Clayton Prichard | How can Customer Marketers and Product Marketing Managers best work together? | Customer Marketing Catch-up

Hello and welcome to customer marketing catch up. Today I'm going to be talking to Clayton Pritchard about how customer marketers and product marketing managers can work together. Well, hello Clayton, it's very, very nice to meet you. Thank you for joining us on the CMA customer marketing catch up podcast. How are you? Glad to be here. I'm doing great things. Awesome, very nice. So what we normally do to begin with is we normally get a little bit of background history delve into who you are and what your career has been like. So why don't you tell us a little bit about where you started with and where you are now? For sure. Yeah, I, so I've got a over 11 years of marketing experience. I got my start actually on the growth marketing side. I was working on a marketing agency helping customers with their advertising campaigns. My first foray into the tech space. I was at Twitter actually on their SMB sales team way back when when it was a small team. Wanted to get back into marketing. I joined a video conversation startup called Hi-Fi as a growth marketing manager, but eventually I sort of slowly transitioned to out into a product marketing role there and found that really have a lot of passion for for that space and sort of the role of the team, how collaborative it is. Would at LinkedIn and to be to see product marketing roles there to really hone that skill set a little bit more to start up space. You're not generally doing only one sort of core set. You're less specialized and so I was able to do that at LinkedIn. And then more recently I was at two early stage sales tech startups where I joined as the first marketing hire and the head of marketing. And so I was able to do a little bit of both the growth marketing and product marketing as well as customer marketing and sort of all aspects of it there too. Awesome. So like kind of fingers in many, many different pies so to speak. Exactly. Yeah, even like marketing operations, which I hadn't really done before. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. So I guess to start off our conversation, we're going to be talking today a little bit about customer marketers and product marketers and kind of how these two different teams interact. So to start off with, what would you say is the biggest difference between how product marketing managers and how customer marketing managers work in the marketing sphere in general. Yes. So I would say I mean, it's kind of in the name right. Product marketers are generally focused more on the product. And so what that means is they are working to really understand who our ICPS are ideal customer profile and making sure that when we're building products, we're building in the right way. So they bring that insight in from the market from customers into the product teams to make sure that we are building the right things that we're building them in the right way. The other piece is they think a lot about the go to market. And so that's a piece that sometimes we don't think about as much as we should in the building of the product is like, how are we actually going to bring this to market. And so they're thinking a lot about that. And one, I think already sort of see one area where they might involve with each other is customer marketers might be one of the places that we pool the data around the customer because they're really deeply understand the customers. They have sometimes a one-on-one relationship with some of the most so our biggest customers because they're doing case studies and things. And so those are really collaborative roles. And then the other piece on the other side when we're going doing the go to market is we're working with those customer marketers on running campaigns to the to customers as well. I think the sort of differences product marketers are centered around the product, but what are we building, how are we building and how we bring it to market. And then customers or marketers are really centered around a specific segment of customers generally. So it depends on the size. Like sometimes they'll start out with being general across all of them, but as you get larger customers, they'll be our sort of larger companies. They'll be more focused on specific ICPs. And so they're running campaigns that are more persona based to really understand or to really market directly to those specific customers. I think they're also generally working more closely on like case studies and the sort of things that were again, where they have to sort of one on one. So like I said, it's pretty much self explanatory in the name, but sometimes we name things in ways where they're not as self explanatory or or they're counterproductive or counterintuitive actually here is one time when it means what it says. Yeah, nice and nice and simple. So it's almost as if the two different teams tend to feed into each other. You've got product marketing, which is more like pre purchase, more like getting things off the ground. And then the feedback that customer marketers can provide from existing customers feeds into the go to markets strategies and other things like that. Yeah, exactly. I would say another piece of customer marketing is they're also they're thinking I think you sort of mentioned that their product marketing tends to be more focused on the initial launch of and what's the next project, the next feature that we're building, whereas customers are going to customer marketing is going to be focused on sort of the life cycle of that customer. And so that means upselling and renewing and those sort of pieces as well. They're really focused on all the way from when we land that customer or really when they