Here at PMA, we're all about defining the really important processes when it comes to product marketing, elevating the field, and emphasizing the value product marketers bring to businesses.

Our product marketing framework is a comprehensive overview of the key stages of business growth and development and what product marketers should focus on at each of those stages.

The first step is to discover who your customers are, how the marketplace operates, and how your business or product has operated up to that point.

Your strategic skills are probably what got you your job in product marketing in the first place, and coming to the fore during this second phase.

Whether you're considering your go to market plan, competitive behavior, or onboarding process, every organization needs a product marketer with a foolproof strategy.

Once you're armed with the knowledge gained in the discovery phase, You can delve a little deeper and start to define your personas, positioning, and messaging.

This last phase before launch is where you arm the teams around you with the watertight strategy you've created.

You'll be working on training, sales enablement, sales assets, and working very closely with marketing on their campaigns.

And what happens when you've done all that? Well, you get to analyze what worked, what didn't, and how to maximize your efforts in the future.

Basically, you get to do it all over again, but with time and experience helping you grow.

So the first stage is the discovery phase and that's where you'll be doing lots of research.

Research is evident throughout But during this initial step, it's definitely more loaded.

So this involves listening to customer feedback, conducting win loss interviews, Gathering competitor Intel, understanding your market's requirements, testing internal assumptions reviewing and refining existing assets, segments, messaging, and so on, and then building a business case to take any viable opportunities further.

The next step is all about strategy and by this point, you should have discovered an opportunity, validated it, and got that internal buy in. So strategizing involves things like setting measurable objectives, pulling your go to market strategy together, understanding which acquisition channels, are available to you and, b, make sense to use thinking ahead to what your onboarding process will look like. And this can directly affect the next one, retention, mapping out an internal communication plan, figuring out which sales enable and materials you need, scoping out any barriers, nailing your pricing, and getting a budget signed off so you know what is and is it feasible when planning your launch.

The next pillar is positioning and this can make or break your success.

The right positioning can exponentially increase sales, The wrong positioning can leave you floating in a sea of sameness or failing to take off at all.

So in here, you've got the positioning work itself, your messaging, your product story, and then activities like segmentation, user personas, buyer personas, and use cases, all of which will help you leverage your positioning and messaging and take your sales and marketing approach to the next level in terms of both relevance and personalization.

The penultimate phase is the actual tactics, and this consolidates a lot of the previous steps.

So it's using your positioning and strategy work to actually go and create the sales and marketing assets needed to launch.

Running sales enablement sessions, so all your work is actually heard and used.

And then casting the net further a field and ensuring wider business areas have what they need to ensure a smooth launch and experience for customers.

Last but not least is growth, and this is a continuous cycle of analysis, optimization, customer feedback, fixing bugs, and collecting case studies to help your release flourish both now and in the future.

I know we just covered a lot of areas there, and so you might be thinking, wow, that's a lot of stuff I need to nail. But not all of these activities are essential right away. And in most cases, you're not necessarily expected to master some of them until you're further along in your product marketing career.

So let's take a look at a bit of a framework of the skills you need to know and be good at now versus which milestones you need to meet as you move up the ladder and establish your expertise in the industry.

So the baseline skills and knowledge any product marketing needs whether it's their first product marketing role or not, or communication and collaboration skills.

The ability to formulate a go to market plan conduct customer, market, and competitive research, Create and deliver sales enablement assets, build personas, apply segmentation, have a deep understanding of the product they're marketing and understand the types of acquisition and customer gaugment channels available to them.

On the advanced list, we've got skills like messaging, positioning, and storytelling, And the reason we've put these in advanced and not baseline is because although they're definitely something every product marketing needs to grasp and do, They're a real craft and so they're often an area that can take some time to really master.

And then we've got understanding and setting objectives in key results, technical writing, creative writing, analysis, and optimization.

By the way, we've got the leadership skills, which include having that business acumen, thinking strategically and tying product marketing's initiatives to the business's objectives driving that internal influence and also pricing.

Pricing can be a little grey in that not all product marketers actually have a saying or knowledge of it, but it's so closely connected to that business acumen side of things. It'd be remiss of us not to include it. With all that in your mind, next let's take a look at why product marketing is so important.

This is a question, product marketers don't necessarily struggle to answer, but other business areas can.

So If you ever get asked the question, here's our response.

There are quotes out there let's say anywhere between eighty to ninety percent of new businesses fail, whether that's a startup new product line or new business being launched within an existing company.

Some of those reports went back and asked CEOs or others within the C suite, well, why do you think you failed?

The number one answer that came back is product market fit.

Product marketing actually assesses the market.

What source of core competencies that organization already has and then pulls that empathy and understanding of the market into, okay, what should we go and build?

Product marketers fundamentally understand there's an acute pain point going on for which people are willing to pay for a solution and that is truly the value that a product marketing manager brings to the table.

It's taking down the risk or lowering the risk of investing a lot of money, whether it's in people or product development or acquiring something new, and derisking that investment.

