Drew Giovannoli on what makes a great Product Marketing leader, setting an ICP, and stress testing PMM frameworks

Product State Q&A

Drew Giovannoli is the Founder of Buried Wins. He was formerly VP of Marketing at Rev, and the Global Director of Product Marketing at BazaarVoice.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: What makes a great Product Marketing leader?

DG: A great Product Marketing leader is 50% influence, 25% Prioritization, and 25% Execution.

50% of influence seems high but a Product Marketer doesn’t sell, doesn’t build products, and doesn’t manage customer relationships. If you’re not influencing your cross-functional partners and the executive team, your role is fairly meaningless.

Influence well, and you can shape the whole company.

25% prioritization is required because the role of Product Marketing is widely defined — and at the service of others. As a result, it’s easy for product marketers to be reactive to sales asset requests, plans to promote every feature release, sales enablement, and endless packaging and pricing changes.

Great product marketing sets prioritization in partnership with their counterparts, socializes it, and then uses that plan to defend against short-term requests to achieve mid to long-term success.

25% execution. Execution is critical, but falls at the bottom of the list because executing brilliantly on work that’s not prioritized and won’t be used by other teams is worthless. Great product marketing execution begins with a commitment to understanding your customers and prospects. The team should be constantly undergoing Win/Loss interviews, Churn analysis, and Gong Calls analysis.

The voice of the customer informs you of the real pain points and value props that will lead you to great messaging, positioning, packaging, and ultimately great product launches.

EC: What is important when setting or re-evaluating ICP?

DG: There are often competing priorities when setting an ICP. The executive team, board of directors, and investors are asking, ‘How big is your addressable market?’

The obvious implication here is that to optimize business growth, you should enter a market with enough juice that it’s worth the squeeze.

The responsible PMM Leader will highlight a large TAM the business could win, but start niched down as much as possible to the area you’ll win first. Narrowing your ICP to a certain company size, specific industry, and even to companies who use a specific software or sell in a certain region will allow you to design messaging and packaging that is catered directly to their need and pain points.

Unless you’re already the dominant player in the space, messaging yourself as the do-all everything store gives off the impression that you’re not specialized and can’t service the client’s specific needs. Try to sell to everybody, and you lose any edge in your messaging.

How do you decide?

Talk to your customers and prospects. I’m often asked to use our agency Buried Wins to figure out if my client is priced too high, or why the competitor is beating them. The most common answer is that they’re only priced too high for one segment of the market. And the competitor is only beating them for one segment of the market. BUT, there’s usually a segment of the market where that isn’t the case. There’s usually a segment of the market where the pricing matches value, and your unique offering beats the competition.

In those cases, the sales and marketing team rarely invests enough to win the segment that the company is already a great fit for.

EC: What advice would you give to make good use of PMM frameworks?

DG: PMM Frameworks are often misconstrued as a to-do list. Instead, frameworks should be used as proper considerations to move forward, and a list of tools at your disposal.

I’m not anti-framework!

For junior PMMs, it’s a good practice to fill out all the details of tools like a messaging framework, a launch framework, etc. It will ensure you don’t miss anything. For the same reason, it’s a great coaching tool for team leaders.

However, trimming the frameworks into the highest impact activities is crucial for PMM leaders in charge of resource allocation.

To solve the over-reliance on frameworks, go through the exercise of pretending you have 6 months of runway:

• What actions would you take to move the needle?

• What would you do if you only had 3 months?

• Many of the extracurricular activities will fall away as you only work on what’s most critical.

“Try to sell to everybody, and you lose any edge in your messaging.”
- Drew Giovannoli