Measure important stuff or die trying w/ Pranav Piyush | We're Not Marketers

Description

Product marketing—marketing's favorite misunderstood stepchild or just expensive project management in disguise?

Pranav Piyush (ex-Dropbox, ex-Bill, founder of Paramark) joins the crew to drop some inconvenient truths: most PMMs are stuck doing thankless work because nobody knows who actually runs the business. We're talking hypothesis-driven thinking, why talking to customers isn't optional, the statistical traps that make your research garbage, and why that rebrand probably won't save your pipeline. Also:

The "HIPPO problem" destroying 90% of PMM effectiveness
The three data pitfalls that make your research worthless (cherry-picking is just the start)
Why statistics courses should be mandatory for every marketer
The hypothesis-based approach that turns opinions into provable strategies
Why measuring creative team productivity is a complete waste of time
The incrementality blind spot: 99% of B2B orgs have no clue about their marketing ROI
Activity metrics you should ignore vs. the engagement signals that actually matter

If you've ever felt like a glorified PowerPoint factory or wondered why your data never wins arguments, this episode will either validate your existence or make you question everything. Either way, you'll finally understand why the role exists in the first place.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction and Host Intros

00:37 Introducing the Guest: Pranav Piyush

00:46 Pranav's Background and Career Highlights

01:25 Personal Anecdotes and Adventures

02:40 Origins of the Podcast

03:37 The Role of Product Marketers

07:04 Challenges in Product Marketing

17:40 The Importance of Data in Marketing

24:00 Understanding Positioning and Messaging

24:45 Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Messaging

25:04 The Role of Customer Research

30:13 Activity Metrics: What Really Matters?

34:29 Creative Work and Measurement

37:31 The Importance of Incrementality

43:58 Rebrands: Are They Worth It?

47:11 Final Thoughts and Podcast Promotion

SNOW NOTES:

Pranav's LinkedIn

Paramark

Elena Verna

Statistical significance

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
We are a podcast for product marketers and B2B SaaS who feel misunderstood of what they do.
Speaker #1
From someone who truly gets what you do and basically help you feel less like a misfit to being unenormable in your role.
Speaker #0
All right, guys, this is another episode of We're Not Markers. This is Zach, the sales waterlad on the mic. Before we introduce our next groundbreaking guest, let's pass off the mic to our fellow co-host, Eric Holland.
Speaker #2
Yeah, what's up? I'm Eric. I'm the franken manager of the group and for the last
Speaker #1
little post intro gab take it away gab bujo sales deck associate still doing sales deck i can't stand it anymore pressing it up back to zach and by the way i forgot my my
Speaker #0
title this is a sales water lab but let me let you guys in on a little something right here our next guest here has an eye and ear to detail here my mic was going in and out i know shocking right because we've recorded about 50 plus episodes but We're not marketers, but who knows if this individual is, because from his background, he started off management consulting. He's led product and growth at Dropbox. He's did a few stints of VP marketing recently at Bill. He's taking on the next challenge, greater than Mount Kilimanjaro, marketing budget. He's looking to protect it for you all. He's got the measuring tape. He's got the abacus. He's got all the tools in the kit right now. Let's introduce it to our next guest here, Pranav Piyush. So excited to have you on.
Speaker #3
Thank you guys. Kilimanjaro is on the bucket list. Someday I actually have to go do that But for now, I will keep myself happy and entertained with marketing measurement.
Speaker #2
Are you a bad writer?
Speaker #3
No, not by any means.
Speaker #2
Other than just climbing the ranks of B2B.
Speaker #3
Give me that boom shh. I'm climbing the corporate ladder. Oh my god. No, I like being out there but you know i have two young kids and they are five and eight and so the last few years have just been not that adventurous right weekends are like busy with their stuff so one day when i'm you know hopefully the kids are a little bit grown up and i get my weekends back i can go back and you know get out there so i did the the i don't i don't think it was the inca trail but it was a a four-day hike in in machu picchu like oh yes and was awesome. Got to replicate that on every continent.
Speaker #0
I was surprised we didn't run into each other. I think I was out 10 years ago. There you go.
Speaker #3
I have a question for you guys. How did the three of you decide to even start this?
Speaker #0
Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker #2
We were having in a very isolated bitch session that resonated around how we feel about our place in the world of B2B tech. as product marketers and it all aligned very well let's just start talking about it on some microphones yeah it was yeah it was either a podcast or a musical we opted for the podcast it's a good starting point musical might be like season seven it's
Speaker #0
on the roadmap yeah we're gonna call it not marketing so you know the game here you know the show we're gonna pass the mic over to gab here he's got the million dollar question for you for now
Speaker #1
are product marketers actually marketers?
Speaker #3
Oh my God, this is a can of worms. So a little bit of, a little bit of context, right? So I was a product manager at once in my, in my career, I've been a, you know, VP of product marketing at bill. Um, and so with no offense intended to my fellow PMM sisters and brothers, I think product marketing is. probably a misnomer in the first place. Now, let me explain, where did product marketing come from? And, you know, I don't have like the definitive history or truth behind it. But it came from this, my perception, my belief is that it came from a dysfunction between product and marketing. And we you know, collectively as a as an industry and B2B invented a new thing called product marketing. That was the inception point. Now, why so so to understand product marketing as a role, and is it marketing is a product? What is it, you have to understand why it was even created and what the source of that dysfunction was, either marketing drives the business, or product drives the the business. 90% of businesses, neither is driving the business. And 90% of the PMMs are stuck in that really unfortunate state where neither product nor marketing is in charge. of driving growth. And PMs are the sole warriors of reason, and data and research, trying to make sure that product and marketing are enabling growth. Now, I say this in a very extreme way, I don't mean that those product people don't care about growth, I don't, I'm not saying that marketers don't care about growth. But there's something missing. And so the whole organization structure in my mind needs to be blown up and new titles, new names, new functions need to emerge. I can talk more about that. And I didn't answer your question directly, but I don't think product marketers are marketers.
Speaker #0
You know, once you said misnomer, I was like, dang, you take me back to seventh grade vocabulary. I was like, oh, print off more context to that response right there. You said there's something missing. Like, what is that What is that missing link and what was the specific experience that led you to that realization?
Speaker #3
On the other side of the equation, you got salespeople, you got engineers, what have you. None of those people are true GM mentality type of people. In an average case, there are obviously cases where that's not true. My realization was PMM is, in most organizations, even the team that I was leading mostly just project. management. And it was very unfortunate that that was the case. Again, that is not the desire or the intent. It's because everyone, sales, demand gen, product, all think that they are driving the ship. And when you have that lack of clarity on who is the ultimate GM of the business, of the product of the feature until you have clarity pmm's job is absolutely thankless and it's not a marketing job it's a project management consensus driving keep the trains on the track get it launched type of a job and there's nothing wrong with it but i don't think that it's the highest leveraged job and so my advice to marketers usually is that hey if you're going to go into a product marketing role have this conversation before you take that job of who is accountable, who is the GM, and how are you going to be working with that GM to drive growth? Because if you don't have a direct relationship with that, product marketing is not going to work.
Speaker #1
You're filling our cup 100% right now. I don't know if you know, but based on our reaction, hearing that is very validating. You said that those PMMs, it's becoming project management. We heard a lot about you're becoming an asset. creating function you're just shipping stuff by shipping stuff um if you already had that discussion of like who's the gm who's the mini ceo what do you think those product marketers can do to influence the
Speaker #3
current positioning that people have internally of their role yeah i think the first thing is having a holistic view of the product journey and so what that means is your job as a product marketer in a in a well functioning organization is to go from the opportunity identification all the way to value capture. And these are like MBA words. But there's real meaning to them, right? What I mean by that is you know your audience better than anybody else, which if you're not talking to five customers, or at least three customers every day, you can't be a PMM. I'm also going to put everybody on notice a little bit. If you think you're a PMM and you haven't spoken to a customer, it's already the end of the day. You're not a PMM. So let's be very clear about what the product marketing role means. You're constantly talking to customers, not just listening to gone calls, like that's helpful, but you're actually spending time with customers. I love doing the audience research. You're doing the market research. You understand your audience inside out, not just like the needs and the jobs to be done and the benefits, but like what do they do when they wake up? What's on their home screen on their phone? What's their favorite YouTube shows? You know them at a level that's super deep. That's where opportunities come from. And what I mean by that is when you understand them, when you understand their motivations and their jobs to be done and needs. You can say that, hey, here are the top three things that they care about in their professional lives. And we're doing great on number two and number three, but hey, number one, we're missing the mark. And here's why. And you take that to your organization. And then it's like, okay, how do you take that opportunity through the process of building a commercially viable business, right? So classic sort of product management thinking. This is also where I say, you know, if you have PMMs and PMs, something's wrong. And if you don't know which one works for the other one, you see what I'm saying, right? Because I can say the same exact thing that I just said about PMs. A product manager should know their audience. And so if you haven't spoken to a customer, how are you a product manager? So, you know, strong opinions, but I do think that those roles actually are very similar and they've been- created because there was a class of product managers who were like, no, no, no, I don't want to do that. So go set up a product marketing team and they should go do that. I'm going to focus on high value. I'm going to create the product like nonsense. I'm going to get hit from all sides after this, this podcast airs.
Speaker #2
Pod takes are very welcome here. Safe space for all.
Speaker #1
That's great. I love the way you said it. And I just have a quick follow-up question on that because My take is a great PMM should be able to jump on the demo with the average sales rep and be on par, if not better than that sales rep. Because you understand all of the different contexts, you understand the different department, you understand those feedback loops. So technically sales should be able to learn from you. And this is the best way to cut off those silos between marketing and sales. But you said something as well in terms of like those PMs. PMs should be talking to the customers. PMM should be talking to the customers. If I'm PMM, and have a discussion with a PM, which is based on the real story, right? And I was like, to the head of product, hey, I want to talk to customers. I want to make sure I get on par to you. The answer was, why would you talk to them? I already spoke with them. We don't want to bug them. We don't want to be gatekept by sales. What should be if I know that my counterpart as a product manager is already in those discussions, already on the field with them, but me as a PMM, I don't get my part of the buffet because there's someone else doing it.
Speaker #3
Yeah, it's a good question. And this is where it goes down to, you know, understanding the organization structure. After having done this role, before I even put myself in that position, I would know, you know, what the working relationship is between PM and PMM. So when I took this role at Bill, I was asked to lead the product marketing team and customer marketing team. I just went on a listening tour. I went and spoke to every product leader there was, every sales leader, every marketing leader. and understood what they thought, you know, product marketing's role was. And, you know, in a larger organization, you have to start there. Like, what is the expectation internally? And guess what? It's going to take you four to six quarters before you can change that perception. Not going to happen overnight. So you got to pick your battles, right? Okay, product thinks and believes, maybe very earnestly and honestly, that they have all of the... the research and the customer insights done. All right, fantastic. Let's set up a day long session where we can go deep into what you have found, and the evidence and the proof points that back that up. So we can use that in our marketing for our claims. It's a great way to surface the understanding of the lack of understanding. And I'm not saying this in a political way, I'm literally saying like hey if we're gonna say that you know, seven out of 10 customers really want this, you know, feature, there's got to be some evidence for it, right? And you have to structure the research in the right way to be able to do it. And so if your product manager or your head of product is somebody who wants to have an evidence-based conversation, then it's going to go well. If it's a HIPAA conversation, the highest paid person's opinion, then, you know, and by the way, that happens 90% of the times. at least you know that right off the bat. And you can figure out in your career sort of how you navigate that situation. It's like, okay, you're not going to go across the hippo and you'll have to find different ways of influencing the organization. I don't know if that helped, but yeah.
Speaker #2
It does help because it lets people know it's not black and white. You got to take those things. And I appreciate that acknowledgement of four to six quarters. I think there's probably a lot of us who are doing that in-house role who don't know what that influence. is going to be like, and it's just good to hear. the reality of it. It's not an overnight success.
Speaker #0
Pranav, a question for you. Go ahead.
Speaker #3
I used to send out a survey to all of our cross-functional stakeholders with two or three questions of just like, hey, I'd set the stage of this is our mission, this is our objective as a product marketing team. How are we doing against that mission and objective? And it was literally just this zero to 10 type of scale. And I would get that feedback and be able to see how that perception is either improving or staying the same. And that was the thing that I was tracking quarter to quarter. We tried to get every product marketing team. We had multiple teams of each pod to have their own metrics. And those metrics were very much aligned with the business that they were supporting. The challenge is that they didn't really have influence over those metrics. So it was good to say that, hey, these are the metrics that we're going to be looking at. But we didn't have control. And so that's why I always think that product marketing is in an unfortunate situation. Many times when it comes to can you actually control the metric that you're trying to influence.
Speaker #0
Diving deeper into that point, a former manager of mine in product marketing shared with me the best way to influence a conversation is data. for product marketers who on their LinkedIn. Say they are data-backed analysts. You know who you are. What is the wrong way of using data to influence an internal conversation?
Speaker #3
I would say maybe there are three to four sort of pitfalls. One is cherry-picking data. And what that just means is like you already have a story in your head and you're just trying to prove your point and you find the right data points to make the case and you go present them. The reason it's a pitfall, the reason I think that that doesn't work, is the smartest people in the room are going to ask you the hard questions about the data behind the data. And, you know, and you're going to be in a house of cards. So that's like one pitfall. The second pitfall is if you're really sort of data savvy, it's not just the data, it's what generates that data. So I'll give you an example. I could ask you a leading question in a survey. and get you to say things a certain way and prove my point. So, you know, I'm going to ask you, hey, was that, you know, that dish was delicious, wasn't it? And you're going to say, yeah,
Speaker #0
yeah.
Speaker #3
You're not going to say, no, it was absolute garbage when I've already positioned the question as a leading question telling you that it's delicious and I believe it's delicious. So you will be more likely to say, yeah. it was good. And I marked that and say, great, I got data. That's garbage, right? That's garbage data. So the second pitfall is like, what is the process to generate the data that you're looking at? And really being confident in understanding whether it's a survey, whether it's a business process, whether it's your CRM, whether it's, you know, whatever else is usage data, but like, what is the actual mechanism through which that data is created? And most people don't understand that and they you know, fall when questioned about that piece. The third thing is, I think this applies to all of marketing. Everyone needs to go take a course on statistics. Most of us did not study statistics when we were learning, you know, how to do marketing, whether that was college, whether that was on the job, right? I didn't go to school for marketing, but you know, I learned it on, and I never really thought about. statistics until like the last maybe four to five years and how to think about I mean I did but in a very sort of isolated way I thought about it as like a b testing I'll apply statistics to it right but like the concepts of correlation causation uncertainty you know what is knowable like if you go spend eight hours on YouTube like just going down the rabbit hole you will learn so much that you can apply to how you make the case internally about. you know, whatever strategy that you're employing. And when you tie all this together into the scientific process, and what I mean by that is, you have a hypothesis, you always start with a hypothesis. And that is a very different way of thinking, as opposed to like, here's my goal. No, you're like, nobody cares about your goals. What you care about is like finding, either proving or disproving your hypothesis, I might have a hypothesis that there's demand for a business like Paramark. Now I got to go prove that if I come to investors and say, no, no, no, I know there is demand. They're gonna be like, well, how do you know? And so taking a hypothesis based approach changes the conversation for marketers, because it's no longer about what I think. It's whether I can prove or disprove the hypothesis that I have, it also makes it less personal. It's not about what I think and I feel and I believe no, here's a hypothesis. And we can either, you know, showcase that it works or it doesn't work. Do you have a better hypothesis? Do you have a different hypothesis? Do you want to test. And the moment you open up that conversation, now you've got the whole room engaged. It's like, well, yes, I think I can, you know, I want to test this thing because, and you're like, why do you think that's a reasonable hypothesis to even form, right? Where is that coming from? Tell me about the intuition. Tell me about the market research you've done. So there's a long-winded answer about this data question, but this more rigorous and scientific way of thinking will free up product marketers to not get into the... tactical debates that we often get into.
Speaker #1
That's an awesome tip.
Speaker #3
Valuable.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And it's like, I did study statistics in college and I don't remember half of it, but what's grinding my gear the most is when I'm with a team, we talk about A-B testing or people just brought A-B tests and they're like, let's A-B test it. And I'm like, guys, we have 150 visitors. There's no way we'll be able to say that we're 95% confident in that hypothesis because There's not enough data to actually prove our point. Correlation doesn't mean correlation. A lot of product marketers can take a page of the book of growth marketers to actually draw those hypotheses. Is there a way on how you think that PMMs can bring that kind of whole hypothesis ideas in, I would say specific situation, for example, if we take messaging, right? Messaging, I'm currently working on something on message testing. A big part of that usually dies by committee. So I'm just curious, how would you approach that for a PMM that never really did any policies, don't really have a knowledge and statistic and want to just make sure they don't fall under those pitfalls?
Speaker #3
Yeah, I mean, positioning and messaging is an interesting one. When you say messaging, do you mean sort of the framework, the hierarchy, the pillars, or you really mean sort of copy?
Speaker #1
