Scaling with Success: The Critical Role of Product Marketing in Growth

Why is it so hard to find a good PMM leader? I have faced this pain myself, so there’s, like, a whole lot of baggage with that comment. If you have a product marketer, the inputs aren’t similar no matter where it’s at. So I’ve found that the easiest thing to do is try to see if somebody has experience in what you’re trying to sell. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So Saima, I hear that hiring a good product marketing leader is super simple, very easy. It’s one of the hardest roles to hire for. Well, to hire well for, I would say. Yeah. You can go hire anyone, but to hire a great PMM leader, well, we’re gonna talk all about it in today’s episode. We we have Kyle Lacy who’s currently the CMO at Jellyfish. Has a great background, was an early company, Lessonly. He was at OpenVenture Partners before that, took Lessonly when he became the CMO. They were acquired by Seismic, was at Seismic for a while, and has now landed at or has been at Jellyfish for a bit and is also advisors to some really great SaaS companies companies out there. And we’re just gonna we dig in product marketing, why it’s important, how it’s different in every company, and all the in between. So great content, great discussion for pretty much all the marketing leaders out there. Let’s do it. Kyle Lacy, thanks for joining us today. Hey there. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. So as we always do, we’re gonna dive right in. We’re talking product marketing today. So I’m gonna ask you, what is the biggest mistake that a CMO or marketing leader can make when it comes to product marketing? I have quite a bit, but I think for me, the top is not getting alignment internally on what product marketing means and the definition of product marketing in the org, in the go to market org. I think the problem is that, which you all know, is that there’s too many definitions of what product marketing should be. And what’s the difference between product managers? What’s the difference between enablement and product marketing? You know, is product marketing segment, industry, product, you know, who does win loss, who does competitive, who talks to the customer? Like all this stuff, I think the failure is usually when you don’t get alignment. And then alignment down to, I would imagine, a very tactical level of these are the deliverables based on the actual, like, whether it’s a product launch, here’s what PMM delivers. Whether it’s, you know, a new road map, whether it’s a keynote, like, really getting specific down to those brass acts because I think to your point, in every company, PMM can be a little bit different. And so what does it mean within your org? What are the deliverables? Where are they owning things versus where are they contributors? I think that’s also a little area. You know, naming, tiering of campaigns. Pricing and packaging. Pricing and packaging. There you go. Yeah. Well, I and I think it depends on the size too. You know, Adam, we were talking I think we were sharing notes, but I made the huge mistake to not hire a product marketer at Lessonly soon enough. Like we had somebody doing product marketing, but he was kind of new to the role, was just doing like whatever hit the to do list, he would get done. Now he’s a great product marketer, but at the time he was new. And I made the mistake not hiring product marketing until much later in our revenue model. And I think it hurt us by tens of millions in ARR because it was very hard for us to move up market cause we didn’t have anybody thinking about the market. If you were to go back now, is there a threshold of when you would have hired? Would you have been right off the bat or where would you have done it? When we started selling to multiple personas, different industries or different segments is when I would’ve made the hire. So it was pretty early on. If you have more than one persona, if you have more than one industry, if you have more than one segment or more than one product, and you don’t have product marketing, you need to catch up because it’s just it’s you’re not gonna be in a good situation in the future. As we so often do on this podcast, we jump in without stepping back. It’s just how Adam and my brain works. Define product marketing or the role of product marketing. Like, what is it? You know, for me, I’ve really tried to hone this over the past two years at Jellyfish, but really it’s about ensuring that the company that you work for delivers the right message about the right product to the right audience. So, messaging, positioning, use case problems, segmentation, and personas. And within that is competitive and win loss, but it’s really about the right message about the right product to the right audience. That’s a very high level. I mean, we can get really tactical, but that’s how I think about product marketing in terms of a mission of a product marketing team. And then there’s core team capabilities that are a little bit more granular, but that’s how I look at it. Yeah. And actually, that opens up. And again, this goes back to it being different in every company, but right message, right product, right persona. What’s that cutoff for you? Right? So you’ve got product marketing doesn’t really stop at a certain point, but it there’s a handoff in terms of, like, the messaging is created, the positioning is created, you have demand gen teams, you have content teams, you have all these different executors of or users of all that core content, all that core positioning. How far should product marketing go in the, I guess you could say, the promotion process or the application process versus, like, let’s just get it off when we have a campaigns team that’s gonna run from there, our content team. It’s very hard to draw a line in the sand, to be honest with you. I hesitate to do that just because everybody is so different. All needs are different in whatever company you’re in, depending on the go to market makeup, depending on if product marketing lives in product or they live in r and d or they live in marketing. I think where a lot of the overlap happens is when you start doing product launches, go to market enablement. You know, I’m