetings with: ⬜ Your boss ⬜ Marketing team leads ⬜ Sales leaders ⬜ Sales enablement ⬜ Product management Ask about their current projects, challenges, and how you can help. |
| ⬜ Get a product demo from the product manager. Record it. Ask for a demo script. |
| ⬜ Spend an hour a day in the product. Aim to do a product demo yourself. |
| ⬜ Get on sales discovery calls. Listen for customers’ pain points and buying triggers. |
| ⬜ Shadow a few sales deals from start to finish to understand the entire buying journey and the different buyer personas. |
| ⬜ Start digging around your competitors’ websites and social channels. Make notes. |
| ⬜ Set up google alerts on your company and your top competitors. |
| ⬜ Subscribe to your company’s corporate blog and social pages. |
| ⬜ Read some key industry reports. |
| ⬜ Start following the key analysts and influencers in your space. |
So why are these steps important? These will help you develop knowledge and understanding around your company, the people you will work with, your product, your customers, and your market faster. These are all prerequisites to take on any project be it a positioning project or a pricing one.
Do you run the risk of being overwhelmed? Well, of course you do! That’s part of the job description, silly! But seriously. Here are a few things to stave off that overwhelming feeling. Pace yourself. Take breaks. Grab coffee. Look out the window. Chit chat with your colleagues. Build relationships over video calls. While this may sound near impossible, accept that working from anywhere may well be the norm going forward. Make notes. Revisit your notes and call recordings. It’s ok to forget things. You are after all human.
Conclusion
When you are new in a job, show your initiative. Ask your boss for a project that you can take on. Better still come up with some initiatives you can run that can add value to the company’s strategic direction. Take up a project and run with it. Being productive will give you a dopamine high.
If you read this far, you are probably in a new job or about to start one. All the best! Download the checklist. If there are more items you find useful in your first 30 days, go ahead and leave me a comment.
