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The Pivotal Role of Product Marketing in Customer Lifecycle Management
Jackie Golden
October 15, 2024
Many SaaS companies in the start up phase wait to hire the Product Marketing role. Some companies want to make sure they are confirmed with their product market fit, however, the earlier the SaaS company can afford to hire this role, the better.
Why is this role so important?
In developing the Customer Lifecycle model, one of the first stages, Qualify, asks some important questions to identify the right market and (Ideal Customer Profile) ICP.
What are the business problems the solution solves?
What target markets have these problems?
Who cares about these problems and solving them?
What is the business impact when these problems are solved?
Is the problem big enough to impact the business financially to want to pay to solve the problem?
These are the questions the Product Marketing team finds answers to through market research and customer feedback and analysis. Once they have these answers for each target market, they develop the company messaging around the following:
Why choose the Company as the solution provider?
How does the Company uniquely get a customer to the vision state from where they are today?
What is the Company’s unique approach or best practices that enable a customer to achieve the value and ROI in a shorter period of time?
How are they different from the competitors?
What does each role at the customer care about when trying to solve these problems?
How does the Company help each role to be innovative, automated, more productive, etc.?
How does the solution make a business impact for the Economic Buyer and Stakeholders?
These are the starting questions the Product Marketing team is responsible for generating a position on and building the content around. They are the team that understands the product from a technical perspective and can then interpret the technical requirements into a business solution that makes a difference in a customer’s profitability (Increasing Revenue or reducing costs).
Customer Lifecycle Management has department quarterbacks designated at each stage of the lifecycle with other departments as supporting roles. One of the main departments that supports all the stages is the Product department, but more specifically is the Product Marketing team.
As the graphic depicts below, notice that Product Marketing is at the center of the circle supporting every stage of the customer lifecycle.
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How can Product Marketing add value to CLM?
“SaaS product marketers are product experts—they know every single detail about your product. Like all product marketing teams, they lie between the product team and the marketing team—giving them in-depth knowledge on your SaaS services and their value.”
Product Marketing is a pivotal team that ensures the company messaging, value propositions and thought leadership is within the sweet spot of the product capabilities. They help the Sales team to set the right expectations that CS can deliver on.
Product Marketing creates value in the following categories:
Brand Awareness
Customer Business value and impact
Market Education to drive thought leadership in the target markets
Product Marketing Value in Brand Awareness
The first priority is to create an online presence and market awareness that stands out from the crowd. The message should differentiate the company from the other competitors in the space and provide a unique approach to solving the problems.
The PM team generates how Sales, Marketing and CS talk about the company and how the product makes a business impact in an innovative way. They help answer the question: What is better about the solution than anyone else in the market?
One of the most impactful contributions the PM team makes for the brand is their ability to express a passion for the space, a dedication to innovation and solving the problems in a unique but more effective manner. They love to show their ability to lead the way and achieve a best in breed status in the market. Be proud and loud.
Product Marketing Value that drives Customer Business value and impact
With so many solutions and options in most of the markets, customers are looking for who has the best handle on the problem and how their solution will create a significant business impact. If a customer is going to invest their time, money and resources into implementing and operationalizing a new solution, they will need to prove the value and impact to the business. SaaS requires customers to continually make a decision, either monthly or annually, on whether to continue to invest in a solution.
Product Marketing has the technical knowledge and details of the solution, how it works and what it can and cannot do. This team then interprets these technical capabilities into english with easy to understand business impact statements. They also develop content to answer the following questions for customers:
Why should I invest my time, money and resources into your solution?
What’s in it for me (personally) and our company?
What is the long term benefits and business ROI once the solution is operationalized?
Will it work in our environment and meet our business requirements?
While these are some basic questions, it is pivotal for Product Marketing to create the one voice of the company messaging around these topics and for each persona (role) type within the customer. Standardizing the messaging with answers to these questions along with training the Sales and CS teams to share the same messages in a standardize way is critical to creating repeatability in generating results for sales wins, expansions and retention.
Market Education to drive thought leadership in the target markets
Thought leadership is a tactic I am a big fan of that can be used as a disruptor in the market. Thinking and talking differently within a crowded market gets attention. Product Marketing can use champions and executive roles within their customer base to prove out some new thought processes, ideas and approaches to solving these business problems. They can use these people to help back up their theories, predictions or statements about the way of the future in their markets.
