WRITTEN BY Tom Crist, Principal at Fluvio
Nearly a year ago, we unveiled the proprietary Fluvio GTM Model, a comprehensive approach to guide the creation of an effective, repeatable go-to-market process any company can and should adopt. The GTM Model covers a wide array of impactful activities that are the backbone of an effective product marketing department.
In this three-part blog series, we’ll dive into how to approach addressing each major element of the Fluvio GTM Model with your team, starting with Inbound activities that create a solid foundation for every market-facing motion. Look out for additional posts on the Outbound and Accelerator elements of the GTM Model in the coming weeks.
Introducing your team to Inbound activities
Let’s start by defining exactly what we mean by Inbound activities in the Fluvio GTM Model. This section of the Model is dedicated to (1) the essential market and buyer insights that Product Marketing (PMM) is tasked to bring to the organization and (2) the creation of the key, foundational assets that summarize, detail, and canonize this information for use by stakeholders across the entire organization.
Inbound activities consist of Market Research and Sizing, Competitive Intelligence, Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Development and Segmentation, Persona Development, Foundational Messaging Framework Development, Company and Product Positioning, Beta Program installation & Management, and Product Roadmap Tiering.
In a mature product marketing function, Inbound activities and processes are mapped, completed, and aligned upon before any Outbound (read: market-facing) activities kick off. However, Inbound activities are time- and resource-intensive, and the unfortunate fact is that many real-world GTMs drop new or existing PMM teams in media res to a given launch effort.
As a product marketing leader, it’s your role to help your team both plan for activities to support the ideal state and address the business-critical, time-sensitive challenges brought on by the business, regardless of stage. Knowing where to start in establishing or revising Inbound assets means knowing what you have on hand, what needs an update, and where you’ll be starting from scratch.
Regardless of the prior experience your PMM team has under its belt, this is the inflection point to do a level-set and align with your product marketers about the intended format and use cases of the various Inbound activities. From demand generation campaigns to getting the most from beta participants, every PMM should be aligned on the inputs and deliverables associated with each activity.
One oft-overlooked aspect of product marketing work is how every team interacts with your product marketers. Across GTMs, cross-functional teams should feel like they’re interacting with the same PMM playbook. For example, if a Product Manager is getting market insights from disparate Persona formats or Project Management is being presented with varying Launch Tier definitions by product line, your efficiency and credibility are going to suffer. Use this close look at Inbound activities as your opportunity to streamline PMM operations and templates as needed.
Assessing your current state and prioritizing Inbound activities
If you don’t have a clear view of your foundational assets around the market, your buyers, target segments, and competitors, it’s time to deploy your team to help you build a “current state” view to share within the organization. This approach can also help inform a 3-, 6-, and 12-month priorities summary view, sharing a strong vision to other leaders re: how your team will bring concrete market insights to the organization in the near- and mid-term.
Unless you’re working at a very early-stage startup, chances are you have a decent starting point for Inbound key assets. Ideally, they have been updated on a semi-regular basis with new insights, but you’ll need to rely on yourself and your team to critically analyze what’s still valuable.
With a full accounting of what you have on hand and what you’re prioritizing to update/develop, you’ve created an opportunity to ask the tough questions that challenge deeply-entrenched internal assumptions, such as:
Do personas created in the past still hold up to how the market looks at pain points and your solution today?
Is there an overarching messaging document for your solution, or is it mostly tribal knowledge?
Are there new competitors, or have your competitors evolved their offerings and/or value propositions?
Is there a solid understanding of where customers are deriving value from your platform, and has it evolved since they made an initial purchase?
In nearly every case, you’ll need to invest in the first item on the list of Inbound activities: market and customer research. Internal teams are a wealth of knowledge (see next section) but there’s no substitute for direct qualitative and quantitative feedback from buyers and users. If you work at a larger organization, it’s also worth assessing which other departments (e.g. Product Management, Customer Success) may already be collecting feedback via surveys, aggregated data for QBRs, or other channels into which your team may have low visibility but could supercharge your research planning.
How cross-functional teams influence Inbound activities
One universal truth in Product Marketing? Whatever you’re delivering is always improved by input beyond the PMM team. Leveraging your cross-functional counterparts early and often during inbound activities should serve as a constant complement to your primary insights from customer and prospect interactions and surveys.
If you’re unsure which other functions to involve, think back to a recent product/feature launch team. Who was involved in successfully bringing your new innovations to market? Has your team consulted with representatives from their departments? If the answer is no, a catch-up is likely in order.
Even though PMM is tasked with being the expert on the voice of the customer, it’s risky to assume that your research hypotheses are on point and the right questions are being asked in customer interviews. Start with a formal research project prospectus and share it, along with the project goals and interview questions, with leaders from other departments that will be most influenced by the assets created.
