By Poornima Mohandas and Rahul Mohandas | 9 min read
It was a Monday morning. It was Mia’s first day at a new startup in the bustling city of Bangalore. After a cup of coffee, HR took her around the office and introduced her to all the folks. It suddenly dawned upon her that for the first time in her product marketing career, she was at a job where there was no product manager. That was the one question she had missed asking in the multiple interview rounds at this B2B SaaS company. She always assumed no company would hire a product marketer without having a product manager first.
So what happens if there is no product manager? Without a product manager, there is no product vision, no product strategy, and no product roadmap. The worst part was, Mia had nothing to celebrate and say “drum roll please” to customers and prospects. Sadly, the only customer communication she ever did in that role was crisis communication.
Mia is a dear friend. Hearing Mia’s story made us wonder, what can we learn from her experience and it influenced us to write this article.
There is no ‘raison de vivre’ for product marketing in the absence of product management. For product managers, it’s like their shiny new product is stuck under a rock without a product marketer.
Before we jump into how product marketing and management can collaborate, let’s understand the distinction between the two roles.
| Role of Product Management | Role of Product Marketing |
| Product manager listens to the market | Product marketing talks to the market |
| Responsible for building a product that meets market requirements and provides business value | Responsible for taking the product to the marketplace with the right positioning |
This 👆 is how we explained it the other day when our 78-year old father asked us what my brother and I do at work 😃
Now that definitions are out of the way, let’s jump into the practitioner’s perspective of how product marketing managers (PMM) and product managers (PM) can best collaborate. These perspectives are drawn from our combined experiences of over four decades in the B2B product world.
Do Discovery and Customer Interviews Together
Whether you are doing blue sky interviews to find out what your next big product to market should be or whether you are doing customer interviews to gauge why adoption is not picking up like expected, it makes sense for PMs and PMMs to do it together. Why, you may ask. Let’s look at two examples.
Say you are doing discovery, it will help you understand the target audience and customer problem better so PM can build a valuable product, and PMM can plan communication upfront, like in the Amazon PR FAQ model.
Now let’s look at another scenario. Suppose you are trying to gauge customer feedback on why a certain product or feature is not getting the traction you had expected, product marketing is likely to ask more open-ended questions, listen more, and be open to feedback and criticism. For product management, it will typically be hard to hear and understand why their baby is ugly.
Joint customer calls are ideal and should be done throughout the product life cycle. If you miss each other’s customer calls, make it a point to listen to the recording or go over the call notes so you can glean insights from it.
Plan Launches and Releases
For every launch and release, PMs and PMMs should ideally team up and tier the launch based on two fundamental questions:
- Will your customers care about this launch? Yes/No
- If yes, how much? Rate on a scale of 1 to 9.
The more your customers care about a launch, the more you want to promote it.
Here is a framework to tier launches, set objectives, and identify opportunities to collaborate.
| Tier I | Tier II | Tier III | |
| Product Launch | Major Release | Minor Release | |
| Launch scope | New product in a new or existing market | New features in an existing product in an existing market | Minor change in an existing product in an existing market |
| Launch objective | Generate interest in the market for the new product | Showcase new capabilities to key stakeholders | Educate customer support to handle customer queries |
| Collaboration areas | — Sales — Customer support — Customers — Partners | Customer support communication |
While the specifics of each launch are different based on what exactly you are bringing to market, the fundamentals remain more or less the same in the B2B world. The bigger the launch, the more the scope for collaboration. Launch time is when PMs and PMMs will work together the most and daily catch-ups are the way to go.
Get a Product Marketing Budget
If your organisation doesn’t already have a product marketing budget for launches and releases, getting your PM on your side will help you build a bigger case. Here’s a table you can share with your PM to win him/her over.
With a budget, we can attract and retain customers:
| Objective | Indicative List of Activities |
| Attract customers | – Run ads for the latest product launch – Host events with a new product showcase – Make professional looking customer and product videos – Get sales excited with a sales incentive |
| Retain customers | – Make videos for every major release – Host customer meetups – Send customers gift cards after every feedback session |
Help Sales Win More
PM and PMMs can work together to help sales win more both at an aggregate level as well as at a deal level. This is so crucial, particularly for PMMs. In the absence of solid KPIs, often your worth will be summarised based on what the field thinks of you. So you want to make sure you invest in building strong relationships with the field.
