Crushing your first 100 days as a PMM of one
As a new PMM, what to do at your first job is usually top of mind. Even more if you’re the only product marketing manager at your organisation.
Jason Oakley (Senior Director of Product Marketing at Klue) gave a talk about this as part of the Wynter Olympics Series. This has been one of my favourite product marketing webinars to date so I’m excited to document my learnings here.
8 things you can do to crush your first 100 days as a product marketer
1. Know your Product
You want to know your product in and out but also want to be trusted by other customer-facing teams (like sales and customer success) as the go-to person for product knowledge. There’s nothing worse than not being trusted by the teams you’re enabling so credibility with these teams goes a long way.
Study product demos and training
Get your teeth into sales call recordings and demos. You don’t need to listen to every single thing but a couple of good ones should do. Get to the point where you can present a demo as good as your top rep.
Record your first demo in 60 days.
This pushes you out of your comfort zone and shows that you know enough about the product to create a demo. This way, you learn by teaching. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get it perfect- you can always adjust it later.
2. Build Key Relationships
Identify your key stakeholders
Figure out who the sponges of information and insights are
Provide value, build social capital
3. Know your competitors
Create battlecards for your primary 2-3 competitors. These should be quick hits and not deep dives. This will also be a great resource to share with your sales team and is a great way to score quick points with them.
8 things to know about competitors
Their opening differentiator - What’s the number one reason they win? What’s their go-to line for why they feel they’re the better option than you?
How they fare in the buyer’s segment and industry - Your competitor may have a better product than you do on the surface but the truth is they fare differently in different segments. You want to find out how they're doing in an individual buyer’s segment when you’re speaking to them.
Their go-to landmines - What are the things they can use against you?
Your most recent wins against them
What’s their biggest strength? (Why you lose)
What’s their biggest flaw? (Why you win)
Their customers that have churned to you and why (this makes for great storytelling)
What’s their (high level) pricing strategy?
4. Put your positioning on paper
Do a bit of research and document the positioning that already exists at the organisation so that others can benefit.
In the first 100 days you’re not going to do a whole repositioning exercise (you can do this as a larger project) but you want to take what they already have and put it in one place (use April Dunford’s messaging exercise for this).
A deck works well because you can include visuals, imagery and taglines. This is also simpler and more actionable than a full blown positioning document.
5. Define a launch process
Not every launch is the same. Prioritise using a tiered approach for product launches and releases.
Tier 1 is the largest, involving net new functionality that will be impactful for the top of your funnel (i.e. announcing an entirely new feature set that’s core to your product’s value prop).
Tier 2 usually includes net new functionality or a significant product update, but likely for functionality that will be most impactful to your existing users (i.e. a major update to a current feature or functionality that is very popular across your user base).
Tier 3 is a table stakes improvement that, while important, is only something that will impact and be noticed by existing users, if anyone at all. (i.e a subtle UI change that power users have been asking for).
Tier 1 is considered the most important while Tier 3 though important as well is considered the least important.
Questions to consider for grouping in tiers
Do we want users to know about this launch?
How easily is the launch detected by an end user?
How disruptive is the change to common flows?
How beneficial is the launch to our end users?
How much lead time do we have?
6. Set up your channels for communication with your team
Create your own unique channel- Chili Piper, for example, has The Sauce - A newsletter for communication with internal members.
Slack - Have key channels in Slack for communication with your team(s)
Examples of Slack channels to set up include:
Product Marketing Updates: For general product marketing updates
Competitive Intel: For product marketing and other customer facing teams to drop new information on your competitors
Go - to - Market channels for specific launches (e.g. #product-name -gtm)
A PM-PMM channel for updates between product manages and product marketing managers
Enablement huddles: These are bi-weekly huddles you can have with sales. You can give messaging and positioning updates, product updates, tools, etc.
7. Audit your content
Take stock of the content that already exists and put everything in one place (A Google Drive folder is a good place to start). You can audit your content using this template.
Documenting customer stories during this process is a great idea and is also a great way to score a quick win with the sales team.
8. Find tools and templates
As much as possible, don’t attempt to build from scratch. Save time by finding tools and templates created by your organisation or by other product marketing managers in other organisations.
Tools and templates you can keep an eye out for include:
Battlecards
Positioning and messaging decks
Customer stories
One pagers
Landing pagers
The information in this article is mostly from Jason Oakley’s Presentation titled “0 - 100: How to Crush Your First 100 Days as a PMM of One”. You can connect with Jason Oakley on LinkedIn. He also has an amazing resource library you can check out here.