Speakers: Priya Doty
Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're helping the Product Marketing Community?
Hi, I'm Priya Doty I am a tech marketer by trade and currently a vice president of product marketing at IBM, where I cover to brands IBM Z and Lennox one these are awesome hardcore enterprise servers. They power everything from clouds to use cases at the smallest startups to the largest enterprises for all kinds of industries. This community of product marketers is so important because we add value to the business is that we work in and we help them grow. And that's why I've chosen to spend some time to give back to this community and share my own experiences so that you guys can learn from me and I can learn from you.
How do you find the ideal product marketer? (Is it better to hire experienced or groom someone into the role?)
So the question is, how do you find an ideal product marketer And you know, you're going to have a range. You're going to find people who are experienced product marketers who already have had experience, in this discipline and the way it's defined in today's world, and then you're going to find people who maybe have some other skills, but they have the ability to cross into this role. So the things you want to look for: I look for two things in particular I look for from a qualitative standpoint, Is this somebody who can build a point of view? Can they understand? Take multiple ideas, multiple concepts on can they craft? From that point of view, that's going to resonate with the market and so If you're an experienced product marketer, then you want to ask yourself, can you, and have you been that person where you've had some eminence? Maybe you've been speaking in front of sales people speaking in front of clients and consumers. Maybe you've written blogs. You want to look for that evidence, and if it's somebody who has not been in the role, then you want to look for evidence that they can do that sort of work. Perhaps they can share with you examples of blogs. They've written content they've built. And again, it's all about making sure that that person can take a unique spin and sort of write a story and create that point of view. The danger of finding somebody who doesn't have that ability is that then that person will struggle a little bit to build a point of view. And they may end up being more of a facilitator with your technical folks or your product, folks. And, that's a tougher place from which to add value. Now the other thing I look for is the quantitative side. I want to know that the person who is a candidate can understand data and work with data to improve what they're doing. So on that front. If they're an experienced product marketing manager, then I want to know how have they built their portfolio? How have they grown their prior portfolios? What were some of the challenges that they had, and how did they diagnose those and then resolve them? And then, if they are newer to that discipline again, wanna look for evidence that they've been able to use data metrics to show how they've improved. What they've worked on on a simple thing to do is just to share, you know, during the interview process, share a piece of data, share a report whether that's, you know, a social media report or digital report or anything, really, and get a sense for the different candidates of how fluent they are in looking at data and understanding what the data is telling them.
How should a product marketer be measured? (Are there actual metrics?)
So this question is about metrics and how a product marketers should be measured. So there's probably four big metrics that apply almost universally. The first is pipeline. How much pipe is being generated? The next is revenue. How much revenue is being generated? Is it meeting your target? Is it exceeding that target? The third is market share. Are you growing that market share? And the last is your brand? Are you advancing your brand awareness and your brand consideration? Those are the four that I would look for and depending on what your product marketers are doing, most likely they're gonna be supporting a portfolio. And maybe that's a subset of a larger portfolio. And that's a that's totally fine. Then what you'll want to do is have specific metrics around pipe around revenue and if it's applicable, market share and brand for that subset of the portfolio. But you'll also want sort of a broader team metric that sits above that covers all those for your broader portfolio. and of course the reason you want to do that is because you want to make sure that your whole team is working together so that you're telling the most cohesive story possible to the market
Once in the role, how does a PMM distinguish themselves from Prod Mgmt? (What’s the value of this role, vs classic PM or Comms/DG marketer)
So this question is about how product marketing can distinguish themselves from other rules that they might work with, especially product management and demand generation. So in terms of product management, the main difference between the two functions is product marketing. You know, our role is to really do the targeting. It's the right message, the right product, the right time, the right customer. You know all of those things. And really, at the end of the day, you're landing the product into the market. So you wanna think from that perspective, how can I take with the product manager has built and landed in the market in the right way and then on the demand generation side? Right? So demand generation and product marketing have to work hand in hand to ensure that all of that great work has a distribution strategy. And where the differences is product marketing is all about feeding the funnel. Um, it's our job to create the news, the content, the material that gets the rest of the demand generation engine running, converting in the right way on been fine tuned so that all of that great, marketing campaign activity the nurtures the emails, the digital pages, the search traffic, all of that can be optimized and converting in its most effective manner.