Eric and I had like a discussion before this call. He was reminding the team that messaging isn't copy, but in that case, I don't mean copy. I mean the framework, the hierarchy of everything, the overall strategy that will support your position.
Speaker #3
So there are some things that you don't experiment with. And messaging is one of those things. Now, let me explain what I mean. You don't apply sort of A-B testing to that. I don't think that that's a good answer. When you are doing positioning and messaging at the strategy level, at the framework level, my thought process and... And I think that this is true for most people. It's much more qualitative in nature. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't require understanding of statistics and science, but it's not the same as running a mass scale A-B test. So I'm sure you've seen this, right? When you do sort of first party research, you go talk to customers. And whether you're starting from an existing sort of baseline of, hey, here are the five messaging pillars that we have already had for five years. and you know you put that in front of customers and you construct a research program to understand their thoughts and feelings about those messaging pillars you need to do it a certain number of times and you need to do it a certain number of get a concentrated mass of your buyer personas your influencers or your champions whatever forms your buying group and there is a method to that madness. If I only speak to five people and one was the CEO, the other was a head of sales ops, and the third was a marketer, you don't got nothing. So you have to think about, have I, if my, if my buying group is made of these four personas, I'm going to make sure that I have at least eight to 10 of these research, you know, studies done for each of those personas. And so So when you think about... statistics, it's really just making sure if you understand the concept of statistical significance, you know, then you're able to kind of draw that into this type of a research process. If you don't, as a naive sort of junior marketer, you could be like, hey, I spoke to people, I spoke to 10 people. And yes, you did good job, but that doesn't make it statistically valid. So even for doing, you know, this audience research, there's like, go chat GPT it, right? Open up chat GPT and say, Hey, what are some best practices on how do I create? you know, research programs for a messaging framework. It's going to tell you exactly what you need to do. So that's how I think you really have to start thinking about it. And again, there's no excuse for marketers to not be able to teach them this stuff. This is not rocket science. You can pick it up quickly.
Speaker #0
It reminds me of a line I heard in Exit 5 podcast. It was like Dave and Dave Kellogg is the idea of the dispassionate analyst. Even when you don't have all the necessary context, I think knowing the thought methodology of data analytics and statistics really elevates the conversation. One example that comes to mind for me is that I'm working with a client right now and we're doing a series of user interviews and 10 to 15 and I can come to them and say, hey, this gives us a perspective. But it might give us signals, but it won't give us a definitive unless we continue, like you said, if we interview eight to 10 of the same personas. And that helps like really guide the conversation, because especially when we're in a space where it's a game of opinion, like you said, the strongest opinion typically wins.
Speaker #2
No, the most highest paid opinion.
Speaker #3
Hippo, hippo. I did not make that term up. It's somewhere on the internet. So I don't know where I learned it from. But to add on to that point, you want to marry the qual and the quant, right? So people also like don't think about this enough. Like, okay, you did your qual, you did 30 interviews, you figured out your messaging pillars for like these, you know, five audiences, four audiences, whatever it might be. It is not that hard to turn those into five different ads on LinkedIn in an ABM way. each for each audience, the persona that you care about, and see your engagement rate from those ads, you will have answers within a week or two of which messaging is actually resonating, right? And now you can go back and do your research lab and say, okay, we, you know, our qual set five, our research telling us it's actually only two things that are resonating. The other three are like, you know, yes, that came up in qual, but the exit either something's messed up. right? Either the copy execution didn't meet the bar, or maybe the broader market doesn't believe that, right? So you take that iterative approach of going from qual to quant. And again, the goal is not conversions in those ads. The goal is to understand whether your message resonates. And so you're doing it for research purposes.
Speaker #0
Clarifying question for you. I'm going to say these two words, and I'm curious what your immediate reaction is. Activity metrics.
Speaker #3
I have nothing against them. I think they're great.
Speaker #0
Really?
Speaker #3
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So I'm gonna dive, we're gonna dive deeper in there. Now we're gonna go a little bit in the deep end. Let me put on my life jacket on real quick because.
Speaker #3
Let's do it.
Speaker #0
Activity metrics with collateral. I'm marketing program, we are doing a QBR. Zach, how many like one pages have we created this quarter?
Speaker #3
Ah, okay. that type of an activity metric. So thanks for clarifying that. Nobody's business. I think that's a waste of time to even like report on that. When I say activity metrics, I actually mean the customer's activity metrics. And so what is the customer doing? And so, you know, engagement metrics. Great example of this is if you've got a whole bunch of resources on your website, I actually think qualified consumption is a metric that more product marketers, content marketers should be looking at. What that means is a blog post that has a session with a blog post that's more than 10 seconds, 20 seconds, that's gold. A video view of more than a minute, that's gold, right? A podcast download and listen, that's gold. And so you do want to look at those customer activity metrics because those are leading indicators of what you're putting out there in the world are actually sort of being consumed or not. People rail against open rates on emails. They have their problems. It's not accurate. But if your open rates, if your click-through rates on your emails are going up and to the right, that's a good thing. That's not a vanity metric. If your total traffic is going up, it's a good thing. It's not a vanity metric. So that's what I meant when I was thinking about activity metrics. But yeah, like, you know, how many one-pagers did I create? Probably less important. In some cases, it's... kind of important but not like okay let's look at bdrs and sdrs right i think activity metrics are important for them because that's kind of it's that's the game it's kind of very similar to your engagement rate on an ad, right? If you if you're not reaching enough people,
Speaker #0
then obviously you're not going to have the impact that you think you had. So SDR, BDR work that way. Like it's a game of numbers. It's a one-to-many exercise. So you have to contextualize it for the specific use case. I don't know. That was my take.
Speaker #1
I agree with you from a sales perspective. Like number activity is what's going to like lay the foundation down. I think where... we struggle in is taking this one size fits all approach and applying it to product marketing. The value, like what Eric mentioned earlier, the value of product marketing is creating a volume of content. And that is enough to justify our value. And you hear it in some conversations, Pranav, where I was talking to a product marketing peer and they mentioned, well, I build a sales enablement hub. And that's what's influencing the sales numbers. I'm like, well, how? They're like, well, they're using it. I'm like, in what way? Like, are they, do they just click it, open it? So I think like we've kind of warped ourselves in this belief that if I create a piece of collateral and it's used on a sales call and I helped and as close as a deal, that collateral closed the deal. No, it didn't. It might have influenced it, but no one. One of my Pico Civil One patrons.
Speaker #0
Back on this and say, not everything needs to be measured. So again, this is a counter point and might be surprising to some. Why Pranav, the guy who builds measurement software, is saying that not everything needs to be measured. Because it really doesn't need to be measured. If you look at the best teams, am I going to go measure the productivity of my creative team? No, I'm not. Like that's not a good use of time. It's not a factory, right? The best advertising copy creative does not come under factory environments. So just like that, some of the product marketing work is like that. It's true creative work that, you know, a great pitch deck, you're just going to know your sales teams are going to be like, holy shit, Zach. This is amazing. And that's good enough. The trouble is, when you come from a defensive mindset and a defensive situation where you're having to prove your worth, because, again, the hippos don't understand what product marketing is and product marketing does. And so if you find yourself in that situation, I can appreciate some marketers coming up with these activity metrics as a way to prove their worth. But I think the motivation and just it's a symptom of the dysfunction. And so I don't blame anybody for doing it. I'm like blaming the system that let it happen. And my advice to those folks would be like, hey, if that's the situation you're in, two things are going to happen. One is you are either going to be out of a job in about 18 months. You yourself are going to find yourself feeling that I'm not adding value. And so might as well change the conversation of the situation proactively rather than just let it to chance and fate. I don't know if that helps, but that's my honest take that you don't have to measure everything. We're hiring our first marketer and salespeople. The way we measure their success is going to be dramatically different from anything I've seen in B2B SaaS. And you need to go towards those type of marketing teams.
Speaker #2
Well, then I want to flip that on you. What do you think are the things that people are not measuring that you are just, you're dumbfounded by, that you feel like they should be and have to be measuring, and it's just not helping both the product marketing and everyone else on the marketing side of the house?
Speaker #0
Yeah, so I've, you know, I've been talking about incrementality and the concept of incrementality for a good part of the last two years, and I can tell you that 99% of B2B organizations have no clue. about the incrementality of their investments. So if I were to look at your marketing, you know, line item by line item, your budget, you've got a bunch of headcount, you've got a bunch of, you know, what I call sort of creative and production, those things, you don't need to measure the ROI on that makes no sense. So creative productions, like how much am I paying my web designer and my video producer, like that's That is the cost of doing business. Right. That is the actual sort of fuel that you're putting into the engine. And the engine is the remaining. Let's say that ends up being like 40 percent of your total budget. You've got the remaining 60 percent and that remaining 60 percent is spread across your advertisements, your specific SEO investments, your PR investments, your you know. And then you have a bunch of channels or mediums that are not consuming any. paid dollars your life cycle stuff right so your emails your in-app those are owned channels so all of that stuff the 60 that's outside of creative and production outside of headcount should absolutely be measured and that 60 of your marketing budget most people just stop at your paid channels they never think about seo they never think about pr they never think about organic social and The reality is that all of those other things contribute, can contribute a significant amount to your pipeline and to your close one. You just don't do it because most marketing leadership just puts them in a separate bucket. And there's no reason to do that. And, you know, that's why we exist as a company is we level the playing field, whether it's, you know, people use all these types of terms, right? In the older times, it was above the line, below the line. it was brand and performance there was offline online it's you know the 95.5 right whatever you you name it the idea is that you have to understand the entire marketing mixes impact on your business but again like it makes zero sense to look at headcount cost and creative production cost like that is those are not the variables that you are ramping up or down necessarily and Yeah, so that's my rough take on what you do measure, what you don't measure. And coming back to like the sales asset production, right? I put that in the creative production piece. Like that is, there's no reason why you need to measure that. You do want to measure the success rate of your SDRs and BDRs.
Speaker #1
So let's say,
Speaker #2
Zach, I got to steal it then. So if 99%, if you're thinking 99% aren't doing that. What's going to happen if a product marketer listens to this and can actually take some of this advice and make it real? What would that next step be for them to say, you know what, I want to be a change. I want to be one of those 1% outliers and make a big difference in the organization. Other than, you know, go buy your product.
Speaker #0
Yeah. The first thing that I say is you have to start with an audit of what you're actually even doing. I kid you not marketers are not even able to articulate hey how many engagements impressions are we getting across all of our different channels there are times when we onboard customers and we show them stuff for the first time after like one month of the initial onboarding phase and we say this is how your impression share is across paid social paid search owned channels and it's shocking they've never seen that report before and where you've got everything from, you know, above the line, below the line. Let's just use that because it's a fun terminology. And so the first thing I say is like, go look at everything that you're actually doing across your marketing mix and what those, you know, impressions or engagements are over time. How have they shifted? Is it basically like whatever you're doing, it's been consistent for like 12 months. And so you've not actually made any changes in your marketing mix. You see what I'm saying? We thought that LinkedIn is doing really well. Guess what? The last 12 months, LinkedIn impressions have been flat. So what's going on? Like, how can that be true? And we have this perception that we're doing great on LinkedIn, right? Look at the actual data, right? Like visually look at what you're doing in each channel, put it in a spreadsheet, you can put that into Claude and chat GPT and ask it like, hey, what are the key observations that you get from this data. You don't need to buy fancy software. If just get the data, put it in a spreadsheet, put it in chat GPT and ask it like five questions. That itself is a great starting point.
Speaker #1
So let's say there's a fellow CMO who accidentally stumbled on the podcast because they were trying to listen to marketing scientists instead. And they fall into one of your four data pitfalls, which is cherry picking what you're sharing here so far. And I hear, oh, creative is the cost of doing business, but I don't want to do an audit. My sales pipeline is on life support. Let's do a creative rebrand to increase our enterprise footprint. I hear Chuck, I'm curious to hear your reaction here. Do rebrands really revitalize the organization? Is it something worth measuring? Because I feel like product marketers at times get thrown into the rebrand mix of putting on a gloss of paint, but nothing's really changed.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think there was a good post from Elena. She's like the meme. Yes. I don't know why I am blanking on her last name, but she's awesome.
Speaker #1
I know she's at growth at Dropbox now, I believe.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And she's advised companies like Miro, Amplitude, all. Elena Verna. Verna. That's right. Elena Verna. And she's, she's an investor in Paramark as well. So shout out to her. She said something right. Like she has never seen a rebrand actually work. Like there are always exceptions, but like rule of thumb, you'd be lucky if you just break even. which means nothing breaks in your funnel. That's the you know, the target. So my honest take, I don't think rebrands are necessary. There are some cases where you might have to do them. I'll give you an example. There was a point of time where the company that I was at, we were going through a major, I am the one who initiated a major rebrand. And for all types of very coincidental reasons we did not end up actually doing it. But The hypothesis there was our name itself was the product. And what I mean by that is we had captured the market for the thing that we said we would capture the market. And now we're like, we're going to where are we going to get the next level of growth from? And the name became a hindrance. So the hypothesis here was not about changing. Oh, we're not resonating with the market. No, no, no, we're going to launch these five new products. There are great additions, but our name is literally a hindrance to those five other products because it's so specific to this one feature that we built. And so, again, you have to have a hypothesis of why are you even doing the rebrand. If you say that you're not resonating with enterprise, what's the proof point? What's the evidence? Have you gone and talked to enterprise people? Have they expressed anything about your messaging that's not resonating? why can't we fix it with messaging itself? Why do we need a rebrand? Right? Is the right starting point. And then if you come in and say like, yeah, we've got all the proof points to say a rebrand is the only way we can achieve it. Go for it.
Speaker #1
I love the hypothesis. I'm, I'm done. I'm like in the quick 46 minutes, you've transformed this virtual recording studio into a virtual weight room and you know, I'm cooked.
Speaker #0
I'm glad.
Speaker #2
Yeah, this was awesome. I've already feeling like taking some stuff back and having some interesting conversations. I'd say, you know, as we sign off here, we're definitely, you know, want to make sure you have some space. So, other than catching you on LinkedIn, anything else going on? Got anything else cooking or anything else you want to let our audience know about before we let you go?
Speaker #0
No, it's, it's yeah, great. So go check out the marketing scientists podcast. That's the podcast that I host. I just finished recording this morning with Kerry Cunningham from Sixth Sense. He is their lead analyst and he spent a bunch of time at Forrester. And we had a great conversation about all things third-party intent, first-party intent, all that fun stuff. So yeah, Marketing Scientists, that's the podcast. Go check it out.
Speaker #1
We're just going to put you to your name as a co-host for this episode to drive the listeners from your podcast to us.
Speaker #0
I don't know if my audience is bigger than your audience, so there we go.
Speaker #1
We'll measure it, but we'll ask for your discretion first to see if it's worthy to be measured. Eric, you're on mute, bro. Hashtag season five.
Speaker #2
Dude, I hit the space button like a rookie. But I just want to say to everyone else here who isn't familiar, I was lucky enough to listen to a presentation with our guest. what, nine months ago-ish. And I've been thinking about it ever since and how, you know, we really need to, you know, do a better job in measurement and what we measure. So now that I know that Paramark is actually live, I suggest everyone go check out the websites, maybe get on a demo, see if it's a good fit. Because I'm really bullish that it can do a lot for us and make us look a lot better in our roles.
Speaker #3
Just write down that you're coming from We're Not Marketers.
Speaker #2
I'll give you 99% of what you said. But in all fairness, another great episode of We're Not Marketers. And we will catch you guys next time.
Speaker #4
All right. See you guys. Thank you very much. Bye.

