Messaging with Kevin Garcia, Director of Product Marketing, Segment

[MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome to the product marketing experts podcast brought to you by Sherbert. I'm your host Marcus Andrews and today we are going to dive deep into the words that PMM's use. We're starting with messaging. I think of messaging as the final result of your narrative and positioning work. It's the actual words that end up on the website and what comes out of the sales rep's mouth. It's the most visible aspect of our work names taglines headlines you name it. And while PMMs aren't hardcore copywriters necessarily I would classify us all as writers. So being able to develop great messaging is really really core to the role and to the function of product marketing. But it's really challenging. You need to develop certain skills to get good at it. You have to learn how to sell your messaging. You need to build a consistent process. You have to figure out how to test it. And most people end up writing a lot of bad messaging before they can start writing good messaging. This is really what has happened to me over the years. But what we're going to do today is break all of that down and hopefully really jump you forward a few steps so that you can really start to perfect your craft here when it comes to messaging. To help, I've got a product marketing expert Kevin Garcia is the head of product marketing at segment where he oversees product partner in customer marketing. Segment is an absolutely fascinating product with a really, really stellar team. I've worked with a few of the folks who work at segment and they are awesome. They're really the top solution in the CDP space. And Kevin and his team are making sure that they stay there by building a best in class go to market. What I think is most interesting about Kevin is really how he thinks about messaging. He takes this really, really research driven approach that I've learned a lot from in a short time. And I think you will too. Kevin, thanks for being on the show. How you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me. All right. How did you originally get into product marketing, Kevin? My background in product marketing is fairly similar to a lot of other folks, which is to say I didn't start in product marketing when I first entered tech. I started as a product manager at a small startup company and was given sort of the opportunity to grow as the company scaled. And in developing some of the most important parts of a launch or most important parts of our new products, I was so enamored with developing not just the actual product and the nuts and bolts, but the story and the message and the how and why of who we were going after. And so I was lucky to sort of springboard that job into a product marketing role and haven't looked back ever since. Awesome. Yeah, that's, you know, I think product management is really, really interesting. A lot of people ask me if I've done it or I'm interested in it. And I am interested in it. It's very cool. But I think product marketing is more fun. It's just like the craft and the work has always been way more interesting to me. Yeah, I feel very similar. I think, you know, they are complementary roles and it's so, you know, definitively exciting to be part of the most exciting part of the process of building a product which to me is the why, the what and the who. And I think being a product manager gives you all those pieces without necessarily having to jump into JIRA and sprints. And, you know, a lot of the nuts and bolts that might be super fun for some folks, but weren't exactly my favorite part of the role. Exactly. That's totally how I feel about it, too. You know, we get to, we're still in that process, but, you know, and the kind of the more creative go-to-market marketing side of it. Yeah, I love working with product managers. It's really exciting when they bring something new, but exactly I'm not spending my day in JIRA or thinking about APIs and that sort of thing, which is better for me. So we're going to talk about messaging today. And I think a good place to start is sort of, you know, the skills you need to develop to get good at messaging. What are the skills that you think as a product marketer you need to develop before you can really start to master messaging? What I found is that, you know, messaging for different companies, messaging for different products can be sort of multifaceted. And at the end of the day, what I found consistently time and time again is that PMMs tend to have really strong skills across three areas. The first is being a really good researcher. I think the best stories and the best messaging and the best words come from deeply understanding the situation of who you're talking to. Right? So regardless of whether I am selling a car or I am selling a P2B software, at the end of the day, I want to be able to have the person who's listening to that message really resonate with it. And I found that it's almost impossible to do that just by having nice words or just by having really, you know, carefully crafted statements. It has to come from a place of knowledge. And so being able to take a step back and say, I don't know these people, I need to really learn about them in their circumstances is a critical part of getting messaging right. I think the second is, you know, the storyteller gene or the ability to tell a really good story. I think oftentimes people are looking at a story and try to jump to the end, right? But a good messaging and a good product marketer can sort of help you sit in the pain, help you understand why some things an issue before jumping to a conclusion, right? And so I think the best PMMs tend to be really good storytellers. They tend to be dynamic and understand that you don't just jump to the conclusion, you kind of have to walk people through from where they're at to where you