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    Product Marketing and Sales Enablement at their finest.

    The HELP Method for creating product marketing content.

    I used to struggle every time I sat down to create a product marketing asset. I needed HELP. Now I use The HELP Method for creating product marketing content. HELP = Hook, Emotion, Logic, Proof Hook “Not just anybody.” Get their attention. Speak to a specific audience here. You have just one shot to get this right, but this is where you can experiment the most. Emotion “Help me if you can, I’m feeling down.

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    Onboarding Segmentation as Product Marketing and Customer Education

    “Hey, look, I actually might want to use this for my team.”  Person who didn’t already have team usage in mind. Notion provides a customized onboarding experience, but also uses the moment to highlight certain features. So let’s say you’ve heard about Notion for personal productivity and are just looking for a place to get some work done. But… if you have a team, then it might be valuable to know that you can work with them in this tool.

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    Product Marketing Fail

    Just saw a product reposition themselves as: “The all-in-one platform for businesses, Now with AI” It may sound good in the echo chamber of your zoom meetings but this is literally meaningless to the potential customer. It could also dismay your current customers, who might perceive that the app they love has now lost focus.

    Nostalgia is a powerful weapon.

    It can stir emotions that change minds, sway opinions, even win elections…

    Use it for good. Not evil.

    The “break-up email” in this SDR sequence is sure to at least get some replies. But I’m not sure it works as they intended.

    It would be much better as the first message to get the back and forth going.

    Relationships FIRST, business second.

    Product-led vs. Sales-led isn’t a mutually exclusive choice. See this example from Toggl, who understands that different buyers have different needs. They signal that if you want to engage sales, you need to be considering the teams version (with 10+ seats). This page is very well executed.

    Sales-Led or Product-Led? Why not both?

    Product marketing is about giving your customers a clear story and the words to use to describe your product. How are we feeling about this clarity?

    70mm

    Some good ideas here for replicating the impromptu real-time mentoring missing from distributed workforces.

    Is Forcing Employees Back to the Office Wise?

    The Least Bad Path

    The hardest (well, one of them anyway) part about product marketing is choosing how to spend your time to make the most impact. Everyone wants a little piece of your work, and you ultimately have to find a path that’s the least bad in serving them. And sometimes, not giving them what they want is what you need to do for the business. A practical example: You get a slack message:

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    I’m over there now too.

    While others zig, there’s a way for some customer-centric companies to zag and not seek to “replace” customer service, but augment it.

    Sam Altman: OpenAI plans a pro-copyright model for ChatGPT

    Two ears. One mouth.

    Two ears. One mouth. I led a Product Positioning workshop this morning with a startup I advise. When you are on a virtual meeting whether it’s sales call, or doing internal brainstorming, or a positioning workshop with startup founders…. … act as a conversation facilitator (not a lecturer). That means fighting the urge to talk, and taking a beat whenever it feels like it’s your turn because most of the time, the other party has more to say.

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    The marketing team when the third CMO in a year rolls in.

    one pagers

    See Frank in the photo there. He is in product marketing and just got asked for another one pager. “We need a one-pager for this.” Is that something you hear a lot? (Feeds and Speeds) If so, it’s really important to get back to basics and understand why people are asking for this. Is it that you haven’t given them a compelling story to tell? Is it that your story isn’t that compelling in the first place?

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    Lifetime Value

    “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.” In a world of subscriptions and SaaS, it’s easy to forget that some of the best products are built to LAST and you pay up front for a lifetime (or many, many years) of value. I was reminded of this when I ran across a Wirecutter article by the The New York Times called: “What Are the Best Buy-It-for-Life (and Beyond) Products?” There are many products in my life that I’d put into this category (Le Creuset being one of them).

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    Maybe Boston will have some halfway decent tacos now?

    Getting internal buy-in for your feature.

    #productmanagement #productmarketing

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