RECAP - How to build influence as a PMM in 2025 | We're Not Marketers

Description

In this special recap, we dive into what it really means to be a product marketer in the ever-evolving B2B SaaS space—from defining the role to gaining the trust of executives and product teams. Hear first-hand advice on establishing boundaries, shaping product roadmaps, and showcasing your unique value.

Tune in to discover how you can go from feeling misunderstood to being the unignorable voice in your organization.

Why product marketing often feels misunderstood—and how to change that.
The “secret sauce” to defining your role so everyone, from sales to CEOs, sees your impact.
Strategies for sitting in a “neutral” spot on the org chart (and why it’s a dream setup).
Insider tips for positioning your product before it’s built—so buyers are ready to say “yes.”
How to set healthy boundaries with tasks that aren’t in your zone of genius.

This episode is featuring episodes clips from Tamara Grominsky, Dave Gerhardt, and April Dunford.

Give it a listen prior to season 4 launching in 2 weeks!

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 being unenormable in your role. Hey folks, Gab here. So season four is dropping in two weeks and because it's a long time, we decided to do a little recap of a series of episodes on how you can build influence as a product marketing manager in 2025. So hoping that this will shorten the wait. Thank you. Cheers and enjoy.
Speaker #0
How do you define product marketing within an organization? Because many instances, you're going to have sales saying, I need this one pager. You may have executive leadership, CEO say, hey, we need some copywriting on this website. So for anyone that's in this similar situation, what is your definition of product marketing? And then how do you influence that definition across key stakeholders?
Speaker #2
Yeah. I think that product marketing needs a definition at each organization. Like there isn't one blanket one. Like for me, product marketing is responsible for identifying who are your best customers and the markets and spaces you should be playing in, identifying how to price, package, and position value, and then bring recurring value to customers. That's product marketing for me. the skills and like tactics under that, we could argue that. Copywriting could fit under that or not. You know what I mean? There's different worlds, right? You need to assess for yourself what kind of product marketer you want to be and within what type of a company. Like I would not be a solo PMN because I would have to spend too much of my time on tasks that are not my zone of genius. But there's other people who excel in that area, right? And so from my experience, most of my teams have been at like later stage startups to early scale ups where we've had the luxury of having product marketing. and some other marketers. That said, like even at Kajabi, fairly large scale up, we had six product marketers. There's definitely times where we wrote our own pendos. Like I'm not saying we're saying, oh, we can't help out. Like we're team players. And there's times where, you know, especially if something comes up today and we want it to go out tomorrow, yeah, we're going to chip in and we're going to like write the email. We'll write the pendo. But that's different than saying I have a tier one product launch coming up. You know. two months from now and I'm going to write all of my own flatter on the website copy. And so it's not to say, oh, we're too good for that or that's not what we do. It's like, how do we set boundaries so we can each do our best work? But then, of course, at the end of the day, we're a team and we all need to chip in, you know? So that's how I think about it. I think if you want to set yourself up for success, whether you're joining a new role or you're in a role right now, it's just having those conversations and setting those boundaries. Like in interviews, I'm super clear on. What do you expect to be doing with your day? Like I'll ask when I'm hiring PMMs on my team, how much of your day do you want to spend doing this? What brings you joy? And so you should already be aligned on this with your stakeholders. And we talked a lot about marketing, but honestly, sometimes I find that actually more of the overlap can even happen with product. But this is the exact conversation we also need to be having.
Speaker #3
What do you feel on that same note in terms of reporting then? If you were to put them somewhere where you had to have a boss, who's that boss in your opinion?
Speaker #2
Yeah. So I have opinions, but I also will caveat it by saying that like the context of the company does matter, right? But in an ideal world, if I was designing a business and I could design it around a structure I think would be ideal, I would have it on its own. So it wouldn't report into product. It wouldn't report into marketing. It would report into either like a chief commercialization officer or a chief strategy officer. And so when I was at Unbounce, this was actually what I had the opportunity to do, which was amazing. So when I joined Unbounce, I joined as the head of product marketing. And I was blessed that the system was already set up a little bit for me. There is a head of product, a head of marketing, and then like a CRO. And so I actually got to report to the chief revenue officer. And product marketing was carved off separate than marketing. The head of marketing and myself, we both reported into the CRO, but at least we were our own functions. But what happened was that we ended up having some friction between marketing or revenue and product. And we all agreed that one of the best ways to diffuse this tension would be for there to be a third party, a neutral and unbiased third party. And so when our CRO, she actually got promoted to the CEO spot, which was amazing. And so then there was an opportunity for me to become the CSO. So I took on the chief strategy officer title. I removed myself from the revenue unit. So then we had a head of product. head of strategy, which was then doing lifecycle partnerships and product marketing, and then a head of marketing. And we would have three strategic peers all being able to work together.