want them to go. And the last piece is being a really good project manager. I think at the end of the day, you know, writing is a creative process. But in the business context, it can often be aligned to big launches, big moments, big initiatives. And those can't really wait for you to have the creative, you know, sparks fly. And so being able to take the work that you're doing creatively and apply it to a project program or product launch is critical because you need to be able to not just tell a good story, but tell a good story when the time is right. And so I found that those tend to be some of the key ingredients of good messaging from a PMM. Really interesting way to think about it. Yeah, the, you know, I think storytelling and being strong there is, well, obviously, would resonate with a lot of people. And even research too, but actually your point around project management is something that I don't think a lot of people might think about when they're thinking about how do they get good at messaging. But I really, really agree project management is not one of my own strengths. Like it's something that I've had to learn and get good at. And I tried to kind of push it away in my product marketing career, you know, say like, okay, you know, there's someone else who's probably better at this, who could take this on. But you know, recently just over the last few years, I've just kind of embraced it and said like, well, this is, you know, this is really part of it. We really have to get good at this and figure this out. And I think it just makes everything, it makes it does make your messaging better, it makes your campaigns better. It's super critical to the role, even if you're not good at it to really focus on that and kind of build it into your processes, really, really important. So I love that point. Yeah, of course. I think every product marketer sort of struggles with one side of that. It's very hard to find someone who's really great across a lot of different spectrums. Right? Otherwise, you know, we'd all be super, super lucky to have every skill set available. Right. I think, you know, on my and the reason I think project management is so important is because, you know, unlike a truly 100% creative role, this role does have business outcomes that you want to drive and business initiatives that you want to move forward. And unfortunately, the business won't wait for you to find that creative spark. And so I found that like tying your writing process into something that can really work for the timeline you're allotted has helped me be more successful versus just, you know, aiming for the perfect words without having any business context involved. Yeah, I would agree. I totally agree with that too. And I think that another thing I've learned over the years is that, you know, while it is a creative role and you're doing a lot of writing, a lot of it is also just kind of pushing the rest of the organization, you know, to feel good about the messaging that you've created, whether it's a name or a tagline or, you know, the copy on a website, like if the product team and leadership feel great about it and it resonates and is good, that's really what's most important is that there's this sort of like momentum around it. And that's the project management ties into that. Is that something you've seen too that, you know, you end up being kind of this driving force behind alignment as a product marketer? At the end of the day, you're working on something that's so important to the company. And when you think about the name or the tagline or the words behind the product, at the end of the day that can make or break the success of the business, you can see companies like Apple who have done such a good job of bringing to life products that have innovative, you know, capabilities and some that don't have innovative capabilities, but their messaging is so rich and so dynamic and so inspiring. I think that for every individual PMM, while not all of us get to launch the next iPhone, you know, we are working on something that the executive team, that the AES, that the rest of the marketing team really care about because at the end of the day, you're giving them the ingredients of part of their work, right? The AES has to sit on the phone and talk about the stories that you've developed with the words that you've used as a reference point. And if it doesn't resonate with them, if they can't believe in it, then it's really hard for them. them to champion it. And so I found that skill set of not just developing great messaging, but also seeing it through across the finish line is the only way it actually sticks because you want this to become part of their language and part of their belief system is the words-- the words don't have to be exactly right. But they do have to really make an impact in the team before they make an impact across the broader ecosystem that you serve. And so I've definitely been a huge proponent of PMM's championing their messaging and having internal momentum built as part of any good messaging launch. Yeah, totally agree. And I think your point around making sure that they stick is what is really important too. I've seen lots of really great stories and messaging and product marketing work done that sort of gets rolled out and then goes to die on a wiki or in Google Doc somewhere and people forget about. But not the projects that have that momentum and have that buy-in and alignment behind them. So I think that's really good advice. All right, so I'd love to dig in. Maybe we could dig into all three of those aspects. But when it comes to research, I think that your approach is really interesting and unique. So what is your process for developing messaging in that research phase? Yeah, of course. So I think you need to right size the research to the messaging that you're developing. So a lot of times, I have not yet met a person or