Answering the Bobs: "What Would You Say You Do Here?"
As a product marketer, do you ever struggle with explaining your job to your in laws, or Aunt Betty, or the Corporate Bobs (from Office Space), "What do you do?"
Of course, we all do. We live in the squishy gray area between marketing, product, tech enablers, sales people, speech writing for corporate leaders, and so much more. That’s why we love it. That, and all the ‘pretty PowerPoints” we make.
I was talking with a former colleague the other week over a bottle of wine and a fancy charcuterie board, and we were discussing this exact challenge.
I made the comment that product marketers, really are just corporate influencers. While we may not be making millions on TikTok we play a pivotal role in getting the corporate forces moving in a direction. Saying the same things and singing from the same song sheet.
We’re influencing the product team that, based on the market data, we should be putting more focus in this area of product, or influencing the dev/engineering team to get things done by a certain time to maximize our launch at an event. Even more so, we are influencing our sales teams to listen to us, to understand how we are messaging and creating stories that help them sell. All of these forces have their own agendas in organizations, so influencing these to get that boat rowing the same direction is quite a challenge. This is just the internal forces, we haven’t gotten to external influence with the likes of media, press, analysts and more.
The good product marketers out there take queues from the social influencers. They find ways to reach their internal audiences in channels they prefer and speak to them in their own way. Product Marketers are storytellers. They make things easy to understand, and feel the value. And we do this internally too. Example, speaking to a sales leaders about a product launch is much different than a product manager about why there needs to be feature x to be competitive. We have to put on our different hats to make sure we are reaching our stakeholders where they are to get them to come along on the bus.
The bad product marketers out there, just write a messaging doc and email it around and say, here it is… and here are a couple pieces of collateral. They aren’t influencing anything, simply delivering an asset they have been asked to do.
Here lies the difference. Organizations that employer and expect product marketing to be the glue function understand the value and strategic importance that we play. Organizations that look at product marketing as just another tactical function within marketing, typically are not able to tell a coordinated, integrated story. They typically lead with feature or function, rather than compelling stories that sell the value of the solution to the problem. And we all know, when we are fighting against features, we eventually lose, because someone always comes up with a better widget to upstage our ‘cool’ feature.
For CMOs, CROs, CPOs or CEOs out there, many times you all don’t understand the strategic importance the glue function plays in your organizations. Product marketing is the strategic arm (or should be) helping to influence the go-to-market motions. Why, well, let’s see:
They have more broad market and competitive understanding than just about any other function in the organization.
They understand the customer and user journey and the sales journey it takes to get them to buy because they are connected at the hip with sales teams from on-the-ground to corner offices, as well as support and services organizations.
They are not biased. They don’t have a dog in the fight, meaning that they aren’t pushing their pet feature through because they think its cool. They aren’t proposing radical shifts in a product because of the ‘this one customer would buy from us if we had this one thing’ syndrome. Nor do they get swept up in executive-itis, where just because someone with a big title says “Let’s do x,” everyone drinks the Kool-Aid. Product marketers are generally the arbiters of rational, market- and data-driven decisions.
My advice to product marketers out there: own your role as the corporate influencer.
To the leaders out there, empower your product marketers to play this strategic role. Engage with them; if you don’t, you will be surprised how much they already play the critical strategic glue in your organization.
The days of product marketing being just an execution arm of collateral and pretty PowerPoints have passed. Today, leading organizations know the power that this function can play in creating a well-managed go-to-market process.
So when Aunt Betty asks next week over Christmas dinner, "So what do you do?" now you have a better answer.