not expecting product marketing necessarily to be the ones really driving features, that’s product managers, but where do we see the market going in terms of messaging and positioning and theming? But I think where most of the overlap happens is market testing, campaigns, product launches, and enablement. And that’s where the handoff usually happens, whether that’s product marketing or product management. Hey, Kyle. You already mentioned this at the beginning, but, you know, hiring a PMM leader at the right time. But why is it so hard to find a good PMM leader? I have faced this pain myself, so there’s, like, a whole lot of baggage with that comment. I think it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning. It’s that people don’t understand what they need. So they look at product marketer and they’re like, well, you did you’ve had six years in product marketing. You must be okay. But for me, it’s, you know, especially for Jellyfish, we have a technical product and we sell to a technical persona. That’s even harder to hire for than if I was at Lessonly or I was at ExactTarget or I was at another martech company. And it’s still hard in Martech where you’re looking at a very specific skillset. And I really think that when you’re hiring like a revenue marketing leader or a demand gen person or marketing ops, they can span over any type of industry, any type of segment, any type of persona, because the channels are fairly similar, right? Like the inputs are similar into what they’re trying to do. If you have a product marketer, the inputs aren’t similar, no matter where it’s at. So I’ve found that the easiest thing to do is try to see if somebody has experience in what you’re trying to sell. So for me, it was we weren’t really gonna spend a ton of time with people that didn’t have experience selling to engineering leaders. It was gonna be a waste of time for the most part. Again, having just gone through this process, for me, it’s obviously the subject knowledge expertise and that awareness. But Yeah. This role, right, there it touches so many teams, particularly at the exact level. So I think presence and just communication style. The other piece for me was being able to talk strategically and think strategically, but also execute. And that’s a very rare combination because a lot of product marketers are great at the messaging positioning, and then they can’t get it out or vice versa. And so having that execution layer or just the ability to turn things around quickly, v ones, v twos, and execute, but do it at a high quality and caliber. Because a lot of times, if you’re looking for a product marketing manager, they’ve had experience in much larger companies because startup life product marketing is not as built out as maybe it should be. And so you’re talking to people who have had ten, fifteen, twenty people, but huge budgets, long cycles, production cycles. You’re not gonna come from Salesforce and succeed at a jellyfish. Like, it’s just not gonna happen. I mean, I’m sure there’s outliers, but I one hundred percent agree with you. And that’s very difficult to find. Very difficult. You have somebody who could over index on product or somebody who could over index on marketing, but they’re not coming together because it’s like two it’s like very left brain, right brain kind of thing going on too. And then you add in evolving categories. That’s a whole another aspect of trying to find a product marketing leader that understands how to stay in front of that stuff and bubble it up to the exec team. So it’s not always founder led messaging, especially when you have founders that are the persona. I think, you know, at any stage company, if you’re hiring a new product marketing or you’re hiring a product marketing leader, they are going to transition the company away from executive founder level messaging to market. And you gotta find the right person to do that. And you explained that with like presence and horsepower and being able to do as well as to align. And also to have a clear POV. Yeah. Yeah. With data. With data. See, now we’re just adding. We’re just adding to the It’s just getting longer and longer and longer. But that’s why it’s so hard. It’s terrifying, honestly. It’s terrifying to do. So just Kyle, to your world you’re in right now, I think you’ve got some efforts going on and you’re sort of retooling product mark. Where where are you in the product marketing world life cycle at Jellyfish right now? And where are you headed? So we’re we’re pretty set. I mean, I hired a great product marketing leader in Lauren Hamburg, and, we’re continuing to build out the team. You know, right now we’re getting more people in that have deep experience in selling to engineers, selling to developers, selling to chief product officers, chief technology officers. And then the next step for us is where does it evolve? Does it evolve to product ownership? Does it evolve to industry? Does it evolve to segment? But right now we’re at the tail end of being built out on product marketing to where we need to be, because we have somebody that can focus on competitive and win loss. And then we have somebody that can focus on product and positioning and messaging with our exec team, you know, understanding the buyer, researching the market, that type of stuff. So we’re in a better spot than we were six months ago where we had zero people, because that wasn’t fun. We talked about finding the right person, but it’s also a really hard thing to measure and show the impact of what product marketing is doing, right? It’s not as simple as a pipeline number. It’s not as simple as, you know, a conversion rate. What sort of KPIs have you used in, you know, your current role or in past roles to really showcase the impact of product marketing teams? I mean, we we measure it by pipeline. I think at least directionally, it shows whether a strategy is working. We’re producing pipeline based off of new products that, you know, you’re not necessarily goaling the product marketing leader on total pipe generated from a product SKU. It’s definitely part of the marketing cadence. And then conversion rate, working with the enablement team. We can produce pipeline all day long, but if we’re not converting