Chapters

Introduction and Host Intros
0sec
Introducing the Guest: Pranav Piyush
47sec
Pranav's Background and Career Highlights
55sec
Personal Anecdotes and Adventures
1min
Origins of the Podcast
2min
The Role of Product Marketers
3min
Challenges in Product Marketing
6min
The Importance of Data in Marketing
16min
Understanding Positioning and Messaging
22min
Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Messaging
22min
The Role of Customer Research
23min
Activity Metrics: What Really Matters?
27min
Creative Work and Measurement
31min
The Importance of Incrementality
34min
Rebrands: Are They Worth It?
40min
Final Thoughts and Podcast Promotion
42min

Description

Product marketing—marketing's favorite misunderstood stepchild or just expensive project management in disguise?

The "HIPPO problem" destroying 90% of PMM effectiveness
The three data pitfalls that make your research worthless (cherry-picking is just the start)
Why statistics courses should be mandatory for every marketer
The hypothesis-based approach that turns opinions into provable strategies
Why measuring creative team productivity is a complete waste of time
The incrementality blind spot: 99% of B2B orgs have no clue about their marketing ROI
Activity metrics you should ignore vs. the engagement signals that actually matter

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction and Host Intros

00:37 Introducing the Guest: Pranav Piyush

00:46 Pranav's Background and Career Highlights

01:25 Personal Anecdotes and Adventures

02:40 Origins of the Podcast

03:37 The Role of Product Marketers

07:04 Challenges in Product Marketing

17:40 The Importance of Data in Marketing

24:00 Understanding Positioning and Messaging

24:45 Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Messaging

25:04 The Role of Customer Research

30:13 Activity Metrics: What Really Matters?

34:29 Creative Work and Measurement

37:31 The Importance of Incrementality

43:58 Rebrands: Are They Worth It?

47:11 Final Thoughts and Podcast Promotion

SNOW NOTES:

Pranav's LinkedIn

Paramark

Elena Verna

Statistical significance

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
We are a podcast for product marketers and B2B SaaS who feel misunderstood of what they do.
Speaker #1
From someone who truly gets what you do and basically help you feel less like a misfit to being unenormable in your role.
Speaker #0
All right, guys, this is another episode of We're Not Markers. This is Zach, the sales waterlad on the mic. Before we introduce our next groundbreaking guest, let's pass off the mic to our fellow co-host, Eric Holland.
Speaker #2
Yeah, what's up? I'm Eric. I'm the franken manager of the group and for the last
Speaker #1
little post intro gab take it away gab bujo sales deck associate still doing sales deck i can't stand it anymore pressing it up back to zach and by the way i forgot my my
Speaker #0
title this is a sales water lab but let me let you guys in on a little something right here our next guest here has an eye and ear to detail here my mic was going in and out i know shocking right because we've recorded about 50 plus episodes but We're not marketers, but who knows if this individual is, because from his background, he started off management consulting. He's led product and growth at Dropbox. He's did a few stints of VP marketing recently at Bill. He's taking on the next challenge, greater than Mount Kilimanjaro, marketing budget. He's looking to protect it for you all. He's got the measuring tape. He's got the abacus. He's got all the tools in the kit right now. Let's introduce it to our next guest here, Pranav Piyush. So excited to have you on.
Speaker #3
Thank you guys. Kilimanjaro is on the bucket list. Someday I actually have to go do that But for now, I will keep myself happy and entertained with marketing measurement.
Speaker #2
Are you a bad writer?
Speaker #3
No, not by any means.
Speaker #2
Other than just climbing the ranks of B2B.
Speaker #3
Give me that boom shh. I'm climbing the corporate ladder. Oh my god. No, I like being out there but you know i have two young kids and they are five and eight and so the last few years have just been not that adventurous right weekends are like busy with their stuff so one day when i'm you know hopefully the kids are a little bit grown up and i get my weekends back i can go back and you know get out there so i did the the i don't i don't think it was the inca trail but it was a a four-day hike in in machu picchu like oh yes and was awesome. Got to replicate that on every continent.
Speaker #0
I was surprised we didn't run into each other. I think I was out 10 years ago. There you go.
Speaker #3
I have a question for you guys. How did the three of you decide to even start this?
Speaker #0
Oh, that's a great question.
Speaker #2
We were having in a very isolated bitch session that resonated around how we feel about our place in the world of B2B tech. as product marketers and it all aligned very well let's just start talking about it on some microphones yeah it was yeah it was either a podcast or a musical we opted for the podcast it's a good starting point musical might be like season seven it's
Speaker #0
on the roadmap yeah we're gonna call it not marketing so you know the game here you know the show we're gonna pass the mic over to gab here he's got the million dollar question for you for now
Speaker #1
are product marketers actually marketers?
Speaker #3
Oh my God, this is a can of worms. So a little bit of, a little bit of context, right? So I was a product manager at once in my, in my career, I've been a, you know, VP of product marketing at bill. Um, and so with no offense intended to my fellow PMM sisters and brothers, I think product marketing is. probably a misnomer in the first place. Now, let me explain, where did product marketing come from? And, you know, I don't have like the definitive history or truth behind it. But it came from this, my perception, my belief is that it came from a dysfunction between product and marketing. And we you know, collectively as a as an industry and B2B invented a new thing called product marketing. That was the inception point. Now, why so so to understand product marketing as a role, and is it marketing is a product? What is it, you have to understand why it was even created and what the source of that dysfunction was, either marketing drives the business, or product drives the the business. 90% of businesses, neither is driving the business. And 90% of the PMMs are stuck in that really unfortunate state where neither product nor marketing is in charge. of driving growth. And PMs are the sole warriors of reason, and data and research, trying to make sure that product and marketing are enabling growth. Now, I say this in a very extreme way, I don't mean that those product people don't care about growth, I don't, I'm not saying that marketers don't care about growth. But there's something missing. And so the whole organization structure in my mind needs to be blown up and new titles, new names, new functions need to emerge. I can talk more about that. And I didn't answer your question directly, but I don't think product marketers are marketers.
Speaker #0
You know, once you said misnomer, I was like, dang, you take me back to seventh grade vocabulary. I was like, oh, print off more context to that response right there. You said there's something missing. Like, what is that What is that missing link and what was the specific experience that led you to that realization?
Speaker #3
On the other side of the equation, you got salespeople, you got engineers, what have you. None of those people are true GM mentality type of people. In an average case, there are obviously cases where that's not true. My realization was PMM is, in most organizations, even the team that I was leading mostly just project. management. And it was very unfortunate that that was the case. Again, that is not the desire or the intent. It's because everyone, sales, demand gen, product, all think that they are driving the ship. And when you have that lack of clarity on who is the ultimate GM of the business, of the product of the feature until you have clarity pmm's job is absolutely thankless and it's not a marketing job it's a project management consensus driving keep the trains on the track get it launched type of a job and there's nothing wrong with it but i don't think that it's the highest leveraged job and so my advice to marketers usually is that hey if you're going to go into a product marketing role have this conversation before you take that job of who is accountable, who is the GM, and how are you going to be working with that GM to drive growth? Because if you don't have a direct relationship with that, product marketing is not going to work.
Speaker #1
You're filling our cup 100% right now. I don't know if you know, but based on our reaction, hearing that is very validating. You said that those PMMs, it's becoming project management. We heard a lot about you're becoming an asset. creating function you're just shipping stuff by shipping stuff um if you already had that discussion of like who's the gm who's the mini ceo what do you think those product marketers can do to influence the
Speaker #3
current positioning that people have internally of their role yeah i think the first thing is having a holistic view of the product journey and so what that means is your job as a product marketer in a in a well functioning organization is to go from the opportunity identification all the way to value capture. And these are like MBA words. But there's real meaning to them, right? What I mean by that is you know your audience better than anybody else, which if you're not talking to five customers, or at least three customers every day, you can't be a PMM. I'm also going to put everybody on notice a little bit. If you think you're a PMM and you haven't spoken to a customer, it's already the end of the day. You're not a PMM. So let's be very clear about what the product marketing role means. You're constantly talking to customers, not just listening to gone calls, like that's helpful, but you're actually spending time with customers. I love doing the audience research. You're doing the market research. You understand your audience inside out, not just like the needs and the jobs to be done and the benefits, but like what do they do when they wake up? What's on their home screen on their phone? What's their favorite YouTube shows? You know them at a level that's super deep. That's where opportunities come from. And what I mean by that is when you understand them, when you understand their motivations and their jobs to be done and needs. You can say that, hey, here are the top three things that they care about in their professional lives. And we're doing great on number two and number three, but hey, number one, we're missing the mark. And here's why. And you take that to your organization. And then it's like, okay, how do you take that opportunity through the process of building a commercially viable business, right? So classic sort of product management thinking. This is also where I say, you know, if you have PMMs and PMs, something's wrong. And if you don't know which one works for the other one, you see what I'm saying, right? Because I can say the same exact thing that I just said about PMs. A product manager should know their audience. And so if you haven't spoken to a customer, how are you a product manager? So, you know, strong opinions, but I do think that those roles actually are very similar and they've been- created because there was a class of product managers who were like, no, no, no, I don't want to do that. So go set up a product marketing team and they should go do that. I'm going to focus on high value. I'm going to create the product like nonsense. I'm going to get hit from all sides after this, this podcast airs.
Speaker #2
Pod takes are very welcome here. Safe space for all.
Speaker #1
That's great. I love the way you said it. And I just have a quick follow-up question on that because My take is a great PMM should be able to jump on the demo with the average sales rep and be on par, if not better than that sales rep. Because you understand all of the different contexts, you understand the different department, you understand those feedback loops. So technically sales should be able to learn from you. And this is the best way to cut off those silos between marketing and sales. But you said something as well in terms of like those PMs. PMs should be talking to the customers. PMM should be talking to the customers. If I'm PMM, and have a discussion with a PM, which is based on the real story, right? And I was like, to the head of product, hey, I want to talk to customers. I want to make sure I get on par to you. The answer was, why would you talk to them? I already spoke with them. We don't want to bug them. We don't want to be gatekept by sales. What should be if I know that my counterpart as a product manager is already in those discussions, already on the field with them, but me as a PMM, I don't get my part of the buffet because there's someone else doing it.
Speaker #3
Yeah, it's a good question. And this is where it goes down to, you know, understanding the organization structure. After having done this role, before I even put myself in that position, I would know, you know, what the working relationship is between PM and PMM. So when I took this role at Bill, I was asked to lead the product marketing team and customer marketing team. I just went on a listening tour. I went and spoke to every product leader there was, every sales leader, every marketing leader. and understood what they thought, you know, product marketing's role was. And, you know, in a larger organization, you have to start there. Like, what is the expectation internally? And guess what? It's going to take you four to six quarters before you can change that perception. Not going to happen overnight. So you got to pick your battles, right? Okay, product thinks and believes, maybe very earnestly and honestly, that they have all of the... the research and the customer insights done. All right, fantastic. Let's set up a day long session where we can go deep into what you have found, and the evidence and the proof points that back that up. So we can use that in our marketing for our claims. It's a great way to surface the understanding of the lack of understanding. And I'm not saying this in a political way, I'm literally saying like hey if we're gonna say that you know, seven out of 10 customers really want this, you know, feature, there's got to be some evidence for it, right? And you have to structure the research in the right way to be able to do it. And so if your product manager or your head of product is somebody who wants to have an evidence-based conversation, then it's going to go well. If it's a HIPAA conversation, the highest paid person's opinion, then, you know, and by the way, that happens 90% of the times. at least you know that right off the bat. And you can figure out in your career sort of how you navigate that situation. It's like, okay, you're not going to go across the hippo and you'll have to find different ways of influencing the organization. I don't know if that helped, but yeah.
Speaker #2
It does help because it lets people know it's not black and white. You got to take those things. And I appreciate that acknowledgement of four to six quarters. I think there's probably a lot of us who are doing that in-house role who don't know what that influence. is going to be like, and it's just good to hear. the reality of it. It's not an overnight success.
Speaker #0
Pranav, a question for you. Go ahead.
Speaker #3
