An interview with Unbounce's Chloe Taylor
Parachute PMMs, storytelling and segmentation
For the first PM Starter Interview, I reached out to Chloe Taylor - PMM, Monetisation and Segmentation at Unbounce. It was my first interview so I was super nervous but Chloe’s bright personality and intelligence made me feel comfortable- and made the interview fun.
Chloe started out her career as a business analyst, moved to revenue operations and now works as a product marketing manager. We cover how she ended up in product marketing, how she approaches her segmentation work and what skill she’s found most valuable to her product marketing career.
PM Starter: You started out in analytics- what’s the story behind you making the switch to product marketing?
It was a mixture of luck and preparation. In my first job, I was an assistant listening in on sales calls I didn't even know product marketing existed until a couple of years ago.
I started out as an assistant and then I found Excel. I had really fantastic manager who just encouraged me to get more education so I did a business course in Excel. I was more on the business analyst side because to be a data analyst, you've got to be a bit more scientific and understand the implications of things.
I picked a route that was quite technical and you had to be careful- I'm not a very careful person, so that made me very stressed out. The things I liked about my job were smaller parts that were more of pushing strategy and understanding the whole business.
So how that led to product marketing was there was a position open and they had had a hard time finding someone to fill the position. Two people had been in my role previously and they had left. Not because there's anything wrong with the company. It's just product marketing is such a hot role right now that they couldn't keep them.I was really lucky. I got an opportunity where there was this beautiful role sitting open.
I’m a parachute PMM as opposed to a portfolio PMM.
A portfolio PMM would be someone who is associated with a product or a feature within the company and they're very tied to it. They do the campaigns, talk to the salespeople about it and they create the messaging for the campaigns. They just know that they're the product marketing manager for that feature.
I don't have a connection to any product. My counterparts on my team are all connected with a specific product in our product suite and I am sort of agnostic because I'm focused on monetization and segmentation.
I basically made up the parachute term- that's my kind of brand because what I do is I will parachute in on the other products as needed. I will do anything to do with segmentation or monetization- I add expertise.
PM Starter: What do you like the most about your job and about product marketing at the moment?
I love creeping on customers in our product and seeing what they're doing. It's just so cool to be like, “Oh my gosh, we've got it”. I'm starting to see trends in the types of SaaS companies that come to us.
I get a list of like a hundred customers and I open their pages and just get acquainted with their business. Sometimes I'll look the people up on LinkedIn and be like, “who is this person?” I'm sure people are like who is creeping and what is going on but it's really fun. My job is just to step inside the shoes of a customer. I get to assume them in the product as long as I don't touch anything. I try to build that picture around who they are and what they want.
PM Starter: I'm sure this influences segmentation a lot, so can you talk more about how they're connected -this random “creeping up on customers”- how does it influence your segmentation work?
So I start with the data. I look at all of our customers and then I'll segment them by date. Right now we're really curious about new customers that are coming to us, what do they want?
We've got this new product that we're creating so it's, “how are new people responding to this product?” So for instance I segment everyone that joined us from 2020- that’s a smaller amount of customers which is a little bit more manageable. Then I start to see the trends and go ok, what industries are they in and what business size are they?
Then the groups start to get smaller. I look at SaaS, maybe 7 to 10 employees and just open their pages. SaaS is not enough for me because are you selling a SaaS product to a consumer or are you selling that to a business? And then within our product, we've got multiple use cases. For instance, are you trying to get sign-ups or are you trying to get actual installs? Is it a webinar? Things like that. And so being able to actually look into the product and see, I've got this idea of who the segment is, but really, who are they in our product?
If they’re in e-commerce are they selling a physical product like a pen or are they selling consumables like beverages?
And maybe those customers have two different problems so you market to them in two different ways.
PM Starter: Thinking about segmentation, I've heard before that you should focus on segments that are most important to your business, or bring the most money when you're first starting out just so you don't get overwhelmed. What do you feel about that? How did you start out with your segmentation work? Because it sounds like there are so many buckets or so many things to think about- is that something that you focused on…the most important segments for your business?
Absolutely. So we've got great leadership that is very clear on our overall vision and our goal and who we want to serve- we're very clear that we want to serve SMBs.
And so you have to be very clear on what market you want to address and the general numbers. If you're looking for twenty million customers or if you're a smaller business and you're thinking OK I can manage a thousand orders a week or a month- think about a segment that captures that.
For us, we wanted to get a lot of people so (we’re targeting) SMBs- that's a big group- whereas enterprise is a smaller group of companies. There aren't that many enterprise customers in this world but they've got a higher deal value, so we're going the different route. We're going down the market with a smaller deal value, but we want lots and so that's where we start.
It's so clear in our trends that there are some clumps and for us, it's SaaS and e-commerce. And so I've got a nice anchor and then go with the biggest chunks first and then investigate them.
Would we have been faster to the gate if we understood that our customers were just going to be B2B SaaS? Would we have addressed the matter? I don't know, because then are you missing a market? What if there is a potential market for consumer SaaS out there. So I think it takes constant testing and it takes constant evaluation and so that's where just going beyond the dropdown and going beyond what the customer identifies themselves as is really important. I think we get tricked a little bit by the drop-down of what people select. That's great in the beginning to get up and running, but not if you want to have targeted landing pages to really have high conversion.
In the beginning, yeah, you start general and (down the road) it's really about resources.
PM Starter: What skills do you think have been most valuable to you in your current job?
Storytelling.
PM Starter: Hmm okay I wasn’t expecting that
So yeah I took a really great course. I would recommend Nancy Duarte. She teaches you how to make great slide decks and that was the start of my storytelling journey.
The information you exclude is just as important as the information you include. A big part of my work is communicating in slide decks and communicating asynchronously because we're all distributed. That's how I sell my ideas. I make a punchy slide deck and tell that story that pulls people in. The stuff I don't include in the story is really important. I've learned to not just do big data bars. That's what I used to do in Rev Ops where I just gave everyone everything because I'd be like, well, it's not my role to tell you what you need to know- maybe you need to know everything. And now as I've gotten a little bit more mature, I know that it's my job to cut the fat for execs or anyone even. They've got limited time. Everyone's got limited time and so telling them everything I'm interested in is not relevant because I'm interested in it all.
As Coco Chanel says, “Take one accessory off before you leave the door”. Even though you're kind of attached to that accessory. You know you've got to take things out and make sure your slides past the 5-second test. If people can't figure out what it says in five seconds. Then you're not really telling a story.
PM Starter: If you could go back in time and give advice to yourself before starting this product marketing role at Unbounce. What would it be?
It would be - start talking to customer success earlier to know more about the customer and just start building those networks. I’m doing that now but if you’ve got more time to do it, start that from the beginning. You've gotta get your internal network going. You're only as good as the information you know on the ground and once you start. If I could have had that information I could’ve done a little bit more in my presentations instead of just working in a silo by myself.
You can follow Chloe Taylor on LinkedIn here.