Speaker #3
Oh, man, that sounds like a dream layout there. How do you convince everyone in your organization that we should be building products that people want to buy that when we launch this we've got people already lined up to pay us for it versus building a product and then taking all of our resources to figure out how are we going to get people to buy this thing have you situation where you've had to have that conversation and say look this is how we need to run product launches and develop products Do you have any advice for our users or any examples that we could share?
Speaker #0
I think it's something that both of you guys have said before, along with when we had Jason on last week. He said that conversation should begin with your product counterpart when you are thinking about the product roadmap, when you're looking at the annual plan. But let's say that you are not there for that conversation. you join at a later part of the year, you are new. I think it's like, that's the first, like one of the first meetings to have on a books. And it's like, Hey, like, what does the roadmap look like? What are we prioritizing? What's changed? What's like, what changes have we seen so far, either from just like customer interactions, from feedback we're getting from customers, from cases that are coming from the customer success team that may influence how we have the list. prioritized today. But I think at the end of the day, before we talk to the entire organization, is to have that sit down with the product counterpart and figure out like, what is their priority and what they want to watch.
Speaker #1
Yep. I would agree with that. And I think that for a major part, when that's happening, there's already a roadmap. They already know what they want to do. And it's like, hey guys, here's this mix match weird stuff. kind of word, do something with it. Come on, PMMs, go to market with it. When positioning, as we know, should be done at the ideation phase. So then everything else is more of a, I don't want to use too much slang, but I would say it's more of a top-down approach and bottom-up. And we're just able to go to market more effectively then. Here's our kind of weird framing product, and you need to do something with it, and you need to position it correctly, and you need to do that. If you're able to do the research, to look at the competition, and then to identify gaps in the roadmap, I think it's a better way. And then you can say, okay, so can we take a step back? Can we remove the releases and ideas of the next quarters and just focus on tweaking that product? to fit the positioning or in the strategy around the market we want to bring and then we'll be able to focus on the direction we want to take because like the same is happening in growth as well you're trying to like make things work but it's not seamless because there's not necessarily a need for that product people are not necessarily aware of it either probably more or they just don't know about your solution. So yeah, pretty much it.
Speaker #3
I love this. We got some wise words coming out of the we're not marketers today.
Speaker #4
Just the role of product marketing, I would actually argue is the most important role in marketing. How's that? Because I think that people get too in the weeds in companies. We get bent around the axle and we get too obsessed over little tiny optimizations or tweaks, or maybe we need to Maybe we have the wrong sequence going out to these people. Maybe the ad targeting is wrong. Maybe we need to do another X. It always comes back to the tactics. And if you look at LinkedIn, it is so much tactic driven. If there was one 80% thing that makes the difference in marketing, it is what product marketing should own, which is positioning and messaging. And I think positioning is the most important part of great marketing. And typically that needs to be, that is typically owned by product marketing. So as a way of working backwards from your question, a hundred percent product marketing is probably the most important role in marketing. That's not to take anything away from the others. I think you need people who are going to promote and distribute that message and convert that message. But without the message is the thing that is the biggest thing. And if I could bet all, I wrote about this recently, like the number one thing that I would bet on is positioning and a unique point of view and a differentiator. And that all comes from product.
Speaker #0
One challenge, especially for founding product marketers, is building that influence with their leadership to have that ownership and that trust. What chatter do you see within your Exit 5 community or from your past experience? on how like a solo product marketer or can build that trust and leadership. So that leader at the end could be like, take that, what you just said here, take this positioning, run with it and enable it across our organization.
Speaker #4
