By Poornima Mohandas | 2 min read
So you have a great SaaS product. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that you need to hire a product marketer. It’s fashionable and everyone has one are not good enough reasons to make that hire. Only if your startup and product have reached a certain stage of maturity will a product marketer be able to add value. Not sure what product marketing is and why you should care, check out my earlier post.
In my experience, here are six signs you should look for in your startup, before you hire a product marketer.
1. Complex Product
Do you have a complex product? Are there several screens, plenty of use cases, oodles of reporting, complex analytics and/or lots of integrations with other products? Is it hard for your buyers to understand your offering and its value?
Product marketing can help you break down the complexity and make it all seem beautifully simple.
Used to the simplicity of consumer apps like Uber and Whatsapp, buyers today want every app be it B2B or B2C to be just as simple.
If your product is fairly simple, chances are you will not derive much value out of a product marketer. Let me explain with an anecdote. Once a head of marketing interviewed me for a product marketing role. I asked her about her product and the length of her sales cycle. She said, “My inside sales rep can sell the product over a single phone call.” By the end of the interview, I convinced her that she didn’t need to hire a product marketer, because her product was so simple it could be sold over a single phone call. There’s isn’t much value a product marketer can add to make the sale any quicker.
2. Rapid Innovation with Frequent Releases
Here’s a second sign you should look for. Your startup has frequent major releases with significant new features that your customers care about. You want to educate your customers on the value of your innovation and how to use the new capabilities. At the end of the day, if your customers don’t use your new features, what is the point of building them? Product marketing can add tremendous value here by owning customer communication and ultimately making customer retention easier.
3. A Decently-Sized Sales Team
Say you have built a decently-sized sales team with at least ten quota-carrying sales reps. If they are to be successful selling a fairly complex product, they will need plenty of sales enablement.
Product marketing considers sales as its customer and provides sales training, continuous education, and a body of polished sales collateral.
Product marketers create various types of collateral based on the problems at hand such as:
| Sales Collateral | Objective |
| Buyer Personas | Help sales know the buyer better |
| Discovery questions | Find the buyer’s pain points |
| Demo videos | Generate interest in prospects in >2 minutes |
| Product positioning | Position the product in the customer’s mind |
| Pitch deck | Present a solution to the customer’s problems |
| Competitive analysis | Prepare sales to deal with competitors |
Sales enablement efforts, if sustained and continuous, will help you shrink your sales cycle because it makes the sales process more repeatable rather than random and ad hoc. The key is to believe in it and stick with it.
4. Long, Complex Sales Cycle
Does your sales cycle take three months or more, involve multiple decision makers, often from different departments? If yes, this means your sales reps will need to handle competitive evaluation cycles, handle plenty of objections, demonstrate ROI, and position different aspects of your product and your company depending on the audience in the room. He/she will have to present on product functionality to the line of business and on information security to the CIO. Product marketing can help sales be better prepared for these numerous conversations and presentations.
5. Highly Competitive Market
You operate in a market with lots of competitors as is the case with most products these days. If the market is fairly sizeable, it will also attract the attention of tech research houses like Gartner and Forrester.
In such a scenario product marketing can help you:
- Develop competitive positioning
- Build competitive analysis and objection handling
- Engage and brief research analysts
- Get featured in industry research reports
6. Have a Stable Product Management Function
Ideally, hire a product marketer only after you have a stable product management function that can lead product direction. Product marketers and product managers are typically joined at the hip on several initiatives from product launches to release communication to sales collateral. In the absence of a product manager, a product marketer will find it challenging to convincingly talk to the market about a product that has no clear owner and limited direction.
In conclusion, if you have three or more of these six factors at your startup, you should seriously consider hiring a product marketer or at least engage an expert in a consulting capacity. If these signs seem distant in your company’s horizon, your headcount might be better utilized elsewhere.