At the aggregate level you want to deliver joint training sessions wherein the PMM:
- Tells the story and sets the context
- Differentiates between a good prospect and a bad one
- Arms sales with discovery questions
- Helps tackle sales objections
- Tells them how to win against competition
While PM can:
- Train sales on the demo and talk track
- Educate them on FAQs and known issues if any
- Give an overview of the strategic direction and the product roadmap
At a micro deal level, PMM can point sales to the right collateral to use at the right stage, help them position against a new or emerging competitor, while PM can assist with deep-down technical questions. Deal level assistance can be a two-way street and serve as a great avenue to get customer feedback on competitive positioning and product strategy.
CABs and User Conferences and Tradeshows, Oh My
Every product company who has happy customers should constitute a Customer Advisory Board or CAB that meets as regularly as your customers will allow 🙂. If you don’t have one already, PM and PMM can work together to build one out.
CABs help both PMs and PMMs in the following ways:
| CABs help PMs | Understand the customers’ priorities Prioritise investments Co-create the product strategy and roadmap |
| CABs help PMMs | Identify marketing campaign themes (more on this in next section) Get ideas for thought leadership assets Spot potential webinar speakers and case study candidates |
Apart from CAB, PMs and PMMs can also co-speak at user conferences and relevant trade shows to spread the message and get the pulse of the market.
Use Product Strategy to Drive Campaign Planning
When your PM shared the product roadmap at your last CAB, what caught the excitement of your customers? That can potentially be the theme for next quarter’s marketing campaign, provided it is being developed. Let’s look at an example to see how this pans out.
Suppose you are a sales forecasting company, and you plan to launch a new app that automates sales email cadences, that really excited key customers at the last CAB. You could run a marketing campaign around The Power of Cold Sales Emails prior to the launch.
Running such a campaign ahead of product launch with a good body of thought leadership content will help you gauge the excitement in the broader market around sales email automation and also give you a head start with your SEO.
Make Migrations Attractive
Customer migrations can be trying and demand a lot of patience out of you.
The other day, we were talking to a friend, Hari, who had an interesting migration experience. He had to handle a difficult migration of 500 enterprise customers from a legacy platform to a new one. The migration had once been attempted and aborted, given that many customers did not want to move.
Hari teamed up with his PMM to lead this project. They decided to highlight what the new platform offered and why it was better from a performance and stability standpoint. They carefully crafted a thorough customer communication package highlighting all the benefits of the new platform. They sent this message to all the customer success managers and asked them to evangelise it with their customers. Once the message had spread about the benefits of the new platform, it felt like much of the resistance had melted away. They then gave the risk averse customers beta environments to play around with and shifted them to the live environment once they were ready. The migration took six months to execute but went off smoothly.
For migrations, PMs and PMMs should collaborate to craft the right message and work out a path of minimum friction, cost, and resources, making the journey far easier for customers and your organisation.
Engage Analysts
If you are in the enterprise B2B space, you already know how important it is to get and retain analyst attention. Typically, PMMs own the engagement and evaluation cycle. They would consult with everyone from PM to Customer Support to Engineering to answer exhaustive Request for Information questionnaires. Also, collaborate with your PM on what’s best to demo and what parts of the roadmap to showcase.
It is also a good practice to have the product manager in the room during analyst briefings and consultations so they can keep the PMM honest and use the analyst’s rich industry experience to size the market and hone product strategy.
Draw Inspiration from Each Other
Product managers and product marketers can learn and draw inspiration from each other whether it is in how deeply one understands the product’s limitations or in how succinctly the other can verbalise the customer problem. Both roles need each other to flourish.
PMs must build valuable, feasible, and usable products for PMMs to take to market and say “drum roll please”. That apart, PMs need to keep PMMs honest in everything from sales collateral to analyst briefings so we only promise what we can deliver.
Conclusion
If you are a PM or PMM, build your relationship with your counterpart. Have weekly syncs with each other, go out for lunch or coffee. Be joined at the hip. See how you can add value to each other whether it is in getting product feedback, launch planning, setting the agenda for your next CAB or making up for each other’s blind spots.
Both these roles sit at a cross-section of customers, sales, customer success, marketing, and engineering and can only be effective when they are functioning in unison.
This post was first published on Mind the Product.
About my co-writer:
Rahul Mohandas is a product advisor with over 25 years of experience in the product management and technology world. Apart from being an advisor to several startups, he’s also an adjunct faculty for online programs on product management at some of the country’s top B-schools like Indian School of Business (ISB) and Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIMK) through Emeritus.