The market and customer base is always interested in learning about new innovative ideas and ways to solve some common problems. Thought leadership programs are a way of educating the market on how to think about solving these problems. When the market starts to take note and finds the theories the SaaS company is promoting to be sound, they may come into agreement with the approach. As the market begins to view the problem and solution in the same way the SaaS company has been marketing, it can help to put the company at the top of the list to consider when they are ready to buy a solution. This helps drive a targeted pipeline around an ICP.
A great example of a company that used a thought leadership approach in human productivity is Apple. They developed a product and software to solve problems the market didn’t know they had. I asked my older colleagues: “Did you ever imagine that you would ever be walking around with a computer that fits into your hand that automates just about everything we do from day to day?” All of us answer the question with a resounding “NO, NEVER!” We remember the big main frame days and couldn’t imagine the computing power fitting into the palm of your hand. The Product Marketing team has this kind of power and influence in any market.
This is the challenge for Product Marketers: Educate the market to think differently about how to solve a problem they have or help them realize they have a bigger problem then they thought and your solution is the best way to solve it.
Where does Product Marketing Play in the Customer Lifecycle?
The Quality Stage
When we journey map the Qualify stage of the Customer Lifecycle, the Product Marketing team becomes the intelligence in content creation. They interpret how the new features and functions can be used to improve a process, automation, ease of use, efficiency and effectiveness within the operations.
As they develop the technical content and interpret it into an easier way to comprehend the technical content, they usually will provide this to the Marketing team who will then develop the branding, creative content and voice of the company for the new content.
Once the content has been developed into usable content; for example, presentation decks, digital brochures or marketing one pagers, and website pages; the Marketing team will be able to feed the new content through a Sales enablement process. This can be a simple notification, Sales training or a more comprehensive company wide training.
The Acquire Stage
In the acquisition stage, Product Marketing leads the way in evaluating the prospect and customer wins and losses to identify what persona messaging for each GTM play is working and not working.
Using the summary conclusions from the analysis, Product Marketing can create an action plan to make content and messaging modifications to improve the sales cycle funnel performance to improve win rates. They can also work with the Marketing and Sales teams to listen to sales calls and continue to improve the sales team’s ability to present the messaging and handle objectives correctly to improve their ability to move deals through the pipeline more effectively.
The Implement Stage
Once the deal is closed, the Customer Success and Professional Service teams guide the customers through implementing and operationalizing the solution. In many cases, the CS and PS teams provide a best practice approach that is developed in partnership with the Product Marketing team using a maturity model as the basis. This approach is designed to help customers make the improvements in people and processes to enable the technology to make the business impact.
Product Marketing should understand the gap between what the product can do “out of the box” and what the customer’s expectations and requirements are in order for customers to operationalize the solution across their company. The gap is what the services teams have to fill to make the solution work for the customer and realize the value and ROI. The goal of the Product Marketing team is to close this gap over time with a well designed product roadmap plan that makes it easy for customers to operationalize the solution with minimal services.
The Value Stage
At this stage the CS and PS teams are gathering a tremendous amount of customer feedback about the product capabilities, ease of use, administrative burden, integration and the services teams performance to deliver and support post Go-Live. This information is critical to the Product Marketing team to understand, evaluate and determine proper action plans for how to improve the Product Roadmap and the ease of use and implementation process.
The most important part of the Customer Lifecycle Management approach is the collection and evaluation of customer feedback through the various stages and customer journey processes. It is best shared across all departments and evaluated as one company, one team and utilized to make the most critical pivots and shifts in the company’s strategic direction and operational plans.
The Product Marketing team is usually the quarter back for customer data collection, analysis and dissemination of the conclusions to ensure the company is making the right decisions (based on the 80/20 rule) as to what product changes are required and when to make them.
Conclusion
Product Marketing sits at the center of the Customer Management Lifecycle due to it’s pivotal role in bringing any technical product to market and developing the strategic and operational plans that will:
Define Product and Market fit
Develop GTM focused plays around target markets and personas
Develop content that is easy to consume by the prospects and customers
Develop messaging that prospects and customers can easily perceive the business impact of the technology and how it will make them more effective and efficient (at the persona level)
Collect Customer data, analyze and provide conclusions on trends and perceptions to drive product roadmap strategy to be best in breed in their market
As you fill this role, keep in mind how pivotal this function is to ensure what you build in the product can be easily explained to the markets in a way that stands out above the crowd.