Here at PMA, we're all about defining the really important processes when it comes to product marketing, elevating the field, and emphasizing the value product marketers bring to businesses.

Our product marketing framework is a comprehensive overview of the key stages of business growth and development and what product marketers should focus on at each of those stages.

The first step is to discover who your customers are, how the marketplace operates, and how your business or product has operated up to that point.

Your strategic skills are probably what got you your job in product marketing in the first place, and coming to the fore during this second phase.

Whether you're considering your go to market plan, competitive behavior, or onboarding process, every organization needs a product marketer with a foolproof strategy.

Once you're armed with the knowledge gained in the discovery phase, You can delve a little deeper and start to define your personas, positioning, and messaging.

This last phase before launch is where you arm the teams around you with the watertight strategy you've created.

You'll be working on training, sales enablement, sales assets, and working very closely with marketing on their campaigns.

And what happens when you've done all that? Well, you get to analyze what worked, what didn't, and how to maximize your efforts in the future.

Basically, you get to do it all over again, but with time and experience helping you grow.

So the first stage is the discovery phase and that's where you'll be doing lots of research.

Research is evident throughout But during this initial step, it's definitely more loaded.

So this involves listening to customer feedback, conducting win loss interviews, Gathering competitor Intel, understanding your market's requirements, testing internal assumptions reviewing and refining existing assets, segments, messaging, and so on, and then building a business case to take any viable opportunities further.

The next step is all about strategy and by this point, you should have discovered an opportunity, validated it, and got that internal buy in. So strategizing involves things like setting measurable objectives, pulling your go to market strategy together, understanding which acquisition channels, are available to you and, b, make sense to use thinking ahead to what your onboarding process will look like. And this can directly affect the next one, retention, mapping out an internal communication plan, figuring out which sales enable and materials you need, scoping out any barriers, nailing your pricing, and getting a budget signed off so you know what is and is it feasible when planning your launch.

The next pillar is positioning and this can make or break your success.

The right positioning can exponentially increase sales, The wrong positioning can leave you floating in a sea of sameness or failing to take off at all.

So in here, you've got the positioning work itself, your messaging, your product story, and then activities like segmentation, user personas, buyer personas, and use cases, all of which will help you leverage your positioning and messaging and take your sales and marketing approach to the next level in terms of both relevance and personalization.

The penultimate phase is the actual tactics, and this consolidates a lot of the previous steps.

So it's using your positioning and strategy work to actually go and create the sales and marketing assets needed to launch.

Running sales enablement sessions, so all your work is actually heard and used.

And then casting the net further a field and ensuring wider business areas have what they need to ensure a smooth launch and experience for customers.

Last but not least is growth, and this is a continuous cycle of analysis, optimization, customer feedback, fixing bugs, and collecting case studies to help your release flourish both now and in the future.

I know we just covered a lot of areas there, and so you might be thinking, wow, that's a lot of stuff I need to nail. But not all of these activities are essential right away. And in most cases, you're not necessarily expected to master some of them until you're further along in your product marketing career.

So let's take a look at a bit of a framework of the skills you need to know and be good at now versus which milestones you need to meet as you move up the ladder and establish your expertise in the industry.

So the baseline skills and knowledge any product marketing needs whether it's their first product marketing role or not, or communication and collaboration skills.

The ability to formulate a go to market plan conduct customer, market, and competitive research, Create and deliver sales enablement assets, build personas, apply segmentation, have a deep understanding of the product they're marketing and understand the types of acquisition and customer gaugment channels available to them.

On the advanced list, we've got skills like messaging, positioning, and storytelling, And the reason we've put these in advanced and not baseline is because although they're definitely something every product marketing needs to grasp and do, They're a real craft and so they're often an area that can take some time to really master.

And then we've got understanding and setting objectives in key results, technical writing, creative writing, analysis, and optimization.

By the way, we've got the leadership skills, which include having that business acumen, thinking strategically and tying product marketing's initiatives to the business's objectives driving that internal influence and also pricing.

Pricing can be a little grey in that not all product marketers actually have a saying or knowledge of it, but it's so closely connected to that business acumen side of things. It'd be remiss of us not to include it. With all that in your mind, next let's take a look at why product marketing is so important.

This is a question, product marketers don't necessarily struggle to answer, but other business areas can.

So If you ever get asked the question, here's our response.

There are quotes out there let's say anywhere between eighty to ninety percent of new businesses fail, whether that's a startup new product line or new business being launched within an existing company.

Some of those reports went back and asked CEOs or others within the C suite, well, why do you think you failed?

The number one answer that came back is product market fit.

Product marketing actually assesses the market.

What source of core competencies that organization already has and then pulls that empathy and understanding of the market into, okay, what should we go and build?

Product marketers fundamentally understand there's an acute pain point going on for which people are willing to pay for a solution and that is truly the value that a product marketing manager brings to the table.

It's taking down the risk or lowering the risk of investing a lot of money, whether it's in people or product development or acquiring something new, and derisking that investment.