I used to send out a survey to all of our cross-functional stakeholders with two or three questions of just like, hey, I'd set the stage of this is our mission, this is our objective as a product marketing team. How are we doing against that mission and objective? And it was literally just this zero to 10 type of scale. And I would get that feedback and be able to see how that perception is either improving or staying the same. And that was the thing that I was tracking quarter to quarter. We tried to get every product marketing team. We had multiple teams of each pod to have their own metrics. And those metrics were very much aligned with the business that they were supporting. The challenge is that they didn't really have influence over those metrics. So it was good to say that, hey, these are the metrics that we're going to be looking at. But we didn't have control. And so that's why I always think that product marketing is in an unfortunate situation. Many times when it comes to can you actually control the metric that you're trying to influence.
Speaker #0
Diving deeper into that point, a former manager of mine in product marketing shared with me the best way to influence a conversation is data. for product marketers who on their LinkedIn. Say they are data-backed analysts. You know who you are. What is the wrong way of using data to influence an internal conversation?
Speaker #3
I would say maybe there are three to four sort of pitfalls. One is cherry-picking data. And what that just means is like you already have a story in your head and you're just trying to prove your point and you find the right data points to make the case and you go present them. The reason it's a pitfall, the reason I think that that doesn't work, is the smartest people in the room are going to ask you the hard questions about the data behind the data. And, you know, and you're going to be in a house of cards. So that's like one pitfall. The second pitfall is if you're really sort of data savvy, it's not just the data, it's what generates that data. So I'll give you an example. I could ask you a leading question in a survey. and get you to say things a certain way and prove my point. So, you know, I'm going to ask you, hey, was that, you know, that dish was delicious, wasn't it? And you're going to say, yeah,
Speaker #0
yeah.
Speaker #3
You're not going to say, no, it was absolute garbage when I've already positioned the question as a leading question telling you that it's delicious and I believe it's delicious. So you will be more likely to say, yeah. it was good. And I marked that and say, great, I got data. That's garbage, right? That's garbage data. So the second pitfall is like, what is the process to generate the data that you're looking at? And really being confident in understanding whether it's a survey, whether it's a business process, whether it's your CRM, whether it's, you know, whatever else is usage data, but like, what is the actual mechanism through which that data is created? And most people don't understand that and they you know, fall when questioned about that piece. The third thing is, I think this applies to all of marketing. Everyone needs to go take a course on statistics. Most of us did not study statistics when we were learning, you know, how to do marketing, whether that was college, whether that was on the job, right? I didn't go to school for marketing, but you know, I learned it on, and I never really thought about. statistics until like the last maybe four to five years and how to think about I mean I did but in a very sort of isolated way I thought about it as like a b testing I'll apply statistics to it right but like the concepts of correlation causation uncertainty you know what is knowable like if you go spend eight hours on YouTube like just going down the rabbit hole you will learn so much that you can apply to how you make the case internally about. you know, whatever strategy that you're employing. And when you tie all this together into the scientific process, and what I mean by that is, you have a hypothesis, you always start with a hypothesis. And that is a very different way of thinking, as opposed to like, here's my goal. No, you're like, nobody cares about your goals. What you care about is like finding, either proving or disproving your hypothesis, I might have a hypothesis that there's demand for a business like Paramark. Now I got to go prove that if I come to investors and say, no, no, no, I know there is demand. They're gonna be like, well, how do you know? And so taking a hypothesis based approach changes the conversation for marketers, because it's no longer about what I think. It's whether I can prove or disprove the hypothesis that I have, it also makes it less personal. It's not about what I think and I feel and I believe no, here's a hypothesis. And we can either, you know, showcase that it works or it doesn't work. Do you have a better hypothesis? Do you have a different hypothesis? Do you want to test. And the moment you open up that conversation, now you've got the whole room engaged. It's like, well, yes, I think I can, you know, I want to test this thing because, and you're like, why do you think that's a reasonable hypothesis to even form, right? Where is that coming from? Tell me about the intuition. Tell me about the market research you've done. So there's a long-winded answer about this data question, but this more rigorous and scientific way of thinking will free up product marketers to not get into the... tactical debates that we often get into.
Speaker #1
That's an awesome tip.
Speaker #3
Valuable.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And it's like, I did study statistics in college and I don't remember half of it, but what's grinding my gear the most is when I'm with a team, we talk about A-B testing or people just brought A-B tests and they're like, let's A-B test it. And I'm like, guys, we have 150 visitors. There's no way we'll be able to say that we're 95% confident in that hypothesis because There's not enough data to actually prove our point. Correlation doesn't mean correlation. A lot of product marketers can take a page of the book of growth marketers to actually draw those hypotheses. Is there a way on how you think that PMMs can bring that kind of whole hypothesis ideas in, I would say specific situation, for example, if we take messaging, right? Messaging, I'm currently working on something on message testing. A big part of that usually dies by committee. So I'm just curious, how would you approach that for a PMM that never really did any policies, don't really have a knowledge and statistic and want to just make sure they don't fall under those pitfalls?
Speaker #3
Yeah, I mean, positioning and messaging is an interesting one. When you say messaging, do you mean sort of the framework, the hierarchy, the pillars, or you really mean sort of copy?
Speaker #1
Eric and I had like a discussion before this call. He was reminding the team that messaging isn't copy, but in that case, I don't mean copy. I mean the framework, the hierarchy of everything, the overall strategy that will support your position.
Speaker #3
So there are some things that you don't experiment with. And messaging is one of those things. Now, let me explain what I mean. You don't apply sort of A-B testing to that. I don't think that that's a good answer. When you are doing positioning and messaging at the strategy level, at the framework level, my thought process and... And I think that this is true for most people. It's much more qualitative in nature. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't require understanding of statistics and science, but it's not the same as running a mass scale A-B test. So I'm sure you've seen this, right? When you do sort of first party research, you go talk to customers. And whether you're starting from an existing sort of baseline of, hey, here are the five messaging pillars that we have already had for five years. and you know you put that in front of customers and you construct a research program to understand their thoughts and feelings about those messaging pillars you need to do it a certain number of times and you need to do it a certain number of get a concentrated mass of your buyer personas your influencers or your champions whatever forms your buying group and there is a method to that madness. If I only speak to five people and one was the CEO, the other was a head of sales ops, and the third was a marketer, you don't got nothing. So you have to think about, have I, if my, if my buying group is made of these four personas, I'm going to make sure that I have at least eight to 10 of these research, you know, studies done for each of those personas. And so So when you think about... statistics, it's really just making sure if you understand the concept of statistical significance, you know, then you're able to kind of draw that into this type of a research process. If you don't, as a naive sort of junior marketer, you could be like, hey, I spoke to people, I spoke to 10 people. And yes, you did good job, but that doesn't make it statistically valid. So even for doing, you know, this audience research, there's like, go chat GPT it, right? Open up chat GPT and say, Hey, what are some best practices on how do I create? you know, research programs for a messaging framework. It's going to tell you exactly what you need to do. So that's how I think you really have to start thinking about it. And again, there's no excuse for marketers to not be able to teach them this stuff. This is not rocket science. You can pick it up quickly.
Speaker #0
It reminds me of a line I heard in Exit 5 podcast. It was like Dave and Dave Kellogg is the idea of the dispassionate analyst. Even when you don't have all the necessary context, I think knowing the thought methodology of data analytics and statistics really elevates the conversation. One example that comes to mind for me is that I'm working with a client right now and we're doing a series of user interviews and 10 to 15 and I can come to them and say, hey, this gives us a perspective. But it might give us signals, but it won't give us a definitive unless we continue, like you said, if we interview eight to 10 of the same personas. And that helps like really guide the conversation, because especially when we're in a space where it's a game of opinion, like you said, the strongest opinion typically wins.
Speaker #2
No, the most highest paid opinion.
Speaker #3
Hippo, hippo. I did not make that term up. It's somewhere on the internet. So I don't know where I learned it from. But to add on to that point, you want to marry the qual and the quant, right? So people also like don't think about this enough. Like, okay, you did your qual, you did 30 interviews, you figured out your messaging pillars for like these, you know, five audiences, four audiences, whatever it might be. It is not that hard to turn those into five different ads on LinkedIn in an ABM way. each for each audience, the persona that you care about, and see your engagement rate from those ads, you will have answers within a week or two of which messaging is actually resonating, right? And now you can go back and do your research lab and say, okay, we, you know, our qual set five, our research telling us it's actually only two things that are resonating. The other three are like, you know, yes, that came up in qual, but the exit either something's messed up. right? Either the copy execution didn't meet the bar, or maybe the broader market doesn't believe that, right? So you take that iterative approach of going from qual to quant. And again, the goal is not conversions in those ads. The goal is to understand whether your message resonates. And so you're doing it for research purposes.
Speaker #0
Clarifying question for you. I'm going to say these two words, and I'm curious what your immediate reaction is. Activity metrics.
Speaker #3
I have nothing against them. I think they're great.
Speaker #0
Really?
Speaker #3
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So I'm gonna dive, we're gonna dive deeper in there. Now we're gonna go a little bit in the deep end. Let me put on my life jacket on real quick because.
Speaker #3
Let's do it.
Speaker #0
Activity metrics with collateral. I'm marketing program, we are doing a QBR. Zach, how many like one pages have we created this quarter?
Speaker #3
Ah, okay. that type of an activity metric. So thanks for clarifying that. Nobody's business. I think that's a waste of time to even like report on that. When I say activity metrics, I actually mean the customer's activity metrics. And so what is the customer doing? And so, you know, engagement metrics. Great example of this is if you've got a whole bunch of resources on your website, I actually think qualified consumption is a metric that more product marketers, content marketers should be looking at. What that means is a blog post that has a session with a blog post that's more than 10 seconds, 20 seconds, that's gold. A video view of more than a minute, that's gold, right? A podcast download and listen, that's gold. And so you do want to look at those customer activity metrics because those are leading indicators of what you're putting out there in the world are actually sort of being consumed or not. People rail against open rates on emails. They have their problems. It's not accurate. But if your open rates, if your click-through rates on your emails are going up and to the right, that's a good thing. That's not a vanity metric. If your total traffic is going up, it's a good thing. It's not a vanity metric. So that's what I meant when I was thinking about activity metrics. But yeah, like, you know, how many one-pagers did I create? Probably less important. In some cases, it's... kind of important but not like okay let's look at bdrs and sdrs right i think activity metrics are important for them because that's kind of it's that's the game it's kind of very similar to your engagement rate on an ad, right? If you if you're not reaching enough people,
