It’s no secret product marketers arguably touch the most departments day-to-day, but all that contact can be tough to keep on top of without a little help. The findings from our Tools of Choice report showed collaboration tools are most popular among product marketers and it’s no surprise - they save time and money, reduce admin, cut out meetings, and make sure everyone’s up-to-speed, all the time.
Just like a mechanic, a product marketer needs a tool bag. Find out about all the other great tools you can access to make your life easier in our Product Marketing Tools of Choice report.
Airtable
Part spreadsheet, part database, Airtable makes organisation and collaboration a piece of cake. You can add as many users as you like and each can edit, comment, add and contribute to projects in real-time. It accepts any type of content - attachments, long text notes, links, checkboxes, barcodes or otherwise, and lets you pick from grid, calendar, gallery or kanban view.
Website: airtable.com
Cost:
At Nearmap, we’ve shifted launch planning back into the hands of product managers, who now use Airtable to keep everybody on track on every GTM execution, regardless of size and scope of the release.
Angela Catalan, Director of Product Marketing, Nearmap
Asana
Asana’s all about helping teams get organised, say on track and hit deadlines, and it does this by providing a single place to store, detail and track project components. Within it, you can move tasks through various stages (like To Do, In Progress, Started, Waiting for Approval and Done), set timelines, see how busy your teams are, and get instant calendar access to everything that’s going on.
Website: asana.com
Cost:
Once you set up a GTM project it’s easy to clone old projects for your next GTM. Once I had project templates for minor and major releases it was easy to spool up the next project by assigning dates for each task working backwards from the release date.
James Allgood, Product Marketing Lead at Brightidea
Basecamp
If you’re looking for a more efficient way to work with your team Basecamp could be the answer. You can create to-do lists to see which tasks are upcoming or overdue, start project-specific message boards, set schedules, share and store important files, start real-time group chats, invite clients, see hill charts, and much, much more.
Website: basecamp.com
Cost:
Box
Using, managing and sharing multiple tools, projects and files every day comes with a whole load of security, compliance and organisational concerns, but that’s where Box hopes to help. It provides a safe haven to store and share all your work in one place and is open to both internal and external collaboration.
It integrates with 1,000s of leading software providers (like Office 365 and G Suite), accommodates every industry and country’s security and compliance requirements, and installs intelligent workflows for you to access anywhere, at any time.
Website: box.com
Cost:
1Password
If you hop from tool-to-tool every day, 1Password could be the answer to your password-forgetting prayers. All you need to remember is the one password for your master account and then they store and protect the rest.
Website: 1password.com
Cost:
Product marketers need to work across a wide spectrum of activities. One minute you might be researching customers using Salesforce and Gong and the next you might be digging into a bug in Jira. This means you use a lot of apps and need to track a lot of credentials. 1Password securely stores all your credentials and lets you log into apps fast so you stay productive.
Al Sargent, Head of Product Marketing at InfluxData
G Suite
G Suite’s a popular choice among PMMs for general collaboration and comes with a whole load of features to make the day-to-day that bit easier.
Connect: Gmail, Calendar, Currents, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, and Hangouts Meet Hardware.
Create: Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Sites, App Maker, Keep, and Jamboard.
Access: Drive and Google Cloud Search.
Control: Admin, Vault, Mobile, and Workinsights.
Website: gsuite.google.co.uk
Cost:
Google makes everything easy to pick up and be familiar with when it comes to Docs, Sheets, and Slides, but it's a mixed bag for expertise - using Drive can be phenomenal or a mess depending on how you set it up. We use a Marketing Shared Drive (read: shared folder) that everyone is able to put documents into and therefore everyone can search for, but that needs to be trained because the default is to put new documents into MyDrive which is inaccessible. Mac and PC integrations work great if you use them as your main file system because it's constantly backed up. No saving or versioning necessary, G Suite takes care of it.
