Transcription

• Speaker #0

  I would like to deep dive also on a topic that you like a lot about talking on why product marketing is so misunderstood and what people think about product marketing versus what it is in reality, because there is a lot of misconception even within the product marketing community. So I would like to have your opinion on that. What is for you the biggest myth, misconception? that you've seen about this role?

• Speaker #1

  Well, I mean, there's so many misconceptions out there. It's just like, oh, we're here to do pretty slides. We're here to tidy up everybody else's garbage. We can do everything and everyone and be everything and everything, everything to everybody. And of course, that's absolutely not true. The reason why product marketing is misunderstood actually is quite straightforward, but people don't think about it in these terms. And that is that in any organization, you have tangible roles. right? Tangible. They feel very real. You can almost touch them. So sales is the most tangible role. The sales team sell and they produce their outcome is money, right? It's not very hard to understand, right? It's like, I get it. And the leadership gets it. It's like, we have to have a sales team. They do, they do their thing. We get to eat tomorrow and pay the electricity bill, right? It's very, very tangible. Marketing is more or less the same. more or less the same. And product marketing is completely the opposite. It's a bit like, it's closer to brand in terms of perception. And what I mean by that, not in the work, scope of work, but what I mean is in its intangible perception inside an organization. So brand is a great case in point before we get to the stock, before we get to ours. And that is nobody understands what brand is in most organizations it's always fluffy it's always a logo or it's a color and you know that's that that's true it for like five percent of brand work right that's just brand assets or brand codes but brand is you know real brand managers and people who really understand brand and how to create and maintain brands and manage brands are brilliant at it and you know there's no better brand manager than a brand manager at P&G or Unilever or any of these huge, enormous corporations where their brand managers are basically category managers and they live and breathe the brand. And they also do some of the product marketing work within that role as well. But a typical kind of quote unquote fluffy brand manager is largely misunderstood and brand is on the books of any company as an intangible asset because it's hard to measure, right? You see where I'm going with this. So product marketing is also hard to measure. But it's even harder than brand. At least there are some methodologies officially to measure the value of brand. However, and there is science behind it. The problem for product marketing is there's no science behind it that people understand. It's totally intangible. And there's a reason for that. But I'll just give you a friend of mine, Jonathan Memel, has this wonderful musical analogy for it. So if you think about all the roles in a company as a band. as a rock and roll band right sales are the lead singer right uh everybody knows who they are what they do and what you're gonna get marketing's the lead guitar player right um a lot of people know what they do i've got a pretty decent idea know what they sound like know what they look like maybe not quite so familiar with them but know that they're essential right and then you've got the drummer the drum is like customer customer um service or customer success you know they keep the beat going they keep the customers happy it's just like just keep the lights on keep it going great fantastic don't stop and product marketing of the bass player right every band needs a bass player you have no idea who they are what their name is what they look like what they do what they sound like but bloody hell you miss them when they're gone i love it that's that's product marketing yeah the bass players i've got to credit jonathan my mum for that. is a great and he is a bass playing product marketer so i use that analogy a lot because of my music background of course as well and of course the bass player is the ultimate intangible in any band right you can change your bass player for every album and nobody would know you change the lead singer everybody would know right so we're the intangible uh the ultimate intangible function inside any organization so back to one of your previous questions the what the reason it's misunderstood is because it's intangible And the reason it's intangible is that we don't speak in revenue language.

• Speaker #0

  And so do you mean that we should speak in revenue language?

• Speaker #1

  We have to. If you want to become... tangible in your organization, we have to stop talking in measuring the things that we do and start talking in the language of revenue about the outcomes we helped achieve, right? That's the pivot. So it's not, oh, we changed the messaging and people loved it. It's we changed the messaging and here's what the revenue results were, right? And here are the steps that we did to change the messaging. And this is the before. And this was the revenue from, let's say, the conversion rate on a website. And then we changed the messaging. And this is the after. And this is the increase. And we did that. And that's a conversation you can have with the CFO. So when the CFO is thinking about headcount cards, he thinks, or she thinks, in revenue terms. It's just like, who's the best value to the organization? Who's most tangible? Who can we not live without? And if you're intangible, you're vulnerable. Because they think you can live without you, right? I'm not saying that's right or not, but that's how people think. So you protect your assets. So your assets are measured in revenue language. So we have to start talking in revenue language. If I was in customer success, I would say in dollars or euros or in pounds, I would say, this is how much money we saved the company from stopping 15 customers churning last quarter. We didn't make $15 million. We saved it. And here's how, right? If we weren't here, you'd be $15 million less profitable or, you know, of your gross margin. So we have to sort revenue language. And by showing how we got that revenue is how we start making the intangible tangible. And that is a step towards making product marketing's contribution more understood.

• Speaker #0

  Do you have other examples of how we can really show the value in a revenue business term?

• Speaker #1

  Well, I have a process called show me the money, right? So I don't know if you're familiar with the film Jerry Maguire, but there's a scene in Jerry Maguire where he's trying to sign a player and the player just says, show me the money. And it's a really, really famous scene. I can't talk about it too much because there's a lot of swearing in it. It's a family show, folks. But if we take the analogy of, okay, we have to show the organization the money rather than just the outcome, what we can do is we can show the steps that we got there. So they get an appreciation for all the work that went behind that number. So let's say the number is we converted 20% higher before product marketing got involved. That was worth $2 million incremental revenue. Then show the work that you did. Let's say it's five steps, customer research, insight. validation, testing, reiteration, show all the steps and all the incremental gains or losses that led up to that. So it's like opening the door to the sweatshop. It's like, this is all the work that's going on. This is the engine behind it. Show the steps in vertical steps. It's like step one, step two, step three. This is all the work that we did that might have been considered intangible in these people's eyes. But you're showing actually not just the thought process, you know, the actual work that was done, the time it took, the measurement, the iteration, reiteration to get to that outcome that you're talking about. And for me, it's enough. It's already a lot of work to do that. But it's enough to convince senior leaders at an organization that actually what our contribution is, is worth keeping hold of and think about what it would be like if we weren't here. What happens when the bass player stops playing?

• Speaker #0

  That's a great question. And I like the way you frame it because I think that when we are product marketers, we do really well the fact of explaining what we are doing and all the stuff that we've done.

• Speaker #1

  No one cares. Sorry to break it to you. No one's coming to save you.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. The second part is missing about how do we link it to the company strategy, company OKRs, company...

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, exactly. Well, we spoke to this amount of customers, we did this, we tested this messaging, and the CFO's falling asleep behind his computer. You know, the CEO, she's like, she's gone to lunch. It's like, no one cares. It's like, it's just a harsh, it's a hard reality. And, you know, when 65% of product marketers have been doing the role for less than three years, there's a lot to learn, you know. And I don't mean that in a disingenuous way. There's just... just a lot to learn. So the sooner, whether you've been doing it for one year or whether you've been doing it for 10 years, the sooner you start connecting your work to revenue outcomes, the sooner you'll find that's an insurance policy for your job security. not perfect, but it'll increase it. The sooner the organization will understand your value and the sooner you'll start being invited to other more exciting projects, right? Hey, we need to get product marketing involved in this project, or we've got this launch that, you know, let's bring Carlotta to this, you know, and that will just start happening automatically, whether you stick your hand up for it or not. And that's a great place to be.