a company or a CEO that didn't say, well, I'd love to have our messaging checked in with customers. What are our customers saying? And what I find most often is that people get really overwhelmed by that sentiment or overwhelmed by the idea of researching first because they're saying, I have a tight timeline. I can't really do this. It's very difficult for me to get in touch with people. I don't know who to talk to, the list abounds. And so my approach is fairly pragmatic, which is to say the level of messaging that you're working on has different levels of risk for the business. And you should be aligning the rigor with which you test your messaging based on how important that messaging is to the business. So for example, if you're coming up with your company's tagline and the company's core mission statement and values, you want to be spending a lot of time to make sure you get that right. Because it's fairly difficult to roll those things back. They tend to make their way into a lot of your marketing materials and a lot of your sales materials. They even get used in recruiting when they're very effective. And so those sort of things, you don't want to really put out in iterative forms. You tend to want to really test and learn early so that you can get something close to final or as close to finals you can get when you truly launch it. But for things like product feature launches, where you're not necessarily changing the definition or the full scope of the product, but you might be enhancing one of its use cases. You might be fixing a problem that a lot of folks wanted. You may not need to get so deep in the months-long user research where you're doing qualitative and quantitative research. You can go as simple as just having a few customers that you talk to, a few internal alignment meetings. And I think the whole point of this is, as I mentioned before, you want to get to the point where you have conviction, not about the words, because the words very often are subjective. There's always a different way to phrase something. But you want to get really clear on your idea. You want to get really clear that the idea that these words are framed around and the audience that they're focused on are super, super crisp, clear, and understood. And when you do that, you can have a lot more conviction around your messaging, whether it's describing a feature, or whether it's describing your company's full platform. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really well said and sort of a good device for people to think about how much research to do. When you kind of balance it with the risk and how important it is to get it right, which makes a lot of sense to us. I think there was a team at Hubstraw that was working through some really important words recently. And now how those words translate globally was super important. And there was a lot of work done around that. And whether they translate into regional languages or not, it was just really interesting to see how that process kind of changed the approach. But yes, that's a very good device. So I'd love to know what tools-- what research tools you put to use if something is really important where you're trying to figure this out. So maybe at the very basic level, you can get on the phone with customers. But what else are you doing? Are you doing survey or do you have specific tools? How do you think about that? Yeah, of course. Again, slightly depends on what the inside is that I'm looking for. The closer you are to your target of-- you think you're a few steps away from getting this messaging really locked. The more valuable, the sort of really specific customer level conversations matter. So when you think about customer interviews, when you're on the phone with them, learning about their use case and who they are, what they do, why it matters, is super important and can give you very directional feedback. But at the earliest stages, it can also be much more helpful to get an aggregate view where you're understanding across many people like them, how they interact, what they use, how they use it, why it matters. And the closer you get to this final product of messaging, the more it becomes super valuable to have one person come in and tell you, that's not really working for me. Or I completely understand what you're saying. I would phrase it a little bit more like this. So my perspective-- and again, this is a very pragmatic approach. The reality is that you can do basically all the research you want on any messaging that you want. But the way that I found that makes it a little easier is when I'm still trying to find my target-- if I'm trying to find a tree and a forest, I'm most likely going to go first with a high volume quantitative approach of either through surveys or looking at internal data or looking through our customer success tool. Can I find any specific patterns or specific insights that can help point me in the right direction? And the deeper I go in, the more likely I am to want to talk to a customer, to deeply understand their language and their usage. Once I've sort of at least developed my own guard rails around what I'm trying to say. So for me, it's a lot about use surveys and use sort of these scaled approaches to help point you in the right direction. But there's also a lot of use for just talking to people and getting a read for what they like and what they don't like, what they understand and what they don't understand. But the inverse is also true. I know many, many, many teams that do surveys to test which of these four taglines works the best for you. And people will sort of stack rank them. What I found is that inevitably you're sort of leaving it up to, you know, leaving it up to the chance of you like the version that is most popularly picked. And often what I find is that right when you're kind of deciding on the last few moments, it's much better to have a customer's perspective in mind. So you can live and breathe and make a decision that's informed but maybe not 100% up to external factors. Super interesting. Yeah, I think sort of whittling it down and trying to find the tree in the forest is good. And one thing I think that you've said that's interesting is just that it helps you to not have any experience in the space where you're developing messaging. Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? Yeah, of course. So I am a product marketer who has never worked at a tech company that sells to product marketers. I've worked at companies that are focused on HR, customer success, advertising, and now at segment, you know, data infrastructure, engineering, product management. But I've never actually lived and breathed the role that I'm selling to. And so for me, that's been hugely, hugely impactful because I like many others have had to start from ground zero. Right? I didn't have the answer going in. This is what I've been looking for when I was looking for the product. That's how I write it. And I think what that did is it set me up to have my baseline be, I don't know. And that's OK. And I think that kind of brings a really good research perspective to the table where you can say, OK, well, what don't I know? How can I find out? And who do I need to talk to to really build conviction around what we're building, why we're building it? And I think that practice of coming into the scenario fully, fully understanding that you have no idea how these people's lives work gives you a lot of empathy because it forces you to really deeply understand them before you think that you have the right answer. Yeah. Yeah, I think that empathy and that kind of, you know, just taking that really ground floor approach and beginner's mind to this is really important. I'm working on our marketing hub at HubSpot right now, which means I'm a marketing marketing software to marketers. So for me right now, I'm not in that beginner's mindset, but I have worked on a number of different products that have a number of different audiences at HubSpot. And I think it's helpful. for me, it's super helpful to just be empathetic and to be able to kind of put yourself in that person's shoes and just take that beginner's mindset and really do a lot of research. Which, so I think I just think that's wonderful advice. So let's talk about when you, you know, if you're maybe if you're looking at other product marketing or other marketing in general, what are some messaging mistakes, some common messaging mistakes that you see marketers make? Oh yeah, there's so much going on in the world of marketing. I think, you know, realistically, there's sort of, you know, there's no one's ever going to be fully happy with your messaging. I think unless, you know, you're, you're Disneyland with happiest place on earth or others, you're not really going to come up with something that everyone's just like, wow, this is perfect and it totally makes sense. And I think there's sort of a few key reasons why that's really, really good. I think the first is that a lot of times people make the mistake of trying to talk to everyone, right? At the end of the day, I can really, really understand on a practical level that, you know, firefighters and school teachers and, you know, orthopedic surgeons aren't trying to buy segment. So why am I trying to make the segment messaging be so resonant with everyone who ever read, you know, the award that comes out on our website? Yeah, it's, but it's very common. It's very common to feel the sort of pool to try to talk to every possible person who could be impacted by data, which is everybody, right? And I think it's a very natural reaction, you know, as a marketer and as a person to try to make it as applicable as possible to everyone. But I think what ends up happening for almost 100% of the time is that if you're talking to everyone, no one's going to fall in love with it. It's almost impossible for you to develop a deep, meaningful relationship and a resonant message unless you're opinionated about who is actually supposed to receive that message. Yeah, it's the reason why so many, you know, niche publications, you know, things like, you know, small magazines online, small subscription channels on YouTube. Like it's the reason that these things exist is because people are looking for their people and their message and their ideas. And they want to hear from someone who's heavily opinionated about that one specific thing in a way that totally resonates with them. And so I feel like oftentimes you get a lot of marketers who are saying, you know, I want to be able to speak to, you know, the CEO at a Fortune 500. And I want to be able to speak to a, you know, a startup, you know, founder at, you know, a pre-seed company. And the reality is that you ultimately end up not really satisfying either of their needs, throughout your, you know, whether it be your website or whether it be an e-book or whatever it might be. And so I find that that's a very common mistake, is this idea that you can really satisfy everyone. Absolutely. And, you know, with how crowded and how hard it is to differentiate and if you have messaging like that that's kind of softer, unaponinated or just like murky like that, it just really does not do the job that it's intended to. So yeah, I see that too a lot. And I think that example, especially around like the, you know, the size of your target market or the industry is something that a lot of people make. And your target market will like notice it as well, I think, you know, if you're, sometimes it's good to say who you're not for or have something that's so opinionated that it might make some people like, you know, it might turn some people off. And that's really a good thing because it just means you're kind of laser focused on your on your right audience. So yeah, is that part of, I