3 Telltale Signs That It’s Time to Hire a Product Marketer

Make Your First Product Marketing Hire Sooner — Here’s Why

Oftentimes, the first product marketing hire on the Marketing team is one of the last positions added. Marketing tends to prioritize roles that have a clear and tangible impact on the marketing pipeline, such as demand generation or growth marketing. While this approach is logical, it leaves Marketing devoid of a key growth driver: product marketing.

Without a product marketing resource in place, the ability of other marketing roles to hit their goals can be hindered by:

• A lack of effective product messaging
• An inability to capitalize on new features
• Feature-based sales materials
• And more

Product marketing plays a key role in creating these foundational marketing materials that elevate all Marketing functions’ abilities to achieve their goals.

However, how can a Marketing leader know the right time for their first product marketing hire? Here are some of the telltale signs that indicate it’s time to hire your first product marketing hire.

1. Product Enhancements Fail to Achieve Adoption and Revenue Goals

A poorly executed product launch is one of the most common indicators that it’s time for your first product marketing hire. A product launch fails to drive the intended adoption and revenue for many reasons. Aside from building a product that solves a meaningful customer problem, a successful product launch is also dependent on packing the product appropriately, communicating the value of the new solution, and ensuring all internal teams are prepared to capitalize on the new release.

When one or more of these aspects is missed, it hampers the marketing and sales teams’ abilities to effectively generate demand, convert leads, and close deals. When a launch is unsuccessful, it may feel like the process of taking a product to market is internally chaotic and externally invisible — meaning customers didn’t take notice of all the work that went into getting the product ‘out the door.’

A product marketing manager plays an integral role in crafting a product’s launch strategy based on their knowledge of the market, customers, and product. Furthermore, they then quarterback the execution of the launch to ensure every team involved is aligned on the desired outcomes, understands their role in the launch, and follows through with their responsibilities on time.

2. Marketing is Disconnected from the Product

Consider the following example:

The demand generation team prepares for a webinar. They know they can drive registrations, build a compelling format for the content, and establish a post-webinar nurture campaign. However, they are unsure of what content will both interest their audience and speak to the value of their product to the audience.

If this scenario happens repeatedly at your company, it’s time to consider your first product marketing hire.

One of the core responsibilities of a product marketer is to deeply understand the market, the customer, and the product. With this knowledge, a product marketer is uniquely equipped to provide thought leadership that interests the target persona and ties into the specific problems solved by the product. When a product marketer partners with other marketing roles for initiatives like webinars, it will likely result in more registrations, more pipeline created, and more conversions from prospect to customer.

3. Sales Defaults to Feature-Based Selling

A common symptom of a lack of product marketing is a reliance on feature-based messaging and selling. In sales, this may look like a salesperson demoing the product and exclusively talking about how the user can take action. While it’s often useful to show how a product works, relying on this approach to drive action and urgency from the buyer is often ineffective, especially to a prospective buyer (beyond an early adopter, for instance) who cannot quickly identify the business outcome based on a feature.

A product marketer is skilled in creating value-based messaging and enabling a sales team to leverage this approach in the sales process. Value-based messaging focuses on the problems experienced by the target customer and how the product uniquely solves those problems. By reframing product demos and sales slides through this lens, sales can elevate their conversations with prospects to ensure they understand not just how the product works, but also — and more importantly — the benefits they gain from adopting the product.

A product marketer applies this same benefit-based approach to marketing materials to ensure that prospects understand the value of the product from the beginning of the buying process through to the end.

Prioritize Product Marketing — and Reap the Rewards

These are three critical signs that it’s time to consider your first product marketing hire. Dedicating a resource to these areas will uplevel the entire organization and likely uncover other areas that need product marketing attention. While product marketing impacts may seem less tangible than other roles, the reality is that a talented and experienced product marketer elevates the entire revenue organization to increase pipeline, improve conversion rates, and drive product adoption.

Carema Consulting partners with B2B SaaS companies to help them navigate the product marketing journey across multiple levels — from staffing and process development to messaging creation and go-to-market planning. Our expert team has years of experience in product marketing for SaaS organizations and is ready to put that knowledge to work for your success and growth.

Connect with us today to discuss your product marketing challenges and learn how we can help.