What do you think are the top 3 hard skills & soft skills that every Product Marketer should have? Here’s my take:
Hard skills:
Excellent writing and storytelling skills
Data analysis skills
Product knowledge
Soft skills:
Grit
Persuasion and influencing
Servant leadership
This was a question that I was asked by someone on my team, so I’m sure they’d appreciate seeing your thoughts!
How to Nail Targeting 🎯: Create combos of Use Case + ICP + Industry/Company Characteristics + Region
Create a spreadsheet and map each combo of those 4 things together. You’ll probably have a list of 5-15 rows.
Then rank your top 3-5 and discuss with key people (Sales, CX, CEO, Product) to come to an agreement.
Then this drives all of your efforts ⬇
1. Marketing runs targeted campaigns with a specific use case message to people with specific titles in specific industries at specific companies in specific regions.
2. Marketing creates content & community that resonates with this targeted audience.
3. Sales does outreach to this targeted audience & becomes experts in their internal buying process.
4. CX puts a bigger emphasis on retention and upsell with this targeted audience.
5. Product builds new features for this targeted audience.
Of course, you’ll iterate these over time as you learn more, but this approach will drive a focused strategy that you can rally the whole company around.
What am I missing? Agree/disagree?
Use this PMM content kit template for every new product integration you have.
Core:
1. Simple messaging guide (internal)
2. PDF one-pager
3. Demo video
4. Partner marketplace web page
5. 3+ screenshots of actual integrations
6. Dedicated website page on your website
7. 1-2 slides to go in the general sales pitch deck (internal)
8. Feature matrix
9. Pre-sales enablement deck for Zingtree (internal)
Collab With CX Team:
1. Documentation about the integration
a. 3 short videos
i. How to integrate (likely just a couple of mins)
ii. How to use 101
iii. Advanced how to use 201
b. Article ‘How to integrate’
2. Ideally an Implementation & best practices guide
3. Implementation Plan (when applicable) (agenda, team, etc.)
Ideal:
1. Ideally a customer story and customer logos
2. Ideally how integration compares to top competitors’ integration with the same one (internal doc)
3. Ideally a pitch deck for the partner to pitch you to their existing customers (internal)
4. Pre-sales enablement deck for partner sellers (internal)
5. Discovery questions for Sales related to the integration (internal)
6. Feature matrix comparing integration features and limitations (internal)
Shoutout to David Chase, Brad Schieber, Guillaume Tarralle – “GT”, Danna Troncattty Leahy, and Farhad Rizvi for helping me create this.
What would you add/subtract from this?
Clearly document the process flow for creating content. For instance, who needs to review it, whom it goes to next, etc.
This helps everyone get on the same page for expectations, and you’ll probably get more work produced at a higher quality level b/c of the clarity.
How does the Director describe your company to their VP when they’re explaining why they should consider buying your software?
That moment is so crucial if you actually want to get considered and win the deal.
Having positioning that is easy for someone else to remember and repeat is so key!
If they can’t communicate it clearly to others, then people will be confused by your company and you’ll get passed up. Probably by some competitor that makes their stuff easier to understand and repeat.
Our hope for Zingtree: that people can understand and repeat “Zingtree elevates contact center agent productivity through conversational workflow software.”
Wdyt? Think a Director of Support will understand that and be able to repeat and explain it?
What’s yours? I can give you my take if I think it’s understandable and repeatable.
I just presented new positioning & messaging to our whole company. Here’s the slide flow (in a condensed version for this text post):
Slide 1: Think to yourself: How do you describe Zingtree to someone when they ask you? (pause for people to think about it in their heads)
Slide 2: Why care about positioning: Consistent story, differentiated, mental map, aligned GTM motions & product roadmap
Slide 3: Factors to consider:
1. Must align with the company goal of ____.
2. Can the Manager/Director of Support easily explain Zingtree to the VP/SVP of Support?
Slide 4: What I’ve heard in my 1.5 months so far: (show options of what different people say and the sentiment you think each has)
Slide 5: New one-line positioning: Elevate contact center agent productivity through conversational workflow software
Slide 6: Breaking our one-liner down: (explain the meaning behind each word)
Slide 7: Key capabilities (list the key capabilities and a description of each)
The reaction was very positive and people are excited about it!
What would you add/change to this framework?
Here’s some top factors to review when analyzing your ICP:
– Think about your sweet spot ICP versus your total TAM ICP
– Large pain that you can help with your current product today without many enhancements needed
– Medium to large deal size (likely most companies want this)
– High win rate
– Fast sales cycle length
– Industries
– Company size
– Job titles
– Regions
– The related use case
Keep in mind: your current ICP may not be your future ICP as the product evolves.
I’m hiring a Product Marketing Manager! Interested? Apply with the link in the comments!
Why join us?
1. Work with me & our fantastic team!
2. Zingtree is growing very fast as a company
3. We have a very differentiated product
4. We’re taking an innovative approach to Marketing
Tag someone you think might be interested even if you’re not 😊
Here’s a teardown of a marketing asset that Zingtree recently created for the Sales team.
Headline:
Shows benefit while speaking to cost-savings.
In today’s economic uncertainty, speaking about cost savings is more important than normal.
Middle boxes:
Heading: gives specific outcomes they can expect, based on what we’ve seen from actual customers. E.g. Ramp agents 85% faster
Description: Describes features & benefits related to the outcome
Icons: Related to the text, break up the text to make it more digestible
Lower boxes:
Social proof: descriptions from customers achieving great outcomes related to the middle boxes.
Customer logos: eye-catching brands people may recognize
Bottom sentences:
Use social proof of the # of companies. Include a CTA to take the next steps.
What other insights do you see here? What would you change in it?
You probably don’t need to create a category for your startup yet…
Instead, create a great product descriptor or campaign name. Aka do Marketing.
As Todd Barr has said, if you create a category too early when you’re not the winner, you might be spending money for someone else to win the category.
So how do you choose your name then? Choose something that:
– Gets people excited
– Tells them more about what the company does
– Descriptive enough but not too bland
– Not too broad
– Your company is one of the best at
Agree/disagree?