Alec Pinkham, Director of Product Marketing at AppNeta
Slack
Bluntly put, Slack simplifies team communication. Conversations occur in channels or private messages and the former can be split by project, team, department or just about anything else, with members able to join and leave as they wish. Better yet, everything’s searchable, it integrates with external tools and services, lets you drag-and-drop files, and accommodates face-to-face and face-to-screen calls.
Website: slack.com
Cost:
At OpenLegacy, we use slack every day for instant communication amongst individuals. We share files through it, setup groups, etc. and it’s especially useful because more of the employees are remote. It enables us to stay connected and act as a team even though we aren't physically located together.
Martin Bakal, Product Marketing Director at OpenLegacy
Confluence
Confluence makes collaboration open and accessible to help teams create powerful pages, work better together and stay organised. Whether it’s your six-month marketing plan or product requirements, it’s got templates to give you a kickstart and lets you group relevant pages, jointly edit, give feedback and understand team decisions.
Website: atlassian.com/software/confluence
Cost: the more people you onboard the lower the price per-user, but here’s a rough idea of what to expect for their Cloud plans:
With a bit of love (and lots of page tagging and other macros), you can organise information to create a wiki that works for your team. It’s now where stakeholders go to look for information about customers, their workflows, and repurpose those ‘source materials’ for demand-generation campaigns and sales enablement programs.
Angela Catalan, Director of Product Marketing at Nearmap
Zoom
Zoom’s used for video and audio meetings and also facilitates live messaging and content sharing, syncs with your calendar, and records and saves your files. With zoomrooms, you can also hook it up to your existing conference system and with zoomphone, you’ve got one app for voice, video, voicemail, messaging, meetings and conferencing.
Website: zoom.us
Cost:
Zoom is our best way of keeping in touch and communicating with each other. We have many remote employees and are on conference/video calls all the time. Zoom integrates with Google Calendar so it’s easy to schedule a Zoom meeting with anyone at the company and we also rely on it for internal all-hands meetings and use it to conduct internal webinars for sales enablement.
Daniel Kuperman, Director of Product Marketing, Snowflake
Calendly
With umpteen new emails in your inbox every hour the last thing you want is a bunch more to organise a meeting. With Calendly, you can block out the days and times that don’t work for you so others know what does, then all you have to do is share the link (either via email or by embedding it on your site) and let the person on the other end pick a slot and add it to your calendar.
Goodbye emails, hello simple scheduling.
Website: calendly.com
Cost:
As a product marketer, I used Calendly to set up win/loss calls for my product team. The tool automatically syncs with each product manager’s Google calendars - that way, when a recently won or lost customer is open to having a conversation, there's little to no barrier in finding a time that works for both parties. While many parties are "open" to having a conversation, many don’t follow through if the process takes too long. We've found that once we implemented Calendly, most (if not all) parties scheduled time after confirming that they were open to having a conversation.
Andrew McCotter-Bicknell, Associate Product Marketing Manager at ZoomInfo Powered by DiscoverOrg
Bynder
Bynder resonates with the struggles PMMs face in terms of bringing more products out - at pace - while maintaining content consistency and it bridges the gap by replacing messy folders, misused assets and multiple locations with a single source for everyone.
On top of that, it enhances team workflows, promotes collaboration, enables smart permissions (so you can control who sees what), comes with brand templates, unlocks the data behind your content, and integrates with lots of leading apps.
Website: bynder.com
Cost: not available online.
PMA
PMA’s Slack channel’s chocker with 1,000s of PMMs from around the world and the community’s a great source for answers to all your questions. From which screen-sharing tools people recommend to Go-To-Market template requests, it all goes on, every day. In conjunction with Product Marketing World, their events also unite 1,000s of PMMs several times a year.
The Alliance’s latest edition is membership packages, where you can exclusively access tonnes of content, frameworks, templates, slides, videos and mentors, as well as members-only events, networks and Q&As.
Website: productmarketingalliance.com
Cost: Slack’s completely free, courses are coming soon, and membership comes in at:
Evernote
Evernote’s a note-taking app for everything from meeting notes and webpage feedback to projects and to-do lists, including audio and images. By keeping everything in one place, it supports team collaboration and ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
Website: evernote.com
Cost:
This has been my go-to for years and I'm a fan of the hierarchy and ease of use across platforms. I often jot notes on my phone or iPad, but use the thick client on Mac for review. We're a Google Docs company so I often have to translate shorthand into docs later but it's worth it for the organization.
