Product marketing from a Salesforce product marketer
It's all about the product
Mehdeeka is for solo marketers or small teams working in the B2B, SaaS, startup, and tech spaces. Check out the previous issue with an interview with product marketer, Ben Wirtz. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!
First up, a big thanks for the reception to last week’s interview with Ben Wirtz (link above)! A lot of new faces came in off the back of that so welcome, I don’t bite, and if there’s something you’d like me to cover within the realm of marketing, tech, B2B, and SaaS, just send me a topic!
This week I’ve got a seasoned product marketer for you. Sydney-raised Jacob Hkeik is currently a product marketer at Salesforce, is ex-Apple, and taught at General Assembly. With an impressive resume, Jacob was actually my inspiration to choose product marketing as my next mini-season for this newsletter!
As always, straight into it;
Kayla: What sets product marketing apart from other areas of marketing?
Jacob: Product Marketing (PMM) is the keeper of the product strategy and is responsible for bringing this to life in the work of the teams that speak to customers – these teams can most commonly be sales, customer support and marketing.
In the instance of PMM being different to marketing or "Marketing Communications” as an example, is marketing communications mainly focus on awareness and demand generation marketing. A PMM’s role is to partner with these marketers and ensure what they create aligns to the product strategy and growth objective.
Another difference is Product marketing can be responsible for driving the KPIs around revenue/sales whereas other areas of marketing generally are not.
K: What are your priorities as a product marketer? How do you manage your workload?
J: Being a Product Marketer for one region within a global sales led company, my priorities are defined by my global Product Marketing team and my local sales team.
They often align to generating marketing pipe or closing open marketing pipe into closed deals.
I manage my workload through severe prioritisation (I try to say no to most things) and focus on the big rocks or multiplier activities that I can do with marketing, sales, customer support or other supporting teams. Collaboration is critical to getting anything done as a Product Marketer.
I try to practice Deep Work and time blocking (from Cal Newport - check him out here!) to still have some quiet time among a normal day of meetings and countless notifications. This time allows me to focus what I do on the things that will move the needle on priorities.
K: When you're producing product assets/work, how do you quality control what goes into it? How is this type of content different to say lead gen content?
J: We hear out what the requirement for an asset is from our sales and/or marketing team and run them by iterations of this as it evolves.
They are the gate keepers for what will be valuable to our customers.
We may also partner with an agency to ensure a high quality asset or production (in the case of a video as an example).
As a product marketer so much of your work depends on the organisational factors – so it really depends. Generally speaking, determining the type of lead gen content you create is grounded in the buyer persona you’re marketing to as well as the specific consideration/sales stage the content is meant for. Think about the content journey and how this aids your stakeholder achieve their goals.
K: Where do you go/what do you do to hone your skills?
J: Product Marketing Alliance are my go to.
K: Any examples of good/bad product marketing?
J: I only try to focus on the good and be inspired by that to improve my practice! Apple is the standout for me - they are an exceptional marketing led brand (I’d recommend looking at wayback machine to see how their messaging has evolved over time for the different product lines (Remember iPhone touch in 2011?). This is also a cool way to check up on any brands and their messaging and how they’ve evolved)
I am excited by the work of Airtable, Zapier and Xero. Closer to my everyday, I'm constantly learning at Salesforce how Product Marketing can simplify robust product suites into marketable concepts like Customer 360.
Enjoyed this interview? Say thanks by sending me a coffee, or use this link to sign up to Buy Me A Coffee and start seeing how much people value your own projects!
Why am I putting this button here? It’s part of my year of being selfish when it comes to my work. Read more about that here, and I encourage you to start being more selfish as well!
Check these out
First up in the links this week is some knowledge! If you are in NSW and are either 1. a sole trader with and ABN or 2. a small business with less than 50 employees, you can qualify for a $500 rebate that you can use to buy ‘safety equipment’ - and luckily this convers sit/stand desks, chairs, and some other office furniture. So if you want to upgrade your WFH space, use this! You can watch a 30 min webinar, answer 3 questions, and then you’re done. But you have to do that BEFORE you buy anything!
I subscribe to The Habit which is a music marketing newsletter, and this issue went over how artists were campaigning to get into Triple J’s Hottest 100 this year - it was a fun + quick read.
Twitter is rebranding, and this Twitter thread covers the why and gives a glimpse at how it’s changing;
If you’re panicking about the iOS 14 update ruining your data tracking, Common Thread has listed out a bunch of work arounds for attributions.
And finally, a #LongRead about dream jobs and how every job is still a job at the end of the day. As the way we work changes rapidly around us, I’ve been super into reading article about work, and I hope you enjoy this recommendation!
Before I go….
If you would like YOUR product marketing highlighted in next week’s newsletter, please send me an email! kaylamedica [at] gmail.com
See you then!