between stages, that’s ultimately on sales managers, enablement, and product marketing. There’s a lot you can unpack there. And then I spend a lot of time looking at completion rates of enablement. If product marketing’s gonna spend a ton of time with enablement, the enablement team to build out messaging and positioning and competitive battle cards. And we we run everything through seismic learning, which was lesson. Ly. And we can see completion rates. And if, you know, the account executive team is at a completion rate of forty seven percent, then, yeah, I’ve got a problem with product marketing and enablement. So there is pipeline, there is conversion rate, but there’s also each product launch has its own metrics too. Yeah. And I think even just usage of the PMM materials, like if you’re using something like a Gong, are the reps actually taking what’s being produced and using it? Are they using are they telling the narrative in the right way? I mean, again, more intangibles that require a bit more digging. Yeah. Yeah. If you launch enablement and a hundred percent of them take it and then you run a Gong report and nobody’s using that messaging that you just train them on, it’s a failure. Why do you think that happens, actually? So let’s talk about that for a second. Yeah. I’m looking for all the answers to solve everything right now. So if you could just, you know, why do I think that you do enablement and then reps forget? Yeah. I mean, again, like even if you have successful, like a hundred percent rep completion, is it just because they’re trying to complete it to check a box and then it’s like, all right, I’m going back to what I was doing? I think we’re human. I think they’ve got a lot on their plate. And I think that it takes more than one lesson for people to learn something. So I think it’s a matter of making sure that you’re staying on top of it. I don’t think a lot of people do very well. And I’m speaking to myself when I say this as well, you’ll launch enablement, you’ll launch a product, and you’ll launch it and move on to the next thing and forget that the most important part of all this stuff with massive amounts of sales teams is practice. They can’t just take a lesson and then remember when to insert a product, depending on what use case is popping up in the call, right? Like there has to be practice after enablement or it’s not gonna work. So I mean, this means you’re spending more time and energy trying to figure out how it fits in the narrative, making sure it’s not too much of a pivot from what they’re currently pitching. And then you’ve gotta get sales managers bought in or it’s not gonna happen because they’re the ones coaching, ultimately coaching. Right? Yeah. Again, going back to making PMM successful, who does PMM need to become best friends with in the org? PMM in general or the PMM leader? I think in general. Like, there really needs to be tight alignment with who? I think second level managers across sales, success, and product. I actually I love that you said second level. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think every product marketer needs to be best friends with the sales leader. The pressure to do what we’re trying to do will bubble up. It’s my job to make sure that my counterpart direct report should be best friends with the direct reports of my peers. Because that’s when, you know, strategy happens between the exec team, but the implementation of all this stuff has to be a shared responsibility across all team managers. When you think about, I think, especially the product management, product marketing dynamic. And, of course, in some orgs, it might actually be the same team or it may not. Like, what have you seen there that’s been because it can get pretty dysfunctional pretty quickly, I think, if things go if things go south. You know, where we’re very lucky that we have a great relationship between the two teams at Jellyfish, Where I’ve seen miscommunication is who owns the customer voice. Like who’s responsible for surfacing, hey, this feature should be built. And I firmly believe, and again, I’m gonna go back to what I said earlier where it’s very much dependent on the business and the go to market model, but product managers are with customers constantly. And so I’m fine with saying, like, customer voice should be owned by product managers. Product marketing should own the market. Where is it evolving? What’s currently happening and what’s evolving? And that’s where I see the most dysfunction is when product marketing feels like they understand what product to build in the future and they’re pushing back and not thinking about competitive or win loss. Pricing and packaging can be one too, that gets a little bit disorganized depending on who you have on the team. But those are the two where I see the most dysfunction. I’m going to throw the question back to you all because. They were all trying to figure this stuff out. I was an organization, I won’t name names, where product managers refused to get on calls with customers. Every time someone I would, like, oh, they don’t wanna talk to I’m like, I would just sit there. And then I got our CEO. He would actually I remember I remember very clearly being in, I think it was was a QBR. I don’t know what it was. And, like, I have this memory of just a hand bashing on the table about how can you not have product managers talking to customers. And it was creating, like, they were literally pushing out features they thought were cool. And then telling mark product marketing it was truly remarkable, actually. Yeah. That’s the wrong way to do it. But I I again, I think answer your question, I think the most successful relationship I’ve ever seen there was one, I think in a company where they’ve elevated product marketing to it was more senior position. Right? So this was like you had a CMO and then you had VPs across the board. They had, like, a couple of junior people and they finally said, you know what? We’re gonna elevate the function and brought in a a VP. And at that point, kinda sent a message in a sense right back to product. So, you know, we’re this is, you know, this isn’t clearly an important and it was just a company that was making a significant transition