Speaker #0
then obviously you're not going to have the impact that you think you had. So SDR, BDR work that way. Like it's a game of numbers. It's a one-to-many exercise. So you have to contextualize it for the specific use case. I don't know. That was my take.
Speaker #1
I agree with you from a sales perspective. Like number activity is what's going to like lay the foundation down. I think where... we struggle in is taking this one size fits all approach and applying it to product marketing. The value, like what Eric mentioned earlier, the value of product marketing is creating a volume of content. And that is enough to justify our value. And you hear it in some conversations, Pranav, where I was talking to a product marketing peer and they mentioned, well, I build a sales enablement hub. And that's what's influencing the sales numbers. I'm like, well, how? They're like, well, they're using it. I'm like, in what way? Like, are they, do they just click it, open it? So I think like we've kind of warped ourselves in this belief that if I create a piece of collateral and it's used on a sales call and I helped and as close as a deal, that collateral closed the deal. No, it didn't. It might have influenced it, but no one. One of my Pico Civil One patrons.
Speaker #0
Back on this and say, not everything needs to be measured. So again, this is a counter point and might be surprising to some. Why Pranav, the guy who builds measurement software, is saying that not everything needs to be measured. Because it really doesn't need to be measured. If you look at the best teams, am I going to go measure the productivity of my creative team? No, I'm not. Like that's not a good use of time. It's not a factory, right? The best advertising copy creative does not come under factory environments. So just like that, some of the product marketing work is like that. It's true creative work that, you know, a great pitch deck, you're just going to know your sales teams are going to be like, holy shit, Zach. This is amazing. And that's good enough. The trouble is, when you come from a defensive mindset and a defensive situation where you're having to prove your worth, because, again, the hippos don't understand what product marketing is and product marketing does. And so if you find yourself in that situation, I can appreciate some marketers coming up with these activity metrics as a way to prove their worth. But I think the motivation and just it's a symptom of the dysfunction. And so I don't blame anybody for doing it. I'm like blaming the system that let it happen. And my advice to those folks would be like, hey, if that's the situation you're in, two things are going to happen. One is you are either going to be out of a job in about 18 months. You yourself are going to find yourself feeling that I'm not adding value. And so might as well change the conversation of the situation proactively rather than just let it to chance and fate. I don't know if that helps, but that's my honest take that you don't have to measure everything. We're hiring our first marketer and salespeople. The way we measure their success is going to be dramatically different from anything I've seen in B2B SaaS. And you need to go towards those type of marketing teams.
Speaker #2
Well, then I want to flip that on you. What do you think are the things that people are not measuring that you are just, you're dumbfounded by, that you feel like they should be and have to be measuring, and it's just not helping both the product marketing and everyone else on the marketing side of the house?
Speaker #0
Yeah, so I've, you know, I've been talking about incrementality and the concept of incrementality for a good part of the last two years, and I can tell you that 99% of B2B organizations have no clue. about the incrementality of their investments. So if I were to look at your marketing, you know, line item by line item, your budget, you've got a bunch of headcount, you've got a bunch of, you know, what I call sort of creative and production, those things, you don't need to measure the ROI on that makes no sense. So creative productions, like how much am I paying my web designer and my video producer, like that's That is the cost of doing business. Right. That is the actual sort of fuel that you're putting into the engine. And the engine is the remaining. Let's say that ends up being like 40 percent of your total budget. You've got the remaining 60 percent and that remaining 60 percent is spread across your advertisements, your specific SEO investments, your PR investments, your you know. And then you have a bunch of channels or mediums that are not consuming any. paid dollars your life cycle stuff right so your emails your in-app those are owned channels so all of that stuff the 60 that's outside of creative and production outside of headcount should absolutely be measured and that 60 of your marketing budget most people just stop at your paid channels they never think about seo they never think about pr they never think about organic social and The reality is that all of those other things contribute, can contribute a significant amount to your pipeline and to your close one. You just don't do it because most marketing leadership just puts them in a separate bucket. And there's no reason to do that. And, you know, that's why we exist as a company is we level the playing field, whether it's, you know, people use all these types of terms, right? In the older times, it was above the line, below the line. it was brand and performance there was offline online it's you know the 95.5 right whatever you you name it the idea is that you have to understand the entire marketing mixes impact on your business but again like it makes zero sense to look at headcount cost and creative production cost like that is those are not the variables that you are ramping up or down necessarily and Yeah, so that's my rough take on what you do measure, what you don't measure. And coming back to like the sales asset production, right? I put that in the creative production piece. Like that is, there's no reason why you need to measure that. You do want to measure the success rate of your SDRs and BDRs.
Speaker #1
So let's say,
Speaker #2
Zach, I got to steal it then. So if 99%, if you're thinking 99% aren't doing that. What's going to happen if a product marketer listens to this and can actually take some of this advice and make it real? What would that next step be for them to say, you know what, I want to be a change. I want to be one of those 1% outliers and make a big difference in the organization. Other than, you know, go buy your product.
Speaker #0
Yeah. The first thing that I say is you have to start with an audit of what you're actually even doing. I kid you not marketers are not even able to articulate hey how many engagements impressions are we getting across all of our different channels there are times when we onboard customers and we show them stuff for the first time after like one month of the initial onboarding phase and we say this is how your impression share is across paid social paid search owned channels and it's shocking they've never seen that report before and where you've got everything from, you know, above the line, below the line. Let's just use that because it's a fun terminology. And so the first thing I say is like, go look at everything that you're actually doing across your marketing mix and what those, you know, impressions or engagements are over time. How have they shifted? Is it basically like whatever you're doing, it's been consistent for like 12 months. And so you've not actually made any changes in your marketing mix. You see what I'm saying? We thought that LinkedIn is doing really well. Guess what? The last 12 months, LinkedIn impressions have been flat. So what's going on? Like, how can that be true? And we have this perception that we're doing great on LinkedIn, right? Look at the actual data, right? Like visually look at what you're doing in each channel, put it in a spreadsheet, you can put that into Claude and chat GPT and ask it like, hey, what are the key observations that you get from this data. You don't need to buy fancy software. If just get the data, put it in a spreadsheet, put it in chat GPT and ask it like five questions. That itself is a great starting point.
Speaker #1
So let's say there's a fellow CMO who accidentally stumbled on the podcast because they were trying to listen to marketing scientists instead. And they fall into one of your four data pitfalls, which is cherry picking what you're sharing here so far. And I hear, oh, creative is the cost of doing business, but I don't want to do an audit. My sales pipeline is on life support. Let's do a creative rebrand to increase our enterprise footprint. I hear Chuck, I'm curious to hear your reaction here. Do rebrands really revitalize the organization? Is it something worth measuring? Because I feel like product marketers at times get thrown into the rebrand mix of putting on a gloss of paint, but nothing's really changed.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think there was a good post from Elena. She's like the meme. Yes. I don't know why I am blanking on her last name, but she's awesome.
Speaker #1
I know she's at growth at Dropbox now, I believe.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And she's advised companies like Miro, Amplitude, all. Elena Verna. Verna. That's right. Elena Verna. And she's, she's an investor in Paramark as well. So shout out to her. She said something right. Like she has never seen a rebrand actually work. Like there are always exceptions, but like rule of thumb, you'd be lucky if you just break even. which means nothing breaks in your funnel. That's the you know, the target. So my honest take, I don't think rebrands are necessary. There are some cases where you might have to do them. I'll give you an example. There was a point of time where the company that I was at, we were going through a major, I am the one who initiated a major rebrand. And for all types of very coincidental reasons we did not end up actually doing it. But The hypothesis there was our name itself was the product. And what I mean by that is we had captured the market for the thing that we said we would capture the market. And now we're like, we're going to where are we going to get the next level of growth from? And the name became a hindrance. So the hypothesis here was not about changing. Oh, we're not resonating with the market. No, no, no, we're going to launch these five new products. There are great additions, but our name is literally a hindrance to those five other products because it's so specific to this one feature that we built. And so, again, you have to have a hypothesis of why are you even doing the rebrand. If you say that you're not resonating with enterprise, what's the proof point? What's the evidence? Have you gone and talked to enterprise people? Have they expressed anything about your messaging that's not resonating? why can't we fix it with messaging itself? Why do we need a rebrand? Right? Is the right starting point. And then if you come in and say like, yeah, we've got all the proof points to say a rebrand is the only way we can achieve it. Go for it.
Speaker #1
I love the hypothesis. I'm, I'm done. I'm like in the quick 46 minutes, you've transformed this virtual recording studio into a virtual weight room and you know, I'm cooked.
Speaker #0
I'm glad.
Speaker #2
Yeah, this was awesome. I've already feeling like taking some stuff back and having some interesting conversations. I'd say, you know, as we sign off here, we're definitely, you know, want to make sure you have some space. So, other than catching you on LinkedIn, anything else going on? Got anything else cooking or anything else you want to let our audience know about before we let you go?
Speaker #0
No, it's, it's yeah, great. So go check out the marketing scientists podcast. That's the podcast that I host. I just finished recording this morning with Kerry Cunningham from Sixth Sense. He is their lead analyst and he spent a bunch of time at Forrester. And we had a great conversation about all things third-party intent, first-party intent, all that fun stuff. So yeah, Marketing Scientists, that's the podcast. Go check it out.
Speaker #1
We're just going to put you to your name as a co-host for this episode to drive the listeners from your podcast to us.
Speaker #0
I don't know if my audience is bigger than your audience, so there we go.
Speaker #1
We'll measure it, but we'll ask for your discretion first to see if it's worthy to be measured. Eric, you're on mute, bro. Hashtag season five.
Speaker #2
Dude, I hit the space button like a rookie. But I just want to say to everyone else here who isn't familiar, I was lucky enough to listen to a presentation with our guest. what, nine months ago-ish. And I've been thinking about it ever since and how, you know, we really need to, you know, do a better job in measurement and what we measure. So now that I know that Paramark is actually live, I suggest everyone go check out the websites, maybe get on a demo, see if it's a good fit. Because I'm really bullish that it can do a lot for us and make us look a lot better in our roles.
Speaker #3
Just write down that you're coming from We're Not Marketers.
Speaker #2
I'll give you 99% of what you said. But in all fairness, another great episode of We're Not Marketers. And we will catch you guys next time.
Speaker #4
All right. See you guys. Thank you very much. Bye.

