259: What is Product Marketing

Steli Efti:

Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:

And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:

And today, the sound track, we’re going to talk about Product Marketing 101. What is  product marketing? How do you hire somebody for product marketing? How do you successfully do  product marketing? Here’s the reason why I want to talk about this with you, Heaton,  because surprise, surprise Close.io is hiring our first product marketer. By the way, if you  listen to the episode and by the end of it, you still think that you  are the right person, please shoot me an email at steliclose@io. I want to hear  from you. But as we’ve been in the process of hiring our first person in  product marketing, I have just been in this fascinating world of interviewing people for this  role, interviewing other successful SaaS founders that have great product market teams, figure out how  they do it. And it’s just a funky, funny space where there’s a lot of  confusion. I feel like there’s very different definitions of even what product marketing is, how  to do it, what to do and how to do it right. So like I  need to talk to my main man, Heaton about this because it seems to an  area that’s fascinatingly blurry to most companies. So, first let me ask you a question  that I asked a lot of people that I’ve interviewed for this position. Which it  seems to be such a basic question, I shouldn’t have to ask it. What is  product marketing and how is it different from other marketing functions in the team? What’s  your definition for that, Heaton?

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. It’s a really good question. Product marketing is a really weird role. It’s almost  weirder than product, although a lot of product people are also product marketers. And the  reason the role is weird is it crosses sales, marketing, and product. And often times,  executives, leaders, CEOs are also involved. Those stakeholders really care about the messaging and what  the product is. And so for me, my definition of what it is, and I’ve  said this a while ago actually but I’m going to lay it out, is basically:  product marketing is the art and science of conveying to people what your product can  do for them with the goal of engaging, converting, and retaining. And that’s really it.  And you know it’s very product centric because it’s got product in it, so it’s  one of my like my topics of choice. So I’m assuming, and I wanted to  ask you a question, but I’m going to just make an assumption and see what you think. I’m assuming you folks are ready to basically start thinking a lot more  seriously abut the positioning of your product in the market. Not the positioning of your  business or brand because I think you’ve got that from a marketing stand point. But  more the positioning of your product. Is that correct?

Steli Efti:

What’s the difference between the positioning of the company and brand and the positioning of  the products specifically?

Hiten Shah:

My blunt answer is that there should be no difference. My more honest answer is,  companies reach a scale where brand and company positioning is done through marketing while product  positioning is done through product. And through meeting what’s the part of the business that’s  communicating that, what’s the part of the business that’s responsible for it. So companies often  hit a scale when their company positioning, their business positioning, their marketing position, like how  they’re viewed in the outside world is not aligned with their product. And the reason  for that is the business gets to a point where it’s working. And all of  a sudden you’re like wait, are we considering what our product does? Are we considering  the people who are using our product when it comes to all communications with the  outside world? Are we updating our website enough? Are we launching at a higher velocity  new features? Is there much more competition? But the truth is, all parts of a  company’s sales, marketing product end up taking the brunt of this problem without knowing it.  Until you’re at this point where like, product marketing becomes a thing that you need  to address and think about. So like I said, I made a bunch of assumptions  but my first question is actually, “Dude, why are you hiring a product marketer. What  made you come to that conclusion?”

Steli Efti:

Yeah. That’s a good question. So here’s how we thought about this right, and why  we came to the conclusion we want to hire somebody there. The one core reason  is that all of our marketing up until this point has been very indirectly marketing  our product to customers, right. So all of our marketing has been content marketing. And  our content is very like kind of sales, thought, leadership, teaching our future customer how  to do their job really well and how to succeed in the market place. And  it’s never been directly marketing our product to them. Right? So we teach people how  to sell and we teach companies how to do sales successfully. These people read our content because they have these questions on how to hire sales people, how to scale  sales, how to do sales well. We have answers for them and they start becoming  … Falling in love with our brand, falling in love with our content, becoming our  audience and our readers. And down the line, this might take six months. This might  take 12 months of them engaging with our content. Eventually, there’s a moment, there’s an  infection point where they either, for the very first, time need a CRM or enough  has happened to make them so unhappy with their current CRM that they’re in the  market for a CRM. And the moment where they are in the market, we are  top of mind and they’re like, “I want to check out Close.io product.” I know  they have a CRM. I’ve been reading their stuff and their content is so great  that I want to give their product a shot. That’s half of all our trials  come from that kind of journey. We have never done up until this point is  to think about the person that is in the market today that is like, “We  need a CRM right now or we need to switch CRMs right now.” And they  go out online and they try to research what are CRMs for unique case, for  our specific needs. And they do a bunch of research, they find a bunch of  solutions and then they compare these solutions trying to boil down to the right one  for them. So people that are just in the market right now, we’ve never marketed  to them because we never do marketing around our product. All our marketing up and  to this point was around our content and then people discovered and fell in love  with the product as secondary step. That’s one big reason why at this scale of  the business, we started thinking okay, it’s increasingly irresponsible for us not to have somebody  that worries about marketing the product, positioning the product in general. But also specifically to  people that are in the market for our product right now. Independently from if they’ve  ever heard of us or not. Does that make sense?

Hiten Shah:

I really like the … Yeah is the Company going more outbound from a sales  perspective, yet?

Steli Efti:

No. It’s still all inbound.

Hiten Shah:

Okay. Cool.

Steli Efti:

And the interesting thing … So I like what you were saying. I didn’t think  about it that way, but I do think that in a brand-wise and company-wise we  have a very clear idea what our positioning is in the market and we have  a very strong position. And a big part of the brand we’ve been able to  build has directly contributed to our success in the market but we’ve not thought as  much about the product positioning, especially in relation with everything else that’s going on. And  also as the products that are competing with us have vastly changed and shifted. And there have been a lot of new entries in the space and some old that  have entered our space. The companies and the products that we were competing with directly  four years ago, it’s not the same space anymore. And it’s been a lot more  crowded, a lot more differentiated. A difference of of features and the way people put  together their sales stack and all that and think about how the product and our  features and future work, like how that compares in positions within the greater market. I  think that at this size of our business this becomes a more important question that  we just didn’t care about back in the day when first launched. One interesting thing  that I’ve seen asking people for their definition of product marketing is that I’ve gotten  like … There’s not a single definition for this and there’s like this wide range  of answers that I’m getting. And it seems like some people and companies, they think  of product marketing as a topa funnel function, right? So we’re thinking about like we’re launching a new significant feature every month, coordinating the launch of that feature, finding partners  to promote this with, writing all the content essence around that on the website and  the block on the support desk software. Coordinating within the new team on how to  communicate this new feature to new people. Creating landing pages for the feature. Thinking about  the new competitors and how their feature is related or compares with this feature. And  just doing just a bunch of positioning around a new feature or product and then  doing the initial launch with a big focus on driving adoption and driving interest and  driving trials and traffic. Versus some people and companies they think of product marketing much  more in kind of mid and end of the funnel. Of like, any time we  launch something new, how do we communicate this with our existing customers? How do we make sure that our existing customers adopt and use this new feature or product? How  do we make sure that people that are already trialing product know about all the  different important key features related to their interests or their customer profile and we convert  them from a trial to an engaged trial and from an engaged trial to a  operated customer. And some companies and people they think of product marketing as something that’s kind of like the entire life cycle. From driving traffic, to helping onboard and engage  to retain, retention right? How do we make sure that customers that wanted certain things  as we roll out these things they know about them and they stay happy and  stay kind of long term successful. How do we make sure that we do a  lot of customer training and education on our new features and our product and all  that good stuff. So there’s three kind of distinct definitions where one is very heavy  at the top of the funnel, the other’s very heavy at the end of it and then there seems to be one definition that just takes just the entire life  cycle and adds responsibility. Do you think that all three could be good? I mean  it really depends on the company. Do you think that some of them are confused  and are actually kind of counterproductive? Thinking about product marketing, where do you sit in terms of what part of the funnel and customer journey, the product marketer or the  product marketing team should own and care most about?