I think that, so when you're that solo or early marketer at a company, and then the example of Drift, the way that I got permission to be in that conversation with positioning was for the first six months of that company, like I just got so much shit done. I didn't care about my title. I didn't care about who, I didn't have a team. I didn't have a good title. I reported the CEO only because we didn't have a VP of marketing and he was just, I was the only person, we just needed somebody to wrangle that. And I just got in and I just did everything. I got our blog up and running and we got our first couple articles out and our website traffic went from zero to 1500 visitors in the first two weeks. And I got to present that to the company and they're like, all right, this is cool. We got some attention now. And then we got our first couple email subscribers, like 100 email subscribers. Then like I'm on the weekend and I'm thinking about, I'm reading articles about SEO. It was the first job opportunity that I had where I got to do all the doing. And so I could like make changes. And so they wanted, they want somebody who takes ownership and autonomy and goes and just gets a bunch of things done. And so before I became involved in the positioning, like I put a ton of points on the board early on to then earned the right for the seat for I got the right the CEO then wanted me to bring wanted to bring me into those conversations. I'll give you an example. There's a guy on our team at exit five right now. His name is Matt. And Matt's been with us for a month and a half. And Matt has just come in. No, just what can I like boom, just gone. He's just done so much stuff in a month and a half. I find myself now like bringing him into more things because like he gets shit done. And I want him to be involved. So there's an element of If you're the solo product marketer, I do think this is a space where product marketers can get stuck. Product marketers often default to like, I got to do my research. I got to talk to customers. This is going to take some time. I need a framework. I need a brief. And it's like now been, you've been at the company for six weeks and all we have is a Google doc. You can get there, but I'm just, especially at a startup, like you need to have a bias for action and let's get a bunch of stuff done. And so if you're the product marketer and you come in this company, And you want to get the sales deck done and perfect, but you notice that they don't even have a sales deck. How about your first week project is to make a V1 of the deck that's just better than what you have now. And it's five slides and you worked on it directly with the VP of marketing, VP of sales, straight out of her mouth, whatever. Okay, boom, that's V1. All right, cool. I think I like this guy, Gab. You need to put points on the board. You need people to want to bring you into those conversations, especially in a role like product mark. product marketing where you don't necessarily have all the keys. You have to be, you have to be brought in on all the things. Like you don't necessarily own the website. You don't necessarily own sales. You don't necessarily own demand gen, but you want, need to be involved. The way that you do that is by putting points on the board and being like being a great resource for people. This is just me, by the way, everybody might disagree with this, but I have a huge bias for action. I move really fast. I like people that do the same. And so I want to see somebody come in and hey, we hired you because we need this role. We don't need you to do six. six weeks worth of Google slides and here's what we could do. I want you to start making progress like right now. Let's put some, let's put something on the board. And when I talk about this in exit five and other people, some people, you can't really know what changes to make until you talk to customers. I'm not saying don't talk to customers. I'm not saying change everything right out of the gate, but there are small wins. Hey, I noticed there's no email. There's no email or this email that goes out. I was like, pretty bad. Can we change that? It's those little things early on that I think build up your credibility and you get the right to have those conversations later.
Speaker #0
So if I'm a founding PMM and I'm at an early stage startup, I'm curious from your experience, how did you build that influence to help navigate that conversation with your CEO before you were the April Dunford?
Speaker #5
Yeah, yeah. Because I was that too. right like nobody cared what i had to say about anything at the beginning even at the end to be honest like you know like like it doesn't get you that far with the founder to be honest here's here's how i used to look at it and this was true even when i just even you know when i wasn't at pmm this was true when i was a vice president of marketing you know like i would get hired to come in and the ceo would be like wave that marketing magic wand, April, and get the leads and the revenue going like this up to the right and, you know, and just get it done. And I would come in and my worry was that I would be building stuff on top of mushy positioning. which is foolish. So if I'm out there building campaigns and I'm going to be writing messaging and I'm going to be doing all this other stuff and I'm going to like, you know, fix the pitch deck and all the other things I'm going to do, but we're, you know, but we don't really know why we win in the market. We don't really know who our competitors are. We don't really understand what our differentiated value is. And now all that stuff is going to be junk. So I would come in and And now I can't. I have never once been successful at coming in, walking into the CEO's job, even as the vice president. I can't walk into the CEO founder and say, hey, you know what? I think this positioning is crap and we should fix it. It's a bit like waltzing in there and saying their baby is ugly. Like you're not going to get very far with that. So I would never do that. I mean, I might've tried to do that when I was junior and stupid. but you'll quickly discover that nobody has that influence right except certain people have that you know who has the influence to go in and walk in and tell the ceo their baby's ugly the ceo's parent april dunford i mean it's not true like even now as a consultant like the Companies don't come to me until they've already decided they have a problem. April doesn't go and convince them they have a problem because that's