We put the Easter weekend behind us and served up an extra-sweet serving of PMM expertise, in the shape of the Science of Product Storytelling workshop, brought to you by Babbel’s Head of Product Marketing, Elliott Rayner. Add insights from our ever-reliable Slack community to the mix, and it was quite the week.
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Recommended product marketing metrics
Q: What kind of targets/success metrics we should pick up for any feature launch campaign? In the past, we’ve reported on a lot of vanity metrics like blog impressions, social media views, etc.
A: “We work with multiple teams to report on all three areas. With Demand Gen, we report on the percentage of email opens and clicks, the number of interest form fills, sales cadence clicks and downloads, and conversions from MQL to SQL to Opp.
“With Product and Biz Ops, we report on adoption - the percentage of each target segment adopting the product, while with Product and Enablement/Sales, we report on any obstacles standing in the way of greater adoption/MRR, including both product defects and missing features, as well as pricing.”
Rebecca Byers, Senior Product Marketing Manager at CentralReach
“For any new product launch, I only look at two things in a stage-wise manner - adoption and then usage. All the others, as you rightly said, are vanity and don't move the needle.
“For the first stage, establish a relatively easier target of, say, 15% of users will have to start using the new feature in the first 3 months post-launch, and then start increasing the target for every 3/6 month period. Now, this will depend on a few things such as the importance of the feature to the core functionality of your product (for example, a lot of people use email but only active professionals use calendaring extensively), the demand patterns of the feature [that must have come up during your initial research], is it a paid add-on, etc.
“For the 2nd phase, you would want to ensure your users who have started using the product continue to do so and also probably increase their usage too. For example, if my software is used for sending push notifications and my new feature is adding rich media to the messages, after adoption, I could set an individual/ group target of X% of messages with rich media from the already adopted users. This will help you derive if people are finding value in your feature or if it's not good enough if a lot of people have stopped using it after first picking it up.”
Anand Vatsya, Product Marketing at WebEngage
Advice for creating sales enablement assets
Q: I'm at a new start-up and we have a dedicated Sales Enablement team (yay!). In my experience, sales enablement has always been part of my function. For those of you PMMs who have worked with a sales enablement team in the past, how did you divide what SE and PMMs were respectively responsible for? Did sales enablement build all of their collateral for the sales team based on the product messaging and positioning you provided? Who was responsible for case studies and internal product training?
A: “In my experience, PMM is responsible for creating all product/service content/training and SE is responsible for driving adoption of it (so determining the best format for training, ensuring reps are using the materials and can access them easily, testing rep proficiency with pitching or objection handling, uncovering reasons why reps may not be using a piece of collateral, suggesting a training calendar, etc).
“In my opinion, sales enablement should never be creating sales collateral. The other thing sales enablement is typically responsible for is sales process/sales skills type enablement -- how to do discovery, how to handle objections, etc.”
Amelia Carry, Director of Product Marketing, Market Intelligence at Khoros
How to incentivize customer feedback
Q: Has anyone incentivized customer feedback on G2?
A: “We have asked for reviews where we offered an incentive and where we didn’t. Incentives work but you still need to follow up and chase customers.
“Depending on how many users you have, it can take time. But the audience who reviews our company’s profile on G2 is the best-qualified one.
“Also, don’t expect too many direct leads. Most users find you on G2 and then go to your website. Rarely request a demo from G2 directly
Gaurav Harode, Founder at Enablix
“Our approach is to contact NPS promoters to ask if they will leave us a G2 review. Our recent campaign was sent without an incentive and produced a 0.5% conversion rate, which I was happy with.”
Sarah Madden Goodlad, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at CM Group
“We ask NPS promoters to review us on G2, depending on some firmographics (like company size, etc.), we may offer a gift card for Amazon in return. $25 for G2 and another $25 if they also post on Capterra.”
Dennis Looijenga, Head of Customer Marketing at Foleon
Understanding developer relations
Q: I find myself struggling a bit to understand how a DevRel org should be structured.
I see that DevRel is an important skill that the marketing team is missing, yet if marketing is managing DevRel then it feels more like a content writer position since the KPI is more tied to getting more traffic and sign-ups rather than educating and bringing knowledge to product to improve product KPIs like onboarding.
Is there anyone at the series B/C stage that has set up the DevRel function and is willing to share some lessons about how to set up DevRel org?
A: “Not B/C Stage but we have DevRel as part of Marketing with vastly different KPIs. We've internally agreed that marketing has a "split" between Dev and Commercial, with the Lead Dev Rel setting the KPIs for the DevRel team.
“The reason they're still closely linked to Marketing is that the Lead DevRel needs to understand the company's goals and KPIs and be accountable for them to an extent - but then decide how best to achieve those (talks, confs, OSS contribution, docs, etc.)”
Ronak Ganatra, VP of Marketing at GraphCMS
“Marketing should help coordinate and facilitate activities, and the DevRel function needs to be a subject-matter expert in your API. They need to be able to answer questions on Github, talk to developers at events, run webinars/demos, etc.
“Marketing can help plan for and enable those outputs, but the DevRel can get into the weeds with your developer audience.”
Gabriele Dane, Product Marketing Manager, Platform & API at Criteo
How to structure your product marketing team
Q: Does anyone have experience dividing their team into functional areas? Our team is currently structured by market/product but it may be helpful for one division to be focused by function; we’re thinking of dividing by Revenue (Sales/TOFU) and System (Product Expertise). Does anyone do anything similar or have any advice on how to do things differently?
A: “Our team has seen two structures:
“Funnel - 1 PMM each for TOF (traffic acquisition), MOF+BOF (traffic conversion + sales enablement), customer marketing.
“Product - 1 PMM each for each product (few more for products with more revenue)
“Funnel-based teams organically evolved into Product based teams. I've spoken with organizations where Funnel/Product PMM teams exist with another team for Enterprise focus.
“I've also spoken with organizations where there is no Sales Enablement done by PMMs (if it's good, sales will be able to sell - this is very brave IMO and the company is doing well, so I guess it's justified).
“There’ve also been cases with organizations where a PMM team is responsible for global initiatives, while several PMM teams are responsible for local initiatives.”
Siddhartha Kathpalia, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VWO
“My team has a structure where there is a core team for each of the 2 main products that focus on discovery/product and market research/roadmap insights as well as positioning, messaging and launch, and also pricing.
“Then there is a team that we call audiences that has someone working with our partner channel as well as two others doing sales enablement, competitive program, website, BoFu content, industry positioning, and personalization stuff with our demand gen team.”
Zachary Fox, Director of Product and Customer Marketing at RD Station