Hiten Shah:

I’ve seen the role differ a little bit here and there. The way I think  about it is pre-launch in the future there’s a lot of communication and research that  can be done, typically product marketers end up doing that research, so that’s one really  strong angle I would consider. And then post-launch, there’s a whole bunch of work that  needs to be done that’s more around like helping the sales team. What typically is  called sales enablement. You know, essentially as I mentioned like earlier, making sure people are  retained and engaged. And so, one way to think about it is product marketing owns  the communication throughout the whole life cycle. But it’s all very customer-centric, not necessarily like  what marketing would do, which is demand generation and things like that. We’re just getting  into like, in my mind, a lot of formalized roles and formalized disciplines. Like demand  generation, it’s a discipline of marketing. Product marketing depending on the company is either, it’s  turning into being more on the product team, less on marketing. But historically it was  more on marketing, less on the product team. Just because how the world was and  how people had a different viewpoint on some of this stuff. So in my mind  like I look at this and say okay, if our company is not doing as  much customer development or learning about messaging for features that we’re building then, then product  marketing team or person can really help with that. And they should be really good  at interviewing customers, customer development. They may even creating a lot of the case studies,  depending on how your business is set-up and teams are set-up. And they’re also communicating  with sales and marketing and product to basically figure out what’s coming, what are those teams need to support what they need to do? And if product marketing is inside  a product, how can product support it? And so I found that more recently companies  are pushing for product marketing being inside a product, but I’ve seen people debate that  it should be a part of marketing. But reason I like … Yeah go ahead.

Steli Efti:

No. Go ahead.

Hiten Shah:

I was just saying the reason that I like it a part of product is  cause it’s very customer centric and it isn’t just about pre-sign-up.

Steli Efti:

I like that, that’s cool. I never thought about like product marketing sitting with the  product team versus the marketing team. Independently from where the position sits, talk a little  bit about basic assets that a product marketer owns and activities, like one on one  what your product do all day, right? You mentioned case studies. We mentioned research and  customer development. We mentioned coordinating with different teams, the product team the support team the  sales team on how to launch and communicate a feature and make sure that everybody  within the company is aligned on this new feature or this new product that is  being launched. We mentioned the website, you know? Updating assets and that nature. But I  also heard from some really successful SaaS companies that the product marketing team owns the  email list and all email communication with customers, trial users, marketing leads, whatever it is.  What’s kind of like, on a practical level, what is top of work that product  marketing in your opinion should own and do? And what are some of the essence  that you seen is best when product marketing owns these types of essence of channels  versus it’s actually not that great if they do all these types assets or channels?

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. I think the simple question is, how close to the customer is it, the  channel?

Steli Efti:

Well what do you mean by that? How close to the customer is the channel?  I mean obviously the website is probably an asset that is further away from the  customer because a customer will not typically visit your website every day to read things  about you, right? Is that the definition of thinking process here?

Hiten Shah:

