I have worked as a Product Marketer for a long time and over the course of my career I’ve had the pleasure of working with many wonderful Product Managers. I’ve found that the role of Product Marketing is a bit nebulous and the definition of it changes from company to company. Oftentimes, the responsibilities of PMs and PMMs are intertwined and overlapping. There are many areas that I’ve seen PMs own in one company and PMMs own in another. For the purposes of this blog I will focus on areas where both PMs and PMMs can contribute including competitive analysis, customer feedback, pricing and sales enablement/training.
Competitive Analysis
Having a deep understanding of competitors is important for any company. I have seen competitive analysis owned by PMs in some organizations and PMMs in others. I believe that there is a need for both to be involved. Product Managers are usually experts at providing feature to feature comparisons of their products. Sales needs to have detailed information on differences in functionality in order to win deals. Just as importantly, sales and marketing should have a good understanding of competitive product positioning and messaging which is more in the Product Marketing domain. PMs and PMMs should work together to provide a complete picture of a product's features, functionally, positioning and messaging to enable sales and marketing success.
Customer Feedback
It is critical for Product Managers and Product Marketers to have a solid understanding of their customers. The better they know their customers, the better products they can make. For PMs, getting customer feedback on product usability and feature requests should be an essential part of creating the roadmap. I’ve seen a lot of positive input come from customer user groups and advisory boards run or co-run by PMs and PMMs. This input allows customers to feel heard, builds advocacy and can lead to incremental revenue through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Similarly, Product Marketers must have an in-depth understanding of their customers in order to create messaging that appeals to them. PMMs can add value by building personas and ideal customer profiles for PMs, sales and marketing to leverage. PMMs should dive into the customer’s business challenges, pain points and motivations in order to inform key product feature needs and sales strategies. Pairing PMs and PMMs on customer feedback calls is ideal in order to access product usability, feature requests and business challenges.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing I’ve seen some organizations put this squarely in the Product Management camp. They are often the key drivers of accessing a product’s worth relative to costs. However, I have also seen organizations where pricing is jointly owned by PMs and PMMs which I think is the ideal situation. PMMs look at pricing through the lens of what the market can bear. They can also have influence over the pricing model in addition to the price point. Both PMs and PMMs should do work on competitive pricing in order to inform their decisions. In addition to Product Management and Product Marketing, Sales should also play a big part in pricing. They have keen insight into what prospects will tolerate when it comes to price points. In summary, pricing should be a combined effort between Product Managers, Product Marketers and Sales.
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