Dave Morse

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for “The Pragmatic Marketer” (vol. 5/issue 1) back in Jan 2007:

The trouble with the outbound role of product marketing is that we have an identity crisis on our hands—we’re misunderstood, misguided, and misaligned. As a result, great products are either missing their potential or failing altogether.  Why is this?  One primary reason is that executives and other members of upper management have wide-ranging expectations of product marketing that are almost never focused on strategy or the bottom line.

Thus, we are usually confined to a tactical role supporting sales and others, expending enormous resources on too many urgent tactics that are never measured and rarely appreciated.  Uncertain about where our “turf” is located, we work in a state of reaction and firefighting, unable to contribute in a way that is meaningful to our companies or our careers.

It is time for product marketers to push the “reset button” on our activities and expectations. Before we began my company’s effort to redefine our product marketing role, our executives had varied ideas about product marketing and felt that it should be part of the product management organization because (following common logic) “they need to know the product in order to market it.”

The trouble in product marketing today

Compared to positions like sales or engineering, marketing is an odd bird.  As a way to prove just how different we are from our cubicle counterparts, here is a simple yet profound test:  Ask anyone (and I mean anyone) in your company the following two questions about sales or engineering:

1. What is the [Sales or Engineering] team responsible for delivering?
2. How are they measured?

Right or wrong, the responses will be relatively uniform—you’ll hear comments like, “software developers write and test code, and are measured by the quality and timeliness of their delivery” and “sales people are responsible for cold-calling prospects, closing deals, and meeting or beating their quota.”

However … ask those same two questions about Marketing, and you’ll find a wide range of answers. “Marketing is … *pause* … well, they write content for our website”, “They generate our leads”, “Dave is great on customer calls”, “They plan our trade shows”, or my favorite, “The t-shirt and coffee mug department”!

It’s true that marketing performs these activities.  But, do any of these descriptions capture the true and complete essence of the role?  What is our real purpose?  Why is the company spending so much money on this stuff?

The true purpose for product marketing

The core responsibility of the product marketing manager is to be the company’s audience persona expert … period.  Their focus is to deeply understand the people that impact decisions about which products to buy (buyer personas) and which products to sell (sales personas).

What is a buyer persona?

Adele Revella, author of the Buyer Persona Blog (www.buyerpersona.com) and instructor of the Pragmatic Marketing Effective Product Marketing seminar, says that a “buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience—an archetype of the target buyer. Marketers use buyer personas to segment and target different types of buyers, using individual profiles to understand the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process for each part of the market they need to influence.”

Buyer personas allow marketers to step out of their role as product evangelists and see the world from their buyer’s perspective.  Through this profiling process, product marketers can be the “proxy” for the buyer, identifying how each solution addresses the most urgent problems for any particular persona, what role each will play in the purchase decision, why they have not looked to us to solve their problems, and where this persona will go to get new ideas and information.

Product marketers who are persona experts can break out of the tactical marketing role and identify a messaging and campaign strategy that will be relevant to the target audience. No more reverse engineering your messaging by aligning with your existing functionality.  No more “shot gun” or “cookie-cutter” style marketing by creating one campaign or collateral piece to resonate with everyone.  This new type of product marketer isn’t a creative genius; this marketer has the insights that make it simple to get the right message delivered in the right place at the right time.

Product marketing responsibilities

The correct role for product marketing is to know each and every buyer persona better than anyone in sales does, and intimately understand all channel personas.  As a result of this expertise, product marketing is responsible for

• Aligning with sales channels to prepare them to:
  • Relate to buyers of all types
  • Focus on the most effective messages and programs
• Developing go-to-market plans that:
  • Generate awareness to get prospects into the sales funnel
  • Help prospects through each/every stage of the sale funnel, and ultimately drive revenue
  • Increase customer retention and satisfaction to ensure customers remain happy and loyal

Product managers and product marketers have a few things in common but are ultimately quite different.  Adele Revella makes these distinctions about the roles, “Product managers develop expertise in the market and then rely on this perspective to influence the product strategy—they are always thinking about how to bridge gaps between the market and the product.  Product Marketing needs to understand the products, too, but its attention needs to be on people, developing personas and using this insight to influence markets full of people—business peoples’ decisions to buy and the sales peoples’ decision to sell the company’s products.  This results in a cohesive go-to-market strategy that Marketing Communications can execute through its competencies in the individual marketing programs.”

Many commonly engage in the “one position, two hats” debate, or “can product managers also be effective product marketers?”  In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore defines and recommends two separate positions for inbound and outbound activities:

“A product manager is a member of either the marketing organization or the development organization who is responsible for ensuring that a product gets created, tested, and shipped on schedule and meeting specifications. It is a highly internally focused job, bridging the marketing and development organizations, and requiring a high degree of technical competence and project management experience. A product marketing manager is always a member of the marketing organization, never of the development group, and is responsible for bringing the product to the marketplace and to the distribution organization. …It is a highly externally focused job.”

He goes on to say, “Not all organizations separate [the two positions], but they should … the type of people who are good at one are rarely good at the other.”

Amen, Reverend Moore!