Yeah. Cause a formalized approach is like okay parts of the website, marketing owns parts  of the website product owns. And the truth is like historically, product marketing has been  a big company role. It’s just something that as you get larger as a company  or you’re in a big company, you have all these product marketers but what do  they really do? They’re just some form a bridge type of person between different departments. That’s usually what products should be doing. So the absolute truth for me is like,  and again I come from a place where like I believe product marketing should sit  in product, not in marketing. So if I come from that place, I’m like well  product’s not doing their job if they need a ton of dedicated product marketers versus  just a few. Or just like it ingrained in their processes. But then that goes  back to how does product determine messaging if the skill-set doesn’t lie in product for  messaging? I would argue that skill-set should lie product because product should be the one  closest to customer in terms of learning what their needs are, learning how to make  the product better, and more importantly learning the positioning in the market that the company  needs. Now this can be super debated because if you’re a great marketer, you’re thinking  about positioning all the time. So then it’s like wait, like who’s actually responsible for  product positioning and value proposition and also like how we communicate, what we do and  who we do it for? And this is why I like, I think people invented  product marketing, you know. It’s like wait, like this is … To me this is  one of those topics that get so freaking confusing simply because it’s like one of  those roles I think was made up because there’s a bunch of deficiencies between the  teams. And so this is like a role that crosses … It’s a marketing discipline  to determine positioning, historically. Right? If you look at the history of this, but it’s  a product discipline to talk to customers. But yet if you’re doing positioning well, you’re  actually talking to market and customers. So, I just go back to the question to  like the places that actually touch the actual customer or someone when they’re close to  buying or close to like signing up is probably more a product marketer role. While  marketing is responsible for topa funnel, acquiring customers, right? But now I’ll throw a freaking  wrench in this by saying, “Well what about growth?” What about the growth people or  the growth key? How does that impact all of this. So to me, it’s like  a fascinating topic.Number one, my friend Steli wants to hire product marketing. Cool. That’s fascinating  to me. Number two, I’ve hired people who you call product marketers and they usually  sat on the marketing team because they were great at copy and we thought as  a team copy was a marketing thing. But when you looked what they did, they  did a lot of things that overlapped with what the product team did too. And  you could think of it as a hand-off and where it’s once product has figured  out a bunch of stuff about the feature, the copy side of it goes over  to product marketing. So they may be helping to run the early access process of  a feature to understand what really matters. But then they still have to work product  to inform the roadmap right, if that’s what they’re going to do. So I would  say that just hearing like what you’re saying, I think you want someone more on the copy side of it that probably will sit more in marketing and that’s totally  cool. But then how do they determine the right copy for different parts of your  website and different parts of the customer life cycle. Well they’re going to have to  talk to the customers, right?

Steli Efti:

Everybody has to talk to the customers-

Hiten Shah:

Yeah, but like-

Steli Efti:

But yeah, I mean absolutely.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah so, to me, I personally think that a lot of this of where they  sit and what they do depends on how your organization is structured.

Steli Efti:

Yeah, and that’s why probably this varies so differently between different companies because companies are differently structured, right? I’m not going to even feel … I think that this was  a fascinating little like deep dive in what is product marketing but also I think  it’s clear that there’s not one definition that will fit for everyone. I’m not going  to even throw in there the question of how does product marketing and product management,  what are the real differences and how do they interact with each other because that’s  going be another 20 minutes of us talking about all kinds of possibilities. But I  do think that it’s fascinating to see some roles that you hire for some functions  within a team and a company, are kind of like been around for every, very  well defined and it doesn’t really … There’s always some difference but 80/20 almost every  company is thinking about this one role or this one position very similarly. But there  other positions and things that are kind, as you said, they’re inventions because there were  deficiencies between teams and the handoff of teams as things are evolving, like the product team now has … Talking way more to customers and taking more and more of  the communication positioning responsibilities. Where, back in the day, they had none of that and  it was all on the marketing team. So as the world changes, there’s kind of  these new positions that are being created that are not as clearly defined and that are still, I think, being defined and shifting around as companies try to figure out  how to do this stuff really well.

Hiten Shah:

Yup, totally, still new stuff.

Steli Efti:

Awesome. Still, new stuff. Alright that’s it from us for this episode. If you listened  to all of this and you’re like, yes I’m the right person to work with  Close.io and to help. And I could be amazing, shoot me an email: steliclose@io. Sorry  about the shameless plugging of this position.

Hiten Shah:

Do be sorry shameless plugging, like you have an amazing company and I’m sure there’s  a ton of people that would want to work there. So seriously, if you think  you can be a product marketing at Close.io. They are a remote team and they  have an awesome company culture. They do these great retreats and what not, as well as you get to work with Steli. So, what’s up?

Steli Efti:

What’s up. There you go.

Hiten Shah:

You should have pride.

Steli Efti:

My man. Thank you for the pitch.

Hiten Shah:

Of course

Steli Efti:

That’s it from us. We will hear you guys very soon.

Hiten Shah:

Bye.