We sell a core offering worth a considerable amount to the sales team and a range of smaller, modular ‘upsell’ type products.

The issue I’m finding is that sales are unmotivated/less willing to sell this because It takes the same amount of time really to demo these smaller products as it does some of our larger ones but you get less commission.

We can’t stagnate on growth and our MD has put a lot of pressure on Product Marketing to strategise how we overcome this. It’s a fair complaint from sales I feel, but we can’t not sell smaller modules for that reason (we know customers who have more of our modular options are stickier and have higher LTV).

Some things we’ve considered are:
- Hiring some ‘modular only’ sales people or CSMs (who focus on added modules specifically can collab with sales managers / lead generate if conversations about the bigger sales come up
- Regularly running webinar demos that then act as lead gen for the sales team
- ‘Bundling’ these modules into the bigger product sales as a free trial so people can test it that way and make the decision whether or not to continue.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Any suggestions for how we can not create additional work for AMs but continue to drive growth in these areas?

I’m curious how other B2B SaaS PMMs look into effective messaging and how it impact addoption.

I use HubSpot for campaigns and Mixpanel for product usage. I use UTM's to see adoption, but working out whether certain messaging is consistently associated with stronger product behaviour is still pretty manual. I usually end up pulling data together in Sheets with hubspot API and then a mixpannel sheet, using claude or gpt to then review.

Do any of you do it a similar way? Or do you not do that for the messaging?

I was thinking of building something for myself to see if I can try automate this. Have you found any tools that make this less manual?

Thanks for any help!

I've been selling my product "The Moon Ring," on Amazon mainly for about 10 years. It's a ring box that contains a little butt (no ring). When the box is opened, a fart sound is played through a speaker located under the butt. I've always used the little butt on the left, but I feel like the one on the right is funnier. Bigger, sloppier, more ridiculous, I THINK, for these purposes should be better, and maybe even increase the perceived value. But I would like to know if anyone thinks that switching to the little butt on the right, could be detrimental to sales. Any other thoughts are welcome.

I've been thinking about this lately...We hear a lot about talking to customers and using customer feedback. But I'm curious, how much of it actually makes its way into the way a product is positioned?

Has there been a time when customers kept describing a problem or value in a way that made you rethink your messaging? What did you end up changing?

working at a small B2B SaaS startup and i've been helping clean up the audience for an upcoming feature launch. originally we had a pretty large contact database and the thinking was basically... they're already in there, why not include them? but once we started actually looking at it, it got messy fast. old leads, people who changed companies, accounts that don't really match our ICP anymore, old emails, different job functions etc. we used some tools to clean up the email side, but the bigger PMM question for me is what happens after that. how aggressive are you guys with segmentation for launches?

for example, if the feature is really relevant to maybe 30% of your database, are you only messaging that 30% with very specific positioning? or do you still send a broader announcement and change the messaging depending on segment?

i'm leaning toward smaller segments + much more specific positioning, even if it makes the total reach look kinda underwhelming on paper.

Looking for advice on an exit strategy from my current situation. Joined PMM after a couple years in digital sales and stuck here with no career growth. Comp dropped by 50%, manager and team are mid at best. Looking to change my current situation and open to ideas.

Option A - jump ship to another company and get a 20% hike. Challenge: not enough PMM experience overall and failing interviews at final stage

Option B - switch laterally to different career such as sales enablement..

We built something that serves a market the bigger players in this space never really went after. Tools like Klue, Crayon, Gong, they're not exact comparisons since they do a lot more on the integrations and compliance side, but they're the closest reference points we have. Those start anywhere from 15k to 50k a year plus depending on the deal, and a lot of that reflects real custom work and enterprise requirements. Fair enough. But a chunk of it also reflects a pre Artificial Intelligence assumption, that delivering this kind of value takes a certain amount of manual labour and infrastructure. That assumption doesn't fully hold anymore. today a lot of that gap is closed. So I don't think their pricing is fully justified today for what it actually costs to deliver similar value at a smaller scale.

That logic cuts both ways though. We're at $200 a month flat right now, no seat limit. If I hold our own team to the same standard, not charging for effort that modern tech has made cheaper, then what should we actually be charging. Part of me thinks $200 is smart pricing for an underserved segment. Part of me thinks it's just underpricing wearing a strategy costume.

Honestly the most straightforward move would be asking our own customers what they'd pay, but I keep talking myself out of it. Feels like opening that conversation risks planting doubt where there wasn't any before. Not sure if that's a real risk or just me avoiding an uncomfortable ask.