Alec Pinkham, Director of Product Marketing at AppNeta
Notion
With Notes & Docs, a Knowledge Base, Tasks & Projects and Spreadsheets & Databases, Notion combines the likes of Airtable, Google Sheets, Trello, Asana, Jira, Confluence, Evernote and more into one.
Website: notion.so
Cost:
WebEx
With WebEx, you can video conference from and to anywhere in the world, collaborate post-call with messaging, file-sharing and whiteboarding, hook up to conference devices, share your screens, and reach 1,000s of attendees at once.
Website: webex.com
Cost:
SharePoint
SharePoint’s a hub for sharing and managing content, knowledge and applications and forms your team, department and company’s intranet. As well as making information easier to find, it encourages cross-departmental collaboration and makes teamwork a doddle.
Website: products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint
Cost:
Quip
Fed up of toggling between tabs? Well, you might not have to anymore. Quip brings documents, sheets, slides and chats together, integrates with Salesforce, and makes live collaboration from any device, from anywhere in the world, easy.
Website: quip.com
Cost: prices based on annual billing
Podio
Podio streamlines processes by consolidating all your content and communication into a single, searchable location. It lets you visualise your dashboard in a way that works for you, pick from endless apps, integrate with your existing tools, see, discuss and track files from anywhere you want, assign tasks and more. The result? Less admin and quicker communication.
Website: podio.com
Cost:
Miro
Whether you’ve got employees in Houston or Hong Kong, Miro makes teamwork easier, faster and more organised. With infinite canvases, readymade templates, digital sticky notes, freeform pens, screen sharing, cursor collaboration, 20+ integrations and more, it’s got solutions for everyone.
Website: miro.com
Cost:
“Miro’s the tool I use to make all frameworks, GTM planning and research publicly and collaboratively. It's not meant to be a management tool (even though they have plugins for that), but it can help by giving visibility to the entire company about the project – and not just the people directly involved in it.”
Lucas Bacic, Product Marketing Manager at VTEX
GoToWebinar
With easy management, automatic invitations and follow-up emails, engagement initiatives (like videos and polls), attendee and performance data and shareable video libraries, GoToWebinar’s the webinar-host of choice for many.
Website: gotomeeting.com/webinar
Cost:
Dropbox
As well as letting you store and share files and folders, Dropbox lets you coordinate with your team in-app and serves up document suggestions to save you time searching for them.
Website: dropbox.com
Cost: their basic account’s free and accommodates 2GB of space, after that your options are:
Zapier
Zapier connects your apps (like Asana, Google Sheets, Hubspot, and a whole load more) so they start automatically feeding one another with important information.
Website: zapier.com
Cost: prices vary depending on how many tasks you use a month. All figures below are based on the minimum tasks per package.
ContactMonkey
It’s got two products but the Sales Teams one’s probably most relevant for PMMs. With it, you and your teams can track Gmail and Outlook sales emails for things like open rates and link clicks, access live feedback and data, send mass personalised emails - now or later, share templates, and view and edit Salesforce data.
Website: contactmonkey.com
Cost:
Coda
Perhaps the easiest way to describe Coda is a hybrid between a Word doc and an Excel sheet. It acts as a “single source of truth” while enabling each individual to see data, reports and processes the way they want, as well as automating tasks and connecting to external tools (like Slack, GitHub and Gmail).
Website: coda.io
Cost: at the moment, your entire team can use all their features for free, however, some ‘Packs’ require a paid account.
The primary way we use Coda in PMM is for launch planning. We have created a Coda template for launches that includes a tiering framework, goals, audience section, messaging, milestones, tactics planning and so on. That means we don't have to start from scratch for every launch which frees us up to spend more time on the actual launch strategy.”
Jasmine Jaume, Group Product Marketing Manager at Intercom
