- By: Mark Jakobsen
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How does product marketing interact with other departments?
Product marketing is a powerful tool. But to get the most out of it, you need each department to work together, not in silos. Only when they come together can product marketers can do their jobs correctly.
Product marketers depend upon the other departments in your business. They need critical information that only your product team will have, feedback that only your customer services team will have, and so on. Without this, they will only be able to do a half-baked job.
Here we will explore what these relationships look like and what information each department needs to share.
Product Management Team
Your product managers need to be talking with your product marketers from the very beginning. This is the start of the entire process and will allow your marketers to understand what the product is, how it works, and its purpose. This information will be the bedrock from which everything is built.
From this, they can start their market analysis. The market analysis will help you to understand the target market and the competitive landscape. Understanding this will help ensure the product is shaped to the market needs, and it’s not a dodo.
Once launched, the conversation will change. Relaying customer feedback, both positive and negative, will help to ensure you can elevate customer satisfaction as high as possible. With high customer satisfaction comes repeat business and referrals.
The feedback will also help to develop the product roadmap for future development. For example, if customer services are getting a proportionately high level of feedback asking for an export feature on a SaaS product, surely this is something you’d want your product team to look into.
Sales Team
The sales team, and here we are grouping together your sales and business development teams, need marketing materials purporting the product’s benefits. Without these, they will not be able to engage with the customer. These materials are often referred to as sales enablement collateral.
The collateral they need will depend upon who the customer is, how the customer digests their information, and at what stage in the marketing hourglass the customer sits. So, product marketers need to ensure they have a variety of collateral for the sales team to rely upon. The sales team are then equipped to engage with all leads regardless of their purchasing stage.
Of course, this also means product marketers need a clear understanding of sales targets, and the sales team need to be briefed on the personas who are most likely to purchase the product. Clear communication here will allow for an increased number of deals, and as a result, revenue to grow.
Customer Services Team
Here we would like to include your customer services team and account managers.
This group has the ears of the customer. Your account managers are focused on ensuring your customers are fully benefiting from your product. They will know first-hand how it is being received and be able to report back to you features that are loved, hated, or missing.
All this is critical information for the product marketer to collate and relate back to the product manager. This will help shape the product strategy. It will also help identify customer success stories that can be developed into case studies for the sales team.
Marketing Team
Don’t let your product marketers go it alone. They cannot be everything to everyone. For them to work effectively, they need a good marketing department behind them. That means content creators to help with blogs, whitepapers, case studies, etc. Graphic designers to help with the layout and delivery of the marketing collateral and a digital team for distribution across all platforms. Depending upon your industry, and how you have structured your marketing plan, you may want to add additional marketing capabilities like event management. This will depend upon the environment your product plays in and how you wish to set up your marketing mix.
Clear lines of communication will allow for the transformation of vision statements, key facts, and other bits of information to be translated into engaging collateral. Your sales and customer services teams can then utilise the collateral to their best ability and take it forward to the market.
Customer Services Team
It’s easy to see how the different departments benefit from each other. To help visualise it better we have created the infographic opposite for you.
The product marketer needs to be the linchpin in all of this to ensure an effective, cohesive marketing effort is conducted. This will inevitably lead to success for the product but also for the company as a whole.
If you would like to learn more about Product Marketing, and implementing it within your company, get in touch.