come in as like a good solid lead all the way through to sort of the rest of their life cycle. How are we going to continue to engage with them, upsell, renew, and a lot of times that doesn't mean we're launching certain new features to them to do those things. They've already launched. They were just making sure that they're driving adoption of. Yeah, yeah. So as somebody who has experience with setting up their own marketing team. So recently you built out the marketing function in momentum as the head of marketing. How did customer marketing and then product marketing kind of apply to building that type of team from scratch? Yeah, I would say. So when I think about how you build up those teams, customer marketing usually comes about when you've got a little bit more a sizable customer base, right, where you start to have to do some scale outreach to them. I'm on momentum because it's early stage. We didn't have someone's focus on customer marketing because the customer success manager and the founders and sales team, they all knew all of the customers more closely. And so you didn't need to have sort of a scaled approach. And so that's when you bring in customer marketing is like we need to start doing some things on a scale manner. We need to set up campaigns for email campaigns for onboarding. We need to set up. Think about all of the like I said sort of case studies and sort of having so many manage that. But when you've got a smaller customer base, it's not known to be as needed. So I think one of the things is really figuring out when do we start to get where we need somebody focused on this on the marketing side. And I think for me, that signal is when the customer success team can't sort of manage these things on their own. When is the time that maybe the product marketer is spending with customer success to manage the email campaigns that they are doing when that starts to become too much and they can't focus on the rest of the product marketing. So that's that's sort of how I think about that. And then product marketing. It's just one of those roles that honestly I hire less because it's a really strategic or less or later as well as a really strategic role. And like how do we think about who our customer is? What's our messaging and positioning? And how are we going to market what we're building? All of those things are really important questions for the company. And so that tends to be one that we build for a little bit later. Earlier comes things like content marketing, community marketing, demand generation. Those are the things that are higher for earlier in the process. Yeah, of course. So they're they think since they seem to be roles that happen or tend to start being inputted into the organization during periods of growth, would you say? So like mid growth, late growth, any kind of scale up kind of company, that kind of stage. Yeah, I think one of the other things that say it even on the product marketing side is, you sort of brought up is once you have too many product managers, where it's difficult to sort of manage, right? And so that's another piece where the, it scales with the organization. Hopefully sometimes we have six product managers before we get a product marketer in there. But hopefully we're sort of, we're starting to scale them concurrently with the engineering and product teams. And so yeah, if you don't, if you have one p.m. or no p.m.s because the founders are doing that, it doesn't really make sense to have p.m.s dedicated to that either, but now once we're starting to have a p.m. team, we need to start having a p.m. team as well. So they can work and collaborate really closely together. Yeah, so it really is kind of exemplifies how during those stages of growth that marketing really becomes a priority once you do get a customer base that is relatively large. You have more dedicated people to marketing rather than just specifically product managers and things like that. So in terms of customer base, marketers with that being a team that mainly focuses on existing customers. How does their work kind of help to boost and support this type of growth within these companies? Yeah, like I said, I think one of the biggest things, once you get a handful of customers is really making sure that they are adopting the product really well, and they're used to just going up because generally that allows us to upsell, but it definitely is key to making sure that they renew. If someone is not using the product, they're not going to renew generally. Sometimes people do anyways, but to get more of that usage is super important. I think the other piece is generally, especially as we expand the company, we're usually going to expand the product offerings. Someone might come in and they buy one sort of product line, but we have two or three others, or maybe they may only have one product line, but we have a couple of add-ons that could purchase as well. Making sure they're super successful with that first product line, and then so that they, it's a lot easier to sell them sort of that next piece and helping them to sort of understand this is how it fits into their goals and what they're wanting to do so that they can continue to get more and more value out of the product and out of the company. But that's less, you can't do that again until you sort of build out the team, but that's how it impacts revenue and the rest of the organization is making sure that we're driving really good adoption and then also driving upsells and renewals. Yeah, it sounds very much like from what you said that custom marketers tend to be a team which helps a lot with improving things like customer personalization perhaps, you know, tailoring marketing towards features that would suit certain customer segmentations and also customer experience, which you say. Yeah, and I think this team works super closely or it does work super closely with customer success to really understand. Like you said, those personalization pieces, we need that data generally in Salesforce or some other areas so that we can run scaled campaigns to them and that works closely with customer success because they're going to know those things about it about the customer. I think the other thing is sometimes we don't, there's going to be some segment of customers that we don't want to do scale approaches with. And so at that point, it's enabling customer marketing, it's enabling customer success to be successful with sort of those one off emails or phone calls and things that they're doing as well to make sure that again, we're continuing to drive adoption and long term value from the customers. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. So kind of taking a little bit of a step to the side really, but along the same topic of customer experience. In your job history, it includes you helping companies that improve the design of their websites in order to support customer experience. So I'm curious as to how important it was for product marketing and customer marketing to be involved in getting that kind of information you needed to make those kinds of improvements. Yeah. So I think I like to see the website be a piece that product marketing is handling because it's important for how do we present ourselves? What's the brand? What's the positioning? The pricing, all those sort of things coming into play and sort of how are we showcasing that to prospective customers primarily? So that can be a partnership with sort of another team, again, depending on the size of the company, or it could just be product marketing working with web design and web development. But then we think about what's really important, especially in a web SaaS company or an internet company is how do we go from once we drive that initial customer to buy? How do we make sure that the website, the marketing website, and the customer experience are cohesive? We don't want somebody to come to the website and then they go into the product and it looks completely different. There's a little bit of design by the same teams. The messaging is very different and it feels like a jolting experience. And so how do we make sure that those are connected? And so I think that's that handoff to customer marketing needs to be smooth because that handoff from the product from the web, the marketing website to the product site also needs to be smooth. And we need to make sure that those are done together. So generally that also means it's the same design team, the same web development team if we can. Or at least the same design team to make sure that we're doing that. Or we're obviously handing off internally sort of style guidelines to make sure that those are working together. And sometimes, usually I like for the product to lead into what's the website look like. And so that we have the branding starts there and what we want people to feel as they're using the product. And then we can sort of make sure that that's cohesive with how we're thinking about the branding externally with the website and other marketing pieces. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. So just kind of throughout this whole conversation, there's been a really big emphasis on kind of how teams kind of work together. So how important would you say the collaboration between product marketing and customer marketing and then potentially customer success and products and some of the other teams that you've mentioned. How important is it to have collaboration, communication on a daily basis? Yeah, I think, I mean, like I've been talking about, it's pretty important, right? I think the customer marketing and product marketing team is working really hand in hand because they both need each other really to do their work. And I think both their super collaborative roles, obviously, I think product marketing is a little more collaborative just because there's more teams to work with. I think customer marketing generally shouldn't have to work directly with product and engineering because that should come from through product marketing to really understand again. What are we building? How are we building it all those sort of things? But at the same time, making sure that the teams are not sort of being walls and slowing things down. So I think that how you build that out really depends on each company. And then yeah, customer success, a super important team, I think, sales also a little less so than customer success just because it's less of an ongoing relationship with them, but still super important that we have those relationships. And the tight, I think, thinking about how do we build those? It's really understanding what is each other's challenges, what is each other's goals and sentives to have that context. And then from there, we can use that context to make sure that we're collaborating in an effective way that we're helping each other out to reach the goals to sort of remove challenges. It's like, how can I help you and how can you help me? We're really thinking about this as opposed to just like, oh, I'm doing, I need this from you. I need this from you sort of all the time. A one-way street, we know, make sure that we're thinking about how can we work together and how can we help each other and the best way to do that is first understanding each other. Similar to how we try to understand customers and what their challenges and goals are, we need to do that with our co-workers as well. Yeah, I think that's a very good, very, very good point. So, which leads on quite nicely to my final question in that the way you've spoken about