from services to software, but it was also teaching sellers to transition from being a services to a software seller. So that was sort of a catalyst right there in terms of just, like, bringing in senior people and saying, you know what? We’re gonna enable on the product, but we’re also gonna teach you a new way of selling it you’ve never done before. And that that actually proves to be pretty, pretty successful. And I think that’s the hardest, at least in a scale up. That’s where decision gets extremely hard is when do you level up? And I don’t I’m gonna ask the question because I don’t have the answer. I think that it’s very much it’s dependent on a lot of things, but I wouldn’t hesitate to level up product marketing sooner than you think it should be just because it’s such a important component to scaling a business to a hundred million or or more, even fifty million. Do not under invest in a great designer and a great product marketer. Yeah. I would echo that. And going back to you saying, you know, you were without a product marketer for six, eight months. What’s the role that you hire first when you go in to build a team? Like, how do you really put those pieces together? Well, who we were just talking about, somebody that can build a team out, but also as a practitioner. So somebody that will get their hands dirty, but also understands what great looks like on hiring junior product marketers. For Jellyfish, that’s where we started. I mean, it was a rebuild. If I was a smaller, like a lesson, I would’ve hired somebody that actually I would have hired the same. Because eventually you want that person to help you build a product marketing team. But the hardest part about, you know, we were just talking about, which is who’s gonna get their hands dirty, but also understand strategy. So one thing, there’s plenty of frameworks and cool diagrams and things out there about how to run product marketing. I think some of which are more legit than others and some that are not. Is there anything that you are lightly subscribed to or think that’s more really useful? Or do you think that most of that is probably just PowerPoint fodder and not necessarily gonna be something that you can really implement? I don’t know whether it’s right, but I’ll tell you the one I go back to constantly, which is pragmatic. I don’t remember. Is it called pragmatic marketer? And then they have like the three, I think there’s like two or three different like modules or something like that. Yeah. So they’re they’re like scientific table that they have that shows the shared responsibilities between PM and PMM. That’s usually where I would go. But most of the time, I’m talking to other CMOs. But, yeah, if I were to pick a framework, it’d be that one, but it’s still PowerPoint fodder for sure. Hey, Kyle. We ask everyone on who comes on the podcast this question, and it’s not related to product marketing now unless you want it to be. What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to do in your career? Oh, my word. What’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve been asked to do? And we have gotten things like smuggling eighty branded speakers into foreign countries to sunsetting a product with a hundred customers in forty eight hours or things all over. One of the really good ones we got was working with NASA on a project for a software CMO. I don’t know if I have any good ones. All the ridiculous stuff I’ve done was my doing. Like spray painting, direct mail or whatever. One of those is good. What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve asked yourself to do? Well, lastly, we had a llama as a mascot and we would give a golden llama out to employees that live values on a quarterly basis. It was the golden llama award to say like, Hey, give this golden llama to somebody exhibiting the values of your team. And that was the whole direct mail. And what was ridiculous was we couldn’t find a golden llama that wasn’t like thirty to a hundred bucks on Etsy. And so we bought this really small llama toy from some place in Michigan, And I probably spray painted thousands of them gold. Like I’m gonna die when I’m fifty five because- I’ve been healing all this golden paint. All this golden paint. Like I have pictures of my garage at the time with plastic on the ground with like hundreds of llamas that I would spray paint one side, wait three hours, flip it, spray paint the other side, and we would send these things out. We sent thousands of them. And it worked really well and it was a success, but that was ridiculous. The other thing was convincing myself that making a small Zen garden for a direct mail, because we were partners with Zendesk at the time, was a good idea to hand out at conferences. So this Zen garden was sand. Stones. Stone. Oh my God. So it was like five to ten pounds and you’re handing these out at a conference where people have to put them in their carry ons and it was the dumbest. I mean, we got, we had to get rid of like eight hundred of them. It was just the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. So you have the unique, I think, bragging rights that you’re the first guest who all the ridiculous examples were of your own doing. Yeah. I would I would say there’s one. When I was at ExactTarget, I was asked to speak at a conference in Sydney and then fly to Raleigh and speak at a conference pretty much the next day. And that was ridiculous. So I, you know, you walk up to the stage and it was, I couldn’t remember where I was and that’s probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve been asked to do, but everything else was my own doing. Love it. Good collection. So, Kyle, this was awesome. Appreciate it. Really digging into it. Great topic, entertaining spray painting, all the great pieces you need for good podcast. I need to find a new story because I’ve been telling that story for, like, three years. It’s getting it’s gonna get old for people, but it’s a good one. When you got another one, come back on and share. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it, and I’m sure we’ll see you around. Thank you. Much appreciated. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. 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