🍁 2-min PMM: Yeti's Campaign, Snyk's North Star Metric, Writer's Laddering, Vercel's Dev Guides.
November 2023, Part 2 release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Recruit Product Advocates (PAs), i.e., Technical SDRs, if you're selling solutions with developers as the primary users.
Vercel uses PAs to assist and engage with developers (ex: help requests, in-product interactions) to guide developers to the aha moment before the handoff to sales. PAs are entry-level technical roles that can gradually mature into opportunities in CS, Engineering, and Product Marketing.
[2] For DTC: Stay authentic to your core brand and lean heavily into community marketing to incite deeper brand loyalty.
Yeti's recent campaign - 'Mapping the Gaps' - lets its 200 brand ambassadors showcase newer Yeti products in the wild while inspiring people to explore unmapped trails. The campaign serves an educational purpose - a fun way to introduce people to the outdoors. It allows Yeti to expand beyond its initial focus on fishing and hunting communities.
[3] Use these 6 checklist items to pick an engagement-based North Star metric predictive of revenue for your B2B PLG solution.
Snyk chose Weekly Fixing Orgs (WFO), i.e., the number of teams who use Snyk to fix vulnerabilities in their apps per week as its north star metric. The choice was driven by this 6-item checklist: (i) reflects the core value of the product, (ii) team-based, (iii) aligned with natural problem frequency, (iv) easy to understand, (v) easily cross-functionally influenced, and (vi) predictive of growth.
[4] Deploy the 'laddering' technique in your messaging to de-position your competitors in a crowded space without even mentioning them.
Laddering involves highlighting your product's strengths in a way that inherently shows off your competitor's issues. You find such strength by looking at what your competitor doesn't have, isn't known for sharing, and is something the customer cares about a lot. Writer separates itself from the many GenAI writing tools by repeating the AI data privacy message.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Opt for this 3-goal, simpler version of MEDDIC over any other sales qualification methodology - "(i) understand where your buyer is today (a problem), (ii) clarify the outcome that matters most to them (a payoff), (iii) build a bridge between the two (the buying process)."
[2] Create compelling problem statements by using these formulas for (i) Costs: "Every [frequency], at least [reach] are [pain], costing us [loss]" and (ii) Consequences = "That means [implication #1]. If it's not addressed by [timeline], then [implication #2]." Additional pointers: Loss = Reach (# people impacted) X Frequency (# times) X Severity (vs. ideal). Implications can be functional, strategic, or personal problems.
[3] Enterprise account mapping is about influence and communication, not hierarchy! To design the flow of internal communication, map "who needs to say what, to who, when, to keep a deal moving."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The 100 best bits of advice from 10 years of First Round Review
[2] What I learned from getting acquired by Google
[3] Is Big Tech monopolizing the AI boom?
[4] The product manager role is a mistake
[5] Clarify your thinking by drawing concept maps