impossible. So vice president of sales though, that's different. So if the vice president of sales comes in and says, we can't sell this stuff, I'm sorry. The CEO might not love that message, but they listen because rubber meets the road over in sales. We don't make our numbers. We're all going to die. So what I would do is I would come. I'm the brand new VP marketing. And I would walk over to sales and I'd say, I'm just here. I'm stupid. I don't know anything, but you know, I'm brand new. And I would just like to sit around on calls and talk to the reps about what's happening on these calls. So I'd sit in on the calls and I'd be listening for the signs of weak positioning. And so the signs of weak positioning is customer prospect gets on the call and the rep is pitching something. And the prospect is making this face, you know, like, I don't understand thing you're talking about, man. Like, and, and a lot of times you'd hear this phrase where you'd get on and you'd be like 10 minutes into the call. And the prospect is like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Back it up, back it up. Go back to the beginning. What did you say at the beginning? Like, cause I'm just, I'm not quite getting it. And so you can see this profound confusion, like where a customer can't even figure out what you are, like can't even figure out what you are. So that's one sign. Second sign you get is this, where. prospect comes on and they say, oh yeah, yeah. So you guys are just like Salesforce and you're not, you're nothing like Salesforce. Like, and so they're, they've put you in a bucket that you don't belong in. And that's a really big problem. And then the rep will say, no, no, no, no, no, we're not that. No, no, let's go back to here. No, we actually do this other thing. And it's like this, you know? And so, so that's a sign your positioning sucks. The other one you'll get is this real pushback, like not, not even so much pushback on. pricing, but a bit like, why would I pay for this? Like I get what it is, but like, why would I pay for it? Can I just do it as a spreadsheet? Or like I'm using in my accounting package to do it right now. Can I just do it with that? And so if I started seeing that stuff, then I would go and have lunch with the vice president of sales. And so I'm like, I'm new here, but I've been listening on a bunch of calls and I've been talking to your reps. And here's what I see. People don't understand what we are. people are comparing us to the wrong thing. People really don't understand the value. Do you see that? Do you think that's true? Now, if this is true, your vice president of sales sees it. He sees it every day. And so when I'm having that lunch, the vice president of sales is going to go, yeah, man, this is a problem. And they'll probably blame it on the product or they'll blame it on something. They'll say, oh, this is just really hard to sell. Or they'll say, oh, the market's really crowded or whatever. And I'll say, look over in marketing land, We have this concept and it's called positioning. And here's what it is. Have we ever done a formal positioning process in this company? And the answer is almost always no. And I'll say, I'm not saying the positioning is bad and I don't know what it would look like if it was better, but I think it's worth, given what I'm hearing on the sales side, I think it's worth looking at it. I think we should just look at it. Then I would go have the exact same conversation with the person running product. Same thing. I'd be like, Hey, I'm over in, I'm over in sales and here's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing we get compared to things we shouldn't be compared to. I'm seeing this, I'm seeing that. Do you see that? I mean, you spend a lot of time with customers. Do you see that? This general confusion about what we are and whatever. And again, if it is a problem, product sees it too. They might not necessarily think it's positioning. They might say, well, you know, we have this roadmap and once we get these five things built, then everything's going to be perfect and whatever. And I'm like, Yeah, okay, but while we're building those things, every day we have to do deals and we suck at doing deals. So maybe we could fix this. In marketing land, sometimes we can fix this by tightening up the positioning. Have we ever done a positioning exercise at this company? And the answer is almost always no. Then I go to the CEO. So then I go to the CEO and I'm not coming in there saying, you gotta do this because I said, and I'm the smartest marketer on the planet. I go in and I say, look, I'm dumb. I don't know anything. I'm brand new here. I don't know a thing. But here's what I'm hearing in sales calls. I'm seeing nobody understands our value. I'm seeing the sales calls really rough at the beginning because people really don't understand what we are. And I'm seeing this, we're getting compared to people we shouldn't be compared to. And so before I go and spend a lot of effort doing this, I think it would make sense to get a little team together, you, me, product, sales, let's get together. And we'll just go through this little exercise and see if we can't tighten up that positioning and make it better. And what does the CEO say? They don't say, oh yeah, April, let's do that. They say, what does John over in sales think about this? And I say, gosh, I have no idea. Let's call him. And then we get John on the phone and John says, yeah, man, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And I think, yeah, it would be a good idea because I already sold him. And then they call product and I've already sold them too.
Speaker #3
She's got her reference call already in the bag.
Speaker #1
Thank you for listening to Win at Marketers. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, review our podcast, and share this episode with other PMMs. Thanks again and see you soon.