What does product marketing do?

Product marketing is THE pivotal marketing function for early-stage startups, yet many (technical) founders don’t understand what product marketing does, and why it’s so important. 

Let’s break it down. 👇

Some founders think that the job of product marketing is to write product datasheets, product release notes, white papers and blog posts. That’s certainly part of the job but not the essence of the job. 

To put it in the engineers' language, the core role of product marketing is business observability and troubleshooting, i.e., finding the weak links in your go-to-market (GTM) strategy and helping fix them. 

At any point, there will be one or multiple bottlenecks in your GTM or your “merchandising cycle” as we have dubbed it at Sequoia Capital . If your revenue is not growing as fast as you want, you need to understand why. 

Are you targeting the right people? Is your messaging landing? Are you qualifying your prospects well?  Are you managing the sales cycle tightly? Are you losing too many deals to competition? 

A good product marketer watches the conversion funnel from prospect to customer like a hawk and has a precise grasp of where the weak links are. 

When there are no solid metrics yet (which is often the case in early-stage companies), good product marketers interrogate salespeople, BDRs, sales engineers, and product managers to pinpoint where the bottlenecks are. 

The best product marketers are really analytical and have a lot of curiosity about the business. That's why, in my experience, former McKinsey & Company ,  Boston Consulting Group (BCG) , or Bain & Company consultants make the best product marketers. 

Apart from analyzing your business, product marketing helps companies: 

1. Determine your ideal customer profile (ICP)

2. Create positioning & messaging 

3. Arm sales and marketing teams with sales tools and collateral

4. Determine pricing 

5. Be the external spokesperson. 

Why is ICP important? 

If you spend your time and resources chasing the wrong customers, you will be burning money. Good products are never all things for all people but they are awesome for some people. The key is to define as precisely as possible who these people are. 

Your ICP has two elements: what kind of company you sell to + what persona cares about your solution. Like many things in GTM, it is a matter of experimenting and iterating. You are not going to get it right the first time. 

Next comes messaging. The best (and toughest to get right) distillation of your messaging is the elevator pitch.

Settling on the messaging is a prerequisite for creating tools and collateral for the sales and marketing teams. The sales deck and company website are the most important “front faces” of the company. 

Pricing is one of the most important yet underutilized strategic levers. Don’t let it be an afterthought. Pricing is about four related but separate decisions: the pricing metric, the pricing model, the price level, and the packaging. (See more on pricing here: https://seq.vc/pricing)

How do you measure product marketing? You hold the sales leader accountable for the forecast and the marketing leader for the pipeline; what do you hold product marketing accountable for?  In my many years leading product marketing teams, I have not come up with a good metric. 

However, I use two qualitative litmus tests: does your head of sales feel well served by product marketing, and does product marketing have a good handle on the business? 

Finding good product marketers is hard because it requires a unique blend of left-brain and right-brain capabilities. You’re asking for the impossible: deeply analytical yet creative people. If you have to compromise, lean analytical (e.g. the McKinsey & Company consultants)

During my time at VMware we put together a “product marketing handbook” that spells out the product marketing charter, the product marketing mindset and skill set, interview questions, and much more. 

Message me to get a copy.