it, it seems like product marketing is very much the kind of follow-through that that cost all the connection that customer marketing has with things that happen pre-purchase. As we know, customer marketing is very much a post-purchase team, focusing on existing customers. So, as a product marketer yourself, what advice would you give to customer marketers on how to interact with product marketing? Yeah, I think one of the things is one that I would take from how to build good relationships even as a product marketer. And that is how can you add value again to that other team? And so, I for our product marketer, it's thinking about, okay, I'm trying to build a relationship with a product manager who maybe sometimes doesn't want to involve the product marketing team or doesn't feel like they have to in order to build something how to wise show value to them. And there's two ways, generally, that product marketers do that. And obviously, I'm going to talk about the customer side. But for product marketers, it's like how do I bring in insights from the market, from customers, these things that they really need to know to answer the questions that product managers have, because at the end of the day, they want to make sure they're actually building products that people want to use and they drive adoption. And so, building in those, bringing in those insights is super important and it's a way to, again, quickly show value. I think the other piece is, there's also thinking about the in-product experience and how can product marketing help there with messaging and positioning. And then the last one, again, making sure that the good and market's early effective to drive that adoption. option of the feature afterwards. Hopefully that's the one I would lean on if the product manager team won't bring you in at all to the product development, is how can we at least show value in the go-to-market side, and then hopefully that leads into building a better relationship that we brought in earlier. And then I would say for customer marketing, it's similar, right? How do we think about what is, again, what does product marketing really need? And I think one of the key pieces, two key pieces for customer marketing can involve, or can bring in is those customer insights. How can customer marketing have a really deep understanding of the customers, what they need, what they're liking and not liking about what they have today? I think having one on one relationships with customers to bring in qualitative data, and then hopefully quantitative data as well from more of a scaled approach, that's super helpful for product marketing to really, like I said, that ends up being the data that they bring to the product team, or part of the data that they're bringing to the product team. And so how can you help them do their job better? That's one key piece there. And then the other pieces on the go-to-market, how can we make sure that we're driving more adoption from customers and making those more successful? And I would say what's super helpful for me as a product marketer is really to have a customer marketer who will push back a little bit on that and say, hey, this is your plan. I think if we did it this way or if we message it this way, based on things that I've done before that will actually drive better adoption, we'll have a better go-to-market and actually be somebody to bounce ideas also versus being someone where I just hand you email copy and you say, okay, and basically does it. So it becomes an operational. I'd rather have somebody who can be a strategic teammate to make sure that we're doing the best thing as opposed to someone who's more operational and just takes sort of like us at the messaging, a share and runs with it. - Yeah, so take advantage of customer marketers being the people who have conversations. - That's right. - And with customers applying that to the people that you work with internally as well. - Yeah, I think like they're gonna know, or they should know better about the customer, especially individuals, but across the board than the product marketing team does. They're gonna get those insights faster because of the campaigns that they're running and being able to share like, this is what generally resonates with our customers and then also working closely with customer success to get sort of the qualitative data on how things are resonating. I think that's the other piece is that product marketing needs as well. We're gonna have, generally hopefully we have product data where we can understand usage and how things are launching, but we're not gonna have the qualitative piece. And so being able to be that team that pulls that from customer success or through interactions directly with customers to really say, how is this, now that we've launched this feature, how is it performing in the market? We're seeing adoption, but what's, or we're not seeing adoption, but what's the story behind that so that we can really understand and are there things that we need to change in the product? Are there things we need to change in the positioning in order to help our customer marketing teams be more successful and our customers ultimately be more successful? Yeah, really about driving that product story. Yeah, exactly. So I think it's definitely a two way relationship where each team's really needed to collaborate well together in order to make sure that they're both successful in the company overall, of course, successful. Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Clayton. It's been really, really useful sitting here and listening, listening to this and asking the questions. Yeah, it's really great to hear about how these two teams work together. So yeah, thank you. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me.