Darrell Alfonso’s Post

Here are 7 strategies to tackle complex problems in marketing operations. 1 - Use this update framework: Priorities, Progress, Problems You can simplify your updates to leadership (and make them more interesting) by framing them like this: What are your current top priorities? What progress are you making on your priorities and the things leadership cares about? What problems are you facing that you could use help with? 2 - Build and create with a training mindset When you create a process or solution, imagine someone else following your process or making adjusting your solution. This will force you to build with simplicity, elegance, and clarity. 3 - Prioritize outcomes over projects Projects are in service of some outcome. If you complete a project but the outcome is not secured, you must start another project. If you complete a lead routing project but sales still does not action sales-ready leads in a timely manner, you need to start another project. 4 - A simple way to become more strategic is to start counting Struggling with strategy? Start counting things. How many campaigns have you shipped this quarter? How many leads did it generate? How many turned into opps and deals? How many resources do you need to launch campaigns? How much additional impact could you drive with double the resources? Understanding these numbers and improving them is the basis of marketing ops strategy. 5 - Think like a consultant Marketing ops can end up with their backs against the wall because of our personal attachments to platforms and processes. Take a step back—if an objective technology consultant looked at your problem, what would they say? What assumptions are you making that can be changed? 6 - Use both “push” and “pull” strategies to gain alignment Sometimes, you need to push projects forward: create tasks, send reminders, and set deadlines. Other times, you need to pull people along with you: create vision, align incentives, and inspire action. Think carefully about which you will deploy. 7 - Search for the “third option.” Invest or not? Switch or stay? Many options in MOPs seem binary, but they really aren’t. There is usually an out-of-the-box third option or combination of 2 options that will serve you better. I'm writing more about this in next week's newsletter, subscribe to stay updated https://lnkd.in/g_3YC7BZ #marketing #martech #marketingoperations

As all Product Marketers know, we have to be able to change direction at the drop of hat 🎩 I find one of the best ways to enable this is to use a "pivot" approach. This means that you're constantly testing and iterating on your messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategy. If something isn't working, don't be afraid to change it. The best product marketers are those who are willing to experiment and try new things. Here are a few tips for using a pivot approach: 🏁 Set clear goals. What do you want to achieve with your product marketing? Once you know your goals, you can start to track your progress and make adjustments as needed. It's easy to get off track as a PMM, we are juggling so many different topics. Set your goals, keep them insight at all times and you'll always head towards success. 🔢 Use data to your advantage. Track your results carefully and use data to inform your decisions. I am a data person, but you need to be able to see past the data and understand the insights and the why. 😢 Don't be afraid to fail. Sometimes the best way to learn is to make mistakes. So, don't be afraid to experiment and try new things. A/B testing that new messaging and finding out it performs worse than the original is always a scary moment, but take it as a learning moment and move on to the next message. 🎉 Celebrate your successes. When you do achieve your goals, take some time to celebrate your success. A lot of PMM's I know (including myself) find it hard celebrate successes as we're always too busy to stop and appreciate what we've achieved. I recently set up a "trophy room" for my team to log all of our successes. Anything from a nice slack message to an record breaking conversion rate from messaging A/B tests. Setting up this approach will get your Product Marketing team's mindset in the right place. #productmarketing

20 Ways Marketing And Tech Teams Can Collaborate For Success

🤝 Product vs Marketing: Common Source of Friction One of the classic challenges in early-stage (all stages, perhaps) SaaS companies is the dynamic between Product and Marketing. Product operates in sprints, constantly delivering new features and updates. Marketing, on the other hand, has a lead time—time to craft the narrative, create the buzz, and generate interest around these features. And here lies the friction: While Product is focused on shipping value fast, Marketing needs a moment to catch up, strategize, and communicate effectively. Now, this raises an interesting question: Should we solve this friction or embrace it? Two schools of thought: 1. Solve the Silos: Break down the barriers—integrate marketing more tightly with the product team. Some companies even create a "marketing within product" function to ensure every release gets consistent outward-focused communication. 2. Friction as a Feature (not a bug): Maybe this friction isn’t a problem to solve. Instead, it’s a feature. Not every new launch needs the spotlight. The natural delay allows time to evaluate if the feature works, gather initial feedback, and refine the messaging for maximum impact when it’s finally shared. So, do we smooth out this tension or let it play its part? I’d love to hear your thoughts. How does your team balance the need for product speed with the need to ensure more thought-through comms in marketing? #ProductMarketing #Silos

‘Hey, can I get a dev to fix this on the site?’ 61 days into 2024, how many times has your Engineering team told you no? For a website that is supposed to 5x the sales team’s pipeline… Today’s B2B marketing teams are leaner and more technically skilled than ever before. But there’s only so much development work they can do on their own. Only so much JavaScript they can learn on the fly. Justin Abrams hit the nail on the head this week. The direct ROI engineers create as part of marketing teams is tremendous. Often more than most individuals working on a SaaS platform bring in a year. How much more pipeline could you create if you had someone always-on for your website’s backlog?