mean, is that, does that come through in the research process too? Is that kind of part of narrowing in on that audience? What happens in the research? Yeah, of course. I think, you know, I have talked to a lot of PMMs and a very common question that comes out is, you know, my CEO wants our messaging to work with everybody they want it to fit for every case. And I think the only real way to push forward is not to sort of come at it from a very subjective place like they are, right? And say, no, our messaging needs to be opinionated for this group. And it should be this way because the next question is very obvious. Why them? Why, why this messaging? I think you need to, you know, over time develop a strong relationship with the customer and that relationship really does come through research, right? Because it's the notion of understanding who they are and having these sort of real customer relationships that are swimming in your head as you're thinking about the messaging and who you should focus on. And also some of the data, right? You need to be able to know and to be a champion for who actually sees success with your product who are the people that end up buying your product, who are the people that use your product? These could all be different people. And, you know, at segment that is the case. They are different people. And I think, you know, what I find is that without this sort of research backing and taking people along with you on the journey of how you arrived at your conclusion, you very often get caught in the trap of, well, your idea is not that much better than mine or not much more supportive than mine. So let's just keep a generic. And, you know, over time, I think what ends up happening is, you know, people lose touch with their customer or don't have that close connectivity to the customer insights. And they end up just kind of settling for, okay, I'll just go with what the executive team says is the motion and that's kind of it. If my CEO proves it, I will give it the thumbs up and ship it. Yeah, that is the battle. I think that's spot on. I think, you know, and it helps some as a product marketer, you know, and have a lot of conviction in opinion as well. I need to be able to sell it. So that kind of brings me to my next point. One of, one of my favorite questions that you got on your AMA on Sherbird was everybody in this person's company has an opinion about messaging, which I'm sure is every company. So how do you defend the messaging that you've created or really, how do you do what you're just talking about really sell it and win buy-in when you've created something new? Yeah, of course. I'll start with this sort of big picture and then I promise I'll jump into very tactical on how I've done it before. Yeah, you know, on the big picture front, you're never going to please everybody. So you shouldn't set that as your target, right? You're setting yourself up for failure. If you think that the head of sales, the head of product, the head of, you know, product marketing and your CEO are all going to hear what you say, stand up and give you a standing ovation. It's just very rare for that to happen. And so, you know, at the core of my answer is you need to pick and prioritize whose voices matter, whose voices are going to carry with me and help me champion this and prove that this is resident work over the long haul, right? I've worked at companies before where that person wasn't the CEO. It was actually the head of product. I've worked at companies before where it was the head of sales. And I think the important part here is identifying and really trusting that you can focus your energy on deeply building context and confidence with a few people versus trying to, you know, sort of solve everyone's problems and make everyone happy. I promise you as someone who's tried and failed at that a million times, it just can't happen. And so, you know, when you think about, okay, how do I do it on the practical level? How do I actually get this done? It really starts with two things. The first is identifying who has influence at the company, right? Who is going to help you champion this and be able to move it forward? And, you know, you have to be really realistic with yourself. This person has to be able to help you mobilize and defend this. And so, think about it from your perspective. If you were going to champion and defend and really go to bat for someone's work, you want to know it's well researched, it's well informed, it's, you know, intentional, it isn't full of mistakes in, you know, in errors. And so, you owe it to your internal champions to do that research that I was mentioning before so that you can build conviction. I've had to, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, rebrand quite a few companies in my time. And I can tell you that the the most successful opportunity I ever had was one in which I had really deeply learned our customer base, learned who we were right for, learned where there was tons of market opportunity. And I brought that to the table with the messaging that I had suggested that was tested and vetted and understood by customers. And that made it really easy for my champion to say like, yes, let's go let's run through this. And we slowly built momentum for, you know, the messaging and the the full playbook, a crawl along the way, right? So it's a crawl before you run scenario with building internal consensus. It's finding who's going to help you really make this and motivate this. I've also found that it literally never hurts to have a few folks who are front line in the motion people who are validating or at least testing with you. When I was updating some of segments messaging, I worked with one of our SDRs to test some of the messaging in our outbound sequences. This is on top of testing with a few other areas and talking to customers, but this was incredibly validating for the head of