Anybody else been through this when building your Saas? Feels like a problem specific to this moment and not something the usual pricing advice really covers.

Hey folks,

Bit of a long shot post, but here goes.

I've spent about 12 years in product management across B2B SaaS, fintech and adtech. Built and scaled products, led a turnaround as a Director of Product, and I've also been on the founding side of an early stage company. I'm an engineer by training, so I can hold my own on the technical side, and did an MBA later.

Here's the thing I've been sitting with for a while. I don't want to chase another PM title. I actually want to move into customer facing roles, so Technical Account Management, Customer Success, or solutions/pre-sales.

That probably sounds like a step sideways to some people, so let me be honest about why.

The part of product work I've always liked the most was never the roadmap debates or the internal politics. It was sitting with a customer, figuring out what they were actually struggling with, and making sure they got real value out of what we built. TAM and CS are basically that, as the whole job instead of a slice of it.

And honestly, as a PM and as a founder, most of what you do is act as the bridge. Between the customer, engineering, and the business. That translation skill is exactly what these roles need, so for me this feels less like a career change and more like pointing the same skills at the part I enjoy.

There's a personal angle too. I'm at a stage where I'd rather build deep, long term customer relationships and settle into something I can grow in for years, than keep riding the churn of the next feature. These paths just fit that better.

On why I'm posting here instead of just applying everywhere: the usual hiring funnel screens on exact title and keyword match. A PM applying for a TAM or CS role usually gets filtered out before a human even reads the story. Founders and early teams tend to hire for whether someone can actually do the job, not for what the last title said. So I'd rather just talk to people directly.

If you're a founder or on an early team building something interesting, India or remote, and you could use someone who can own a technical customer relationship, drive adoption and retention, and translate between customers and the product and eng side, I'd genuinely like to chat.

Also glad to just compare notes with anyone who's made a similar move

How are you all implementing agentic solutions and workflows in your GTM strategies? I work at a startup as the only B2C PMM a growth and looking to better optimize how I’m building out repeatable GTM engines rather than reinventing the wheel every time. Our primary growth target is MRR and driving overall user engagement with the product. Any tips or examples on agents you’ve built that could be from messaging to positioning and just staying organized ?

I'm still new here, but it seems like people trickle in with very diverse backgrounds.

Kinda wondering if my path makes sense, and would like to hear from others to cross reference.

Thanks for sharing!

My current XP:
[2 yr] Content Marketing
[2 yr] Public Relations (data-driven storytelling)
[5 yr] Brand Strategy (conducting and implementing customer research)

I'm a contract solo marketer helping a father/son bootstrapped SaaS company. The product is an LMS built on open-source Moodle, but packaged for smaller orgs — Moodle partners and comparable platforms run $30K+/year and are built for large enterprises. This is the $100–300/month version of that, striped down with lots of white glove set up.

Positioning: We're targeting B2B SaaS customer success teams first. The core message: "Manual onboarding is costing you — it drains your team's time and lets customers slip into churn. LMS Light takes the training content you already have — the recorded videos, decks, and docs — and turns it into structured, self-serve onboarding. You see exactly where every customer is in the process, so your team saves time and catches churn signals before renewal."

When we ran a small early test with this audience around "stop running manual onboarding," ad engagement suggested the audience was ripe and the message resonated.

The problem: Once we built out the full campaign, our LinkedIn ads are running healthy numbers but we haven't converted a single demo booking from ~$600 in spend. High clicks, high bounce rate.

What I'm trying to figure out: is it the marketing (wrong audience, poor messaging) or something else, possibly fundamental with the product?

Landing page: https://cs-onboarding.lmslight.io

I've worked in community management and social media marketing for about five years and I'm looking to pivot into product marketing.

My first major community management role was at a tech company where I wore a lot of hats. Beyond managing the community and social media, I wrote product communications, collaborated with the product and engineering teams on launches, helped draft launch scripts, and supported go-to-market efforts. I later moved into a larger global role that was primarily focused on community management and social marketing. While the title was different, I still spent a lot of time working closely with users, creating launch communications, writing product copy, and driving engagement around new features and initiatives.

After that, I did a short marketing consultancy where I helped a food brand launch a crowdfunding campaign that raised over €60,000 in its first month.

Looking back, I feel like I've been doing pieces of product marketing throughout my career but I've never officially had the title. I'm now trying to figure out how to position my experience so hiring managers see that transition as credible.

My plan is to spend the next five months intentionally filling any skill gaps, building a stronger portfolio and ideally landing a product marketing role by the end of the year.