Smaller marketing teams. Reduced budgets. Doing more with less. These are the things keeping marketers up at night. I see it daily as a fractional product marketer working with teams and talking to marketing leaders. My advice is always to go back to the basics. Goals are SO, SO important. Yes, everyone says that 🙃 BUT so many folks don't *actually* plan for what it takes to see something from start to finish. You have to think about: 1) your team goals and the broader organization's goals 2) the alignment you'll need across teams to move things forward 3) how to get people comfortable with raising "at-risk" or "off-track" items 4) what to do if plans change and everyone has to pivot 5) what "done" actually looks like 6) who needs to lead, follow, review, or get out of the way When goals seem murky, and everything seems to be thrown against the wall, take a consultative approach with your team. Ask: > "What's working and what isn't?" > "How does this align with the organization's goals?" > "What can we postpone or eliminate?" > "What's the cost of doing nothing, building an MVP, or going all-in?" These types of questions encourage priority setting and shared decision-making, fostering a more collaborative and efficient environment. Thinking through the details ensures a higher chance of scalable success. #productmarketing #b2bmarketing

Your customers ultimately decides what your product is truly used for. What you envision for your product may shift once it’s in the hands of real users. This pivot is something many products have experienced: 1️⃣ Nokia started as a pulp company producing paper, but today, it's a leader in telecommunications and network infrastructure. (This one surprised me!) 2️⃣ Slack began as a gaming company, but now it’s a widely-used team collaboration and messaging tool. 3️⃣ YouTube originally launched as a video dating website, and now, well, you know what it is 😅 I’m sure many of you have experienced something similar while building a product. We often get so attached to our initial idea that we overlook how reality might evolve. That’s why understanding the “job to be done” is essential. Recently, I had some great conversations with the first users of our Marketing Audit System. Through these talks, I learned how they were actually using it and what was missing from their workflow. Originally, I thought the product would be primarily used for conducting marketing audits. But only a few users were doing that. What I discovered was that it helps users define and map out their GTM (Go-to-Market) strategies. It clarifies where to start, what’s needed to build a GTM strategy, and how to iterate effectively. (It still have some missing pieces but I’m working on it) So, what started as a Marketing Audit System has now evolved into a GTM Strategy Mapping Tool—a shift led by our users' needs. ————————————————————————————————— 👋 PS: If you’re interested in trying out the updated version of this GTM tool, comment below & I’ll share with you 👇

“When setting goals, Marketing Operations teams should consider crafting different sets of goals for two audiences: your public goals, which will be shared with your marketing and sales partners, and your team’s internal goals, which will only be shared within your MOPs team.” - Megan Michuda via MarTech https://zurl.co/zU0L #marketingprofs #b2bmarketing #growthmarketing #demandgen #leadgeneration #saasmarketing

Excited to share that I've received my third LinkedIn Top Voice badge, this time for Product Marketing. When I look back on my career, I credit my experiences as a product marketer and opportunities to learn from some of the best B2B product marketers in the business for making me a better marketer. 📣 Three reasons why building an all-star product marketing team should be at the top of every scale-up marketing leader's list: 👉 “Put your oxygen mask on first before assisting others.” Ensuring that your product marketing team is well-resourced is one of the best ways to enable the overall healthy functioning of the marketing team. Your marketing team relies on PMM more than any other function for subject matter expertise on content, campaigns, and more. 👉 "Connections matter." Product marketing is a critical cross-company connector. Organizationally, product marketing sits at the intersection of product and marketing teams and the best PMMs speak both languages fluently. They are the bridge that ensures that a product's go-to-market strategy is not just the company's strategy but the right customer strategy. 👉 "With great power comes great responsibility." Product marketing is responsible for product positioning and messaging. Make no mistake about it, holding marketing teams accountable for delivering content and activating it is useless unless your product marketing team is set up for on-time delivery of the foundational materials necessary to execute downstream activities. Just-in-time messaging for campaigns is a recipe for team stress and burnout. #b2bmarketing #productmarketing #pmm #cmo #marketing

🛠️ Elevating Strategy with Product Marketing 🛠️ In our dynamic market landscape, product marketing is not just a role but a strategic powerhouse within organizations. Here are 3 things your PMM team should be doing to drive real business impact: 1️⃣ Positioning & Messaging Mastery: Beyond mere documentation, it's about engaging your entire team—sales, product, CS, and executives—in a narrative journey. I’m a big fan of April Dunford's methodology from Obviously Awesome. It's crucial to ensure your messaging is effective and will be utilized across your organization, if they don’t believe in it, they will go back to that deck that is 3 years old. 2️⃣ Voice of the Market: Leverage platforms like Gong to capture real-world reactions to your positioning. Combine this with analyst conversations (think Forrester, Gartner, Everest Group, etc pending your industry), customer advisory boards, and win/loss interviews to paint a comprehensive picture of your market stance. This approach isn't just about listening—it's about actively engaging with the market's heartbeat. 3️⃣ Deep-Dive Competitive Intelligence: Surface-level analysis won’t cut it, you’ve got to go beyond what scrapping tools like Google Alerts and what campaigns your competitors are running. Dive into the nuances of competitor strategies, look at recent hires & what they are hiring for, from product updates to murmurs in dark social spaces. The goal? To anticipate moves and articulate your unique value proposition more convincingly. As we navigate these strategies, some tools and frameworks help accelerate this but you have to have a plan and dive in as a team because we're not just marketing products; we're sculpting market narratives that win. Engage, listen, analyze, and adapt. How do you leverage product marketing to stay ahead of the curve? #ProductMarketing #CompetitiveIntelligence #MarketStrategy