Once research and analysis commence, integrating anecdotal feedback from Product Management about priorities and new logo Sales is a common approach. But don’t rely on their viewpoints exclusively. For example, consider:
What Customer Success teams are pushing to customers (and what’s resonating or not).
Learning about macro customer trends from ticket data addressed by Customer Support, and aggregated insights from Support leadership.
How a data science team might be able to help you make sense of product usage or in-product communications (e.g. Pendo/WalkMe).
As you glean more insights and create key assets, be sure to share thoughts and questions early and often with your cross-functional stakeholders – but don’t get them lost in the details. Your counterparts likely don’t need to view an in-progress asset like a v0.1 messaging framework, but they can be spectacular sounding boards for answering thorny questions about how customers are deriving value from your products today. Identify pointed questions to ask as you conduct research, and engage stakeholders regularly.
With research readouts in hand, it’s time to create or revisit the Inbound activities you prioritized earlier. Items like buyer personas and messaging are easy targets, but be sure to think about every element on the Inbound side of the GTM process. Does a changing competitive landscape mean that corporate positioning has become out of date? Does an evolution to the buyer’s journey mean new items need to be accounted for in a beta process? Pushing your team to extrapolate broader impacts is a force multiplier for your VOC analyses.
Driving value and socializing results from Inbound activities
Great Inbound work that sits on the shelf (or, more realistically, in an obscure SharePoint folder) not only doesn’t advance business goals, but it does a disservice to the PMMs, cross-functional team, and buyers that participated in its creation. Of equal importance to distilling great insights is finding ways to help the rest of the organization can absorb them.
For every dense deliverable (e.g. market research reports or full-length messaging frameworks), you should require a high-level, digestible, summarized version. Just as those working in government provide detailed analysis for the “policy wonks,” some of these resources your team produces are intended for the “PMM wonks” or “messaging wonks” in your organization.
In these summaries, challenge your team to make takeaways crystal clear, their business impact unquestioned, and the applicability of the insights clear. For example, you wouldn't ask every employee to absorb a 15-slide deep dive on a new competitor; but you ask would Sales to have easy access to new landmines to lay on a call, Product Management to take their capabilities into account when roadmap planning, and CSMs to better anticipate questions from current clients.
At the same time, no one wants to hear from a PMM team that’s raining VOC insights down from an ivory tower. Foundational insights from Inbound work can transform how people within your organization view your solution and the market as a whole – which leads to a high potential for controversy. The first line of defense should already be a superpower for most PMMs: the ability to tell a great story and back it up with solid data. Rather than simply presenting the problem, the method to address it, and the results, make sure there’s a crisp, empathetic narrative behind why your work will make a difference for the business and other roles.
To further mitigate unhelpful pushback, give your cross-functional stakeholders an outlet to provide feedback before sharing widely, including a reasonable level of input on the final document whenever possible…but also ensure they contribute their clout to the rollout. For sales enablement sessions, include a respected rep who can reinforce the value of new messaging to peers. Or, include a trusted PM in a research share-out to Product Management who can highlight some of the major takeaways and their importance.
Also, it’s important to avoid reinventing the wheel every time your team rolls out a new Inbound asset or process. If there’s a critical new piece of market analysis on the market, a dedicated meeting with leadership and mini-roadshows are likely part of the answer. A major tweak to launch tiering might require discussions with individual Product Managers. But not everything needs this level of effort – find ways to integrate learnings and updates into standing meetings, already-popular Slack channels, department All-Hands calls, and other existing sources.
At the end of the day, highlighting collaboration success stories, big market insights, and positive business outcomes, and success stories reinforces a culture that values and supports Inbound activities. So, find the channels that work best in your organization, document them with your team, and leverage as many as you need.
Professional development strategies to strengthen your team’s skills
Great PMM work requires leveraging the many hard and soft skills effective product marketers possess. Beyond knowing how to create a persona or create positioning, powerful storytelling is often what drives the success and adoption of your team’s work. Inbound activities, by definition, are the most research-intensive and impactful work your team can embark on. Helping your team develop the chops to effectively communicate the results is an investment that pays significant dividends across projects.
So, how can you set your PMMs up for success? Consider how you’re approaching professional development for them. There are many great providers of product marketing certifications and general professional development, but there also are outside-the-box methods to create a well-rounded PMM team. Consider, for example:
How building a statistical analysis skill set could improve market research efforts,
Why a course in product management could improve collaboration with PMs, or
How a certification in design thinking could supplement storytelling skills and deck creation.
Among our team of consultants at Fluvio, we take professional development to heart by also fostering a culture of sharing – and it’s easy to replicate. By both stressing the importance of professional development and providing dedicated time for our team to share learning and feedback every month, we magnify the impact of our investment in our team members.
Curious as to where your team’s Inbound capabilities stack up against other leading PMM departments? Take our GTM Assessment and get an unbiased view from one of our consultants on where you stand, where to invest, and next steps.