Chapters

Introduction and Host Intros
0sec
Introducing the Guest: Pranav Piyush
47sec
Pranav's Background and Career Highlights
55sec
Personal Anecdotes and Adventures
1min
Origins of the Podcast
2min
The Role of Product Marketers
3min
Challenges in Product Marketing
6min
The Importance of Data in Marketing
16min
Understanding Positioning and Messaging
22min
Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Messaging
22min
The Role of Customer Research
23min
Activity Metrics: What Really Matters?
27min
Creative Work and Measurement
31min
The Importance of Incrementality
34min
Rebrands: Are They Worth It?
40min
Final Thoughts and Podcast Promotion
42min

Embed

Introduction and Host Intros

0sec

Introducing the Guest: Pranav Piyush

47sec

Pranav's Background and Career Highlights

55sec

Personal Anecdotes and Adventures

1min

Origins of the Podcast

2min

The Role of Product Marketers

3min

Challenges in Product Marketing

6min

The Importance of Data in Marketing

16min

Understanding Positioning and Messaging

22min

Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Messaging

22min

The Role of Customer Research

23min

Activity Metrics: What Really Matters?

27min

Creative Work and Measurement

31min

The Importance of Incrementality

34min

Rebrands: Are They Worth It?

40min

Final Thoughts and Podcast Promotion

42min

Chapters

Introduction and Host Intros

0sec

Introducing the Guest: Pranav Piyush

47sec

Pranav's Background and Career Highlights

55sec

Personal Anecdotes and Adventures

1min

Origins of the Podcast

2min

The Role of Product Marketers

3min

Challenges in Product Marketing

6min

The Importance of Data in Marketing

16min

Understanding Positioning and Messaging

22min

Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Messaging

22min

The Role of Customer Research

23min

Activity Metrics: What Really Matters?

27min

Creative Work and Measurement

31min

The Importance of Incrementality

34min

Rebrands: Are They Worth It?

40min

Final Thoughts and Podcast Promotion

42min