If you’re a product marketer, I don’t have to tell you how important (and at times, challenging) building a trusted partnership with product teams can be.
For those of you that are not product marketers – perhaps you’re a marketing director, sales VP, C-suite exec, or founder – this delicate process can be a make it or break it moment for your business’ product marketing practice. Without a highly integrated workflow between product and product marketing teams, your business is likely to struggle to uniformly connect with your audiences and fail to build products or services that inherently meet their needs. So how can product marketers help navigate these pitfalls and build a trusted partnership with their product team counterparts? Deliver results and prove your value. Well, that’s the abbreviated (and somewhat harsh) version. Here are four concrete steps that you can start implementing today to help you get there.
1. Align on goals. If you expect individuals and teams to work together to solve complex problems, then they better have the same outcomes in mind. The best way to do this is to ensure teams have shared goals. Generally, product managers have product deliverable goals in addition to a final product adoption goal, whereas product marketers are likely to have marketing deliverable goals in addition to performance goals (email open rates, click-through rates, landing page views, post views, etc.). It’s important to distinguish between tactical deliverables and goals. From my experience, its more impactful to have one end goal, with tactical milestones. If product marketers want to be true partners, they must share ownership of adoption of their product and be held accountable for the results. Sharing product adoption accountability will ensure both teams have a shared vision and desired outcome, producing a “we’re in this together” environment that is conducive to collaboration. Without a shared goal, product marketers can deflect responsibility for poor adoption results by pointing to their tactical performance (higher than expected click-through rates, page views, etc.). Without saying it outright, the narrative reads – “we did our job and marketed the launch but the product was a flop and customers don’t like it”. This is the surest way to lose trust with product teams and it’s perhaps the easiest to avoid.
2. Identify KPIs and benchmarks to measure performance. Once you align on a shared goal, the go-to-market strategy will outline the tactics and milestones needed to achieve it (I have a lot to say about drafting go-to-market plans but that will have to come at a later time). As a product marketer, you must have a way to measure the performance of each of these tactics. This isn’t always easy, but harping back to the deliver results and prove your value mantra, it’s necessary for accountability. What are you trying to achieve with each tactic, how might you measure whether or not you are successful in achieving? Answering these questions will give you a KPI to track. Next, you’ll need to understand what success looks like for each KPI. Whether it’s using historical benchmarks from previous launches, industry benchmarks, or simple ball parking calculations based on third-party sources, you need a way to gauge if what you are doing is working or not. Once you’ve launched your tactics or channels, begin aggregating and tracking performance data on a regular cadence within an Excel or Google doc and build aggregated breakouts – daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly – and track alongside your end goal (adoption in most cases). This will make both sharing information and month-over-month analysis easier.
3. Communicate and be a storyteller. One of the unique qualities of successful product marketers is their ability to distill data and information into digestible and compelling stories. While these stories are generally told to external audiences, you should use these skills to effectively communicate to internal teams as well. If you want to be thought of as an expert wordsmith, storyteller, and marketer, you should exude these qualities when you have the opportunity to do so. Review the data that you have been tracking and begin to develop common threads that build toward some hypotheses. What did you expect to see (KPI benchmarks) and what is playing out? Why might that be happening? Is there any other data you can add to support or disprove these hypotheses? Product marketers are uniquely positioned to add value to product managers by providing visibility into areas outside their purview; hence, a more holistic view of the business and market. For example, sales team feedback, customer feedback, support queue analysis, press reactions, research studies, time period analysis, other product developments within the company, product bugs, product gaps, competitive analysis, feature usage, etc. should all be used to further develop and support your story. Now tell it.
4. Consistency matters. Whether it’s through weekly emails, monthly marketing roundups, or quarterly stakeholder reviews, you should find a consistent mechanism and cadence to share performance (and your story) with your product stakeholders. Whichever format you choose – whether it’s an email, Excel, Google doc, word doc, or PPT – be sure to templatize it and continue to use this as a framework moving forward. Again, this very simple but often not done consistently. It’s easy to share results in a one-time, post-launch email, and then forget to follow up a month later when data may have changed the story significantly. If you consistently deliver impactful updates without being asked to, you are well on your way to becoming a trusted partner.