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:

AE: “hey there how are you how’s it going can you help me make some small tweaks for a deck I need for an opportunity that’s about to close?”

PMM: “hey, I’d love to be able to point you in the right direction. When do you need it?”

AE: “2pm”

PMM: …checks watch, looks at calendar…

🧐 What do you do?

In my experience, this is symptomatic of two solvable problems.

  1. You haven’t given the reps a framework for what PMM does, how to make requests, and how to work with YOU.

  2. You haven’t made it clear to the reps how everything matters up to the company vision , strategy, category, and story.

  3. (Bonus thing) you probably haven’t made it easy for people to assemble assets based on an approved framework. And the reps likely aren’t fully onboarded on how to tell the story well enough.

Agree or disagree? Have you found yourself in this situation? What have you done about it? I have some ideas and experience here. But am more curious what others have done.

#productmarketing #salesenablement #narrativedesign