The journey to VP Marketing starts with Product Marketing. Or maybe not…
“Product Marketing” is the hottest potato out there today. There are currently nearly 65,000 open job positions on Linkedin in the US, just for Product Marketing. For perspective, there are only around 9,000 open positions for Online Marketing. That’s huge. And for a very good reason. Marketing professionals that had the opportunity to specialize in product marketing bring a unique perspective to marketing, a very strategic one, that will enable them to build the foundation to take on leadership roles. I took the long route to product marketing but it became my passion and my stepping stone to true leadership.
Every story starts with a personal perspective
I actually started my marketing career at the VP level, with zero marketing experience. One of the advantages of starting my own company was that I could choose any title I wanted. We were a team of 4 friends who founded a sports-related B2C mobile app start-up back in 2012, and I was the only one who didn’t write code. Back then I was already 8 years beyond finishing my Computer Science degree and haven’t written any code since, so the natural thing was to do everything else that didn’t require coding. So in our startup, I found myself taking on responsibility for finance, business development, and, of course, marketing.
The funny thing is that I never planned to go into marketing. Back in business school (Hoya Saxa!) I was 100% focused on finance. Coming out of a Law and Computer Science education, the missing part for me was understanding the “business”. I had a basic understanding of technology and a good grasp of the legal framework, but I felt that I had to deeply understand the numbers behind business, which is essentially a language of its own, before I could truly take on leadership responsibilities. It was fascinating! Marketing seemed at the time as “blah blah”… I totally didn’t get it.
It wasn’t until after I spent a couple of years on Wall Street plus a couple of years at a venture capitalist firm that I naturally transitioned towards marketing. Don’t get me wrong, focusing on finance was one of the best decisions I made. I have always felt very comfortable around numbers. But studying finance during my MBA and my Investment Banking experience taught me how to tell stories with numbers. It’s all about telling the right story, to the right people, in a way that they naturally relate to. After a couple of more years at a leading VC in Israel, I totally caught the “start-up bug.”. I felt that it was the right time to roll up my sleeves and dive into the start-up swamp. I was already a mom of a beautiful 2-year old boy, and I knew this meant taking a huge drop in our family income (it would take a while to get back to the income levels I had while working for someone else). But it was totally worth it.
As a newcomer into marketing, I had to learn everything from scratch. It was totally terrifying, and I quickly understood that marketing was a million light years away from the “blah blah” I thought it was back in business school. The only way to learn while running was to surround myself with very smart and experienced people I could turn to for help. I had to pay some of them, and some just helped out of their good will. But we made it. We developed an exciting product, raised seed funding from the VC community, and started pushing it out to market. Unfortunately we didn’t move fast enough, or maybe the market wasn’t as excited as we were. After two years we closed the start-up but I won a career for life.
What is Product Marketing? It’s an Umbrella!
Based on my “strategic” and analytical background, I felt a natural draw into Product Marketing. I acknowledge that many people may have different views of what Product Marketing actually is, but in my perspective Product Marketing is a series of stories we tell to describe a unique solution to a specific problem. Indeed, even when focusing on a narrow set of personas within the organization, the problem may vary in intensity, implications and relevant potential solutions. That’s why it’s not a discrete story, but rather a series of stories around the same piece of technology or innovation.
I often describe Product Marketing as the “umbrella” that flows one cohesive messaging across many different channels, directions, and personas. Practically speaking, Product Marketing includes producing all the customer-facing sales tools and making sure that a cohesive narrative flows through Demand Generation (getting your target audience to notice and engage with your brand or solution) and Lead Generation (actively hunting prospects) programs.
Product Marketing doesn’t stop when we nail the MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
This is only the first step. Product Marketing activities will accompany prospects throughout the entire journey, and to some degree even after the check is signed. During the initial engagement with prospects, Product Marketing initiates and is responsible to build effective stories on all fronts: digital assets such as the company’s website and social channels, developing smart content that will hit the right pain points of the right target audience, ensure that the content as well as cohesive messaging flows through all marketing programs, and much more.
Once a prospect has started engaging, Sales Enablement kicks in
Sales Enablement, which is at the core of Product Marketing, includes a set of tools that will be used by the broad sales team or account management team to lead the prospect through the sales journey. This is just as relevant for self-service products as it is for enterprise B2B sales processes led by the sales team. Competitive analysis is also a critical part of this toolset. The sales team needs to be equipped with effective “ammunition” to face resistance as well as tough questions on how the product differs from other products out there. I often find that comparative analysis or benchmarking is an effective way to convey your competitive advantage / strengths. Sounds straightforward, right? Think again…
Every competitive analysis that is presented to a prospect is likely to result in resistance.
“You picked the X-axis and Y-axis so you are at the top right quadrant” (of course we did…), “you didn’t mention XYZ advantage of your competitor”… and the list goes on.
The easiest way to deal with this resistance is to be honest with yourself and your prospects, and leverage industry accepted KPIs. For example, use the x-axis and y-axis KPIs that analysts or industry thought leaders often use. Make sure to include your weaknesses while highlighting your advantages. The confidence you are building this way will serve as a strong foundation for additional sales tools.
Building Your Journey to Become a Marketing Leader
My personal journey is the proof that there isn’t a single journey to positioning yourself as a marketing leader. Everyone has their own path, and everyone will define leadership differently.
I transitioned from a Marketing Executive (title-based) to a Marketing Leader only once I took on the Product Marketing responsibilities. Just like I realized I have to boost my financial education so I can understand and speak the “business language”, after a few years of managing marketing activities for three start-ups, I realized that there’s still a lot to learn.
My background and my passions led me straight to focusing on Product Marketing. This career detour may sound like a waste of time, but for me it was an eye-opening experience. I was finally able to deeply understand all pillars of marketing (demand generation, lead generation and content). I was intimately involved in everything (remember the umbrella?) and made sure the stories and tools I’m building will flow effectively and quickly through all channels.
The next step after diving deep into Product Marketing was to rise back up and take on the leadership role. My deep Product Marketing experience enabled me to provide a unique point of view in our leadership discussions and take a bold position based on the ability to run fast on execution. I joined Varada as VP Marketing over a year ago and have been focusing on introducing our groundbreaking big data indexing technology to the market.
I am 41 and a mom of three very energetic boys. And yes, I use my marketing skills with my kids all the time! I was born and raised in Israel and as a child I dreamed of going to medical school. During my service as an officer in the Israel Military (IDF), I fell in love with technology. I’ve been a technology and innovation advocate ever since.