sales to see, oh, our outbound numbers actually look really great with this messaging. It looks better than it was before. I feel fairly confident with just this small data point. I didn't go through and test in every market across everything. I was just showing directionally it's not going to tank us. So let's move forward. And I think taking those sort of tactical steps to build champions along the way is the more pragmatic way to get your messaging out the door. Yeah. Now that's really good advice. I think I'm hearing three things, which is find that champion and really make sure that they believe in you and feel good about it and are going to go to back you up and potentially go to go to bat for you on this and really do that by building this really bullet proof sort of research back kind of data backed case for it. I think that's something too that I've seen that's very effective, right? Where you can be talking about this messaging that is super subjective. But the more that you can kind of make it this bullet proof case with this data and this research to back it up, it does provide that confidence. And then getting it out there into the real world, working with sales teams, working with CS teams and like, you know, having customers see it. And that's amazing that if you can have it, you know, you can show some of the data that it's impacted. I think all of those three points are really, really good. And also I've found that just, you know, sometimes you can say something and you can, you can pitch the messaging really, really well. But it's not until, you know, the executive team sees the customer feedback to it or partner feedback to it. And maybe it's just a quote or maybe it's just a reaction. Even if it's just some random person that they don't know, they just know it's a customer. That can be really, really powerful in the process. Yeah, 100%. The best advocate for any messaging will always be a customer who saw it, believed in it, understood it. Right? There's really no one better. I promise you no matter how much time you spent building this bulletproof pitch, it's full of animated slides and, you know, the best thing you can do is just show, look, here's the kind of customer that we said we want to target. And here's the reaction to the messaging. This works. And I have to get bolsters a lot more confidence than anything you could provide yourself. Absolutely. Well, Kevin, I think this is, this is really, really good advice. I can tell that you've got the scars and experience to prove it going in here and kind of learning over the years with rebrands and pitching messaging. So I really hope that people are able to learn from you and kind of jump forward here. My last question for you is just, you know, what's your outlook on the career of product marketing? Do you think product marketing is generally like a good place to be or get into right now? Yeah, of course. You know, from a career defining perspective, I think there was nothing better for anyone in their early career than being a product marketer. I think it is one of the few roles in a company that has so much impact and just direct contribution to how the company thinks and what the company does and how the company talks and who the company is. I think it'd be hard press to find a job that is more exciting and more dynamic. I have not done the same thing in a very long time, day by day. And I think the skill sets that you build, you know, this sort of thing I talked about earlier, this researcher, storyteller, project manager, mentality can really carry you forward into almost any other career path, right? The same things that make PMMs amazing PMMs are the same skill sets that make amazing entrepreneurs and amazing GMs and amazing CEOs. You know, I think these skill sets in their raw form are completely adaptable to so many different use cases. Some of big believer. I think that, you know, there's very, very few roles where you get to be analytical one day, creative the other and, you know, marketing expert or project manager on the other side. I think it's a super fascinating role. And I think you see that actually play out across companies where product marketing is a pretty, is both a fast growing job in terms of how many companies are looking for one. But also it's a pretty stable job. It's not a job that you immediately think about when you're thinking about, you know, how do I streamline the team? It's a role that's fairly certain and stable at a company because they realize the value of this person doesn't just bring words to life. They bring action and initiatives and projects to life and it's incredibly valuable. So I'm a huge proponent of product marketing. I think it has a bright future ahead of it. Awesome. Me too. I think you said it really well. I mean, I agree with you. I love how much you can learn in this role and how cross-functional it is. And you're totally right. You know, PMMs get, I think they become very strategic at the company and when there's a project that maybe needs someone to bring momentum to it and focus. And just to get it done, like they're choosing a PMM to jump in and lead that, I see that all the time in my work. Kevin, was there anything that you want to tell people about or is there any place that people can find you to connect with you? Yeah, I encourage everyone to look me up on LinkedIn or look me up on Twitter. My tweets are unfortunately mostly about McDonald's. But if you would like to reach out, please, I don't know everything. I will pretend to know everything, but I can hopefully at least give you my honest feedback or if not point you to someone much smarter than me. Awesome. Well, next time you come on the show, we can, we'll do half an hour on chicken nuggets or something like that. That's my dream. Until then, I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on, Kevin and I'm in the competition. Thank you. [MUSIC]