Jay Gaines for Product Marketers = Architects of Growth

Speaker: Jay Gaines

Jay Gaines: More than anything else, Product Marketing in B2B is the function that creates the context and the ability for the rest of the organization to go to market in a customer or audience centric way. It does this by developing deep audience insights in collaboration with a lot of other functions, but it should be the heart of doing that. And also, of course, is the center of offering insight within marketing. It plays a key role in developing content and messaging. But the main thing is that audience insight and, of course, using that audience insight, coupled with the offering insight to create what I call a go to market architecture. That is a rationalized offering architecture that maps to audiences, so that the company can effectively go to market and hopefully be successful and efficient and doing so.

Jay Gaines: Product marketers can best demonstrate that they are growth architects by being the center of audience and customer insight, not just within marketing, but for the entire company. Now they'll have to collaborate with other functions within marketing and, of course, in sales, to develop that insight. But they're the keepers of it, and they need to create an architecture around that that makes it usable for not just marketing but also sales and especially sales enablement. Now, of course, they can also add to this demonstration of being growth architects but not just focusing on net new growth but also customer retention and loyalty, and again, that comes from their insight into audiences and customers. And finally, they need to build that all important go to market architecture, which couples their deep offering knowledge with their deep audience insights to create an architecture in a mapping offerings to audiences in order to effectively and efficiently bring offerings to market.

Jay Gaines: The top three imperatives for product marketers should first be to constantly deepen that audience insight all the way down to the persona level. Second, it's their responsibility to socialize that insight and knowledge about customers and make sure it's being used effectively and consistently across marketing as well as sales. And then, finally, it's really important that product marketers effectively collaborate with other functions, both within marketing and sales, to ensure they're creating measurable efficiencies, productivity and growth for the business.

Jay Gaines: There are a lot of metrics to measure the performance of product marketers, and that's a good thing. But really, the most important ones include revenue, and that includes both net new revenue as well as revenue from retention as well as growth within existing accounts. Gross margins is another one. Sales pipeline growth is another one. And then, of course, there are things like MBOs that relate to stakeholder perceptions of the value and performance of product marketing. That's a really key one that's often times overlooked by product marketing leaders. But it is important because that's one that will really tell you how effective product marketing is at helping the business to the things that needs to do.

Jay Gaines: Product marketing has a lot of stakeholders, both within and outside of marketing. Now the reason for that is because they're the ones that create the context for how both marketing and sales, go to market. Now starting with marketing. I spent a lot of time working of a lot of CMOs on designing their marketing structures, and I used to system that I called the marketing ecosystem, which really showed a typical workflow in marketing. Now, at the far left end. The beginning of that workflow is typically product marketing or, as I call it, portfolio marketing, because the responsibility isn't only around products. But the reason there is because they're not just the center of knowledge about offerings but also the center of knowledge about audiences, which creates context and insight that's usable by all the other functions. in marketing that includes communications, demand creation, digital, field marketing Even in some cases, marketing operations. So again they're responsible to all of those other functions marking to help them do their work in a very audience centric way. Now, outside of marketing the primary one its sales enablement, which typically include sales training. Now that's really critical because product marketing is going to be developing a lot of the messaging, the content that will be used to train sales reps to better engage their target audiences with very specific offerings. Of course, sales leadership, finance and even HR our stakeholders of product marketing. Because again, it's all about the audiences and how the company engages and talks to those audiences. The product marketer is the center of all of that important work.