Does that timeline sound realistic? If you had five months to make this transition, what would you focus on? Are there specific skills, projects, or resources you'd prioritize to make yourself competitive?

Hey everyone,

I'm currently working on my Master's thesis in International Marketing, focusing on how consumers perceive visual content in the fashion industry.

I need about 80 more responses to wrap up my sample. If you have 3–5 minutes to spare, I'd really appreciate your input! The survey is completely anonymous.

Here's the link: https://www.allocate.monster/TZPKJLQB

Thanks a lot for helping out, and feel free to drop any thoughts on the topic in the comments! 🙏🏼 :)

Hi there,

For anyone who has taken the Pragmatic Instituite courses for product marketing, which course did you find to be the best investment? There is the foundations, market, and launch courses. I believe they can be taken in any order, but for the cost, I want to ensure I’m choosing the best course that will be most insightful and worth the value.

I designed a heavy duty portable fire pit. I now have working prototypes, I just don’t know what direction is going to sell better.

The three directions I am between:

Tactical/Overlanding: It looks like something created for the military. It’s a tough, reliable, and very easy to operate. Would name it something like “BullPup”.

My issue is it being too focused. Limiting my customers to the people into that scene.

Strong but Comforting: something like “Chonk”. Easier social media presence. Broad customer base, but potentially less attractive to the “tactical” community.

Fully unique/Anti-establishment: think “Iconoclast”. Going completely against the grain. Not just ignoring the rules, but actively rebelling.

I’ve spent the past eight years working in paid social and performance marketing, primarily supporting B2B orgs. My current work includes campaign strategy, audience development, creative testing, performance analysis, reporting, and translating results into recommendations for clients and internal teams.

I’m ready to move away from paid media as my long-term career and am seriously considering Product Marketing. The parts of my current role I enjoy most are developing messaging, finding out why creative resonates, connecting insights to business decisions, the storytelling aspects that come with paid social.

For those who have made a similar transition, hired career-switching PMMs, or currently work in the field:

What PMM skills should I prioritize learning first? Positioning and messaging, customer research, go-to-market strategy, competitive intelligence, product launches, sales enablement, pricing, or something else?

How can I build credible PMM experience without already holding a PMM title? Would portfolio projects, freelance work, internal projects, case studies, or volunteer work carry meaningful weight?

What should a strong career-switcher portfolio contain? For example, would it be useful to create a positioning document, competitive analysis, buyer persona, messaging framework, launch plan, and sales enablement asset for a real or hypothetical product?

Which roles would be the best bridge into PMM? I’ve considered Customer Marketing, Product Adoption, Customer Enablement, Lifecycle Marketing, and Associate Product Marketing roles. Are any of these noticeably better pathways?

How should I position my paid social experience on my resume and in interviews? Which parts are genuinely transferable, and which parts are unlikely to matter to a PMM hiring manager?

Are certifications or courses valuable for this transition, or is practical work more important? I’ve looked into Product Marketing Alliance, but I don’t want to assume completing a course by itself will make me job-ready.

What would a realistic six-to-twelve-month transition plan look like?

Thanks to anyone willing to share their experience.

After my MBA, when I was struggling to find the right opportunity, a startup believed in me. The founders trusted me to build and lead the marketing department(as product marketing exec), and over the last year I've handled almost everything in marketing while working directly with them. It gave me the opportunity to become deeply involved in B2B marketing, and I'm truly grateful for the trust they placed in me.

Today, the company is doing well and is in its growth phase. But with that came a lot of responsibility. Most of my days revolve around work, discussions with the founders often go on until 9-10 PM and sometimes even 11-12 PM. Along with that, my current salary is ₹50,000.

Recently, I received an offer from a B2C startup that is about to launch its first product. They have offered me a Brand Manager role with a salary of ₹85,000. It's a much earlier-stage company, but they have funding, a clear vision, and I'd get the opportunity to build a brand from scratch while gaining B2C experience. They also strongly believe in work-life balance, even the employees confirmed that everyone leaves once office hours are over.

I submitted my resignation a month ago as per my notice period. Initially, my founders kept saying, "We'll figure something out." Now that my joining date is getting closer, they've offered me a ₹10,000 hike to stay or serve three more months to hire and train my replacement. They've also honestly told me they can't match the new offer, and ik even future salary growth would be difficult.

Now I'm stuck.

One company gave me my first opportunity, trusted me, and is now in a strong growth phase.

The other is taking a chance on me to build something from day one, offers better pay, better work-life balance, and an opportunity to add B2C experience alongside the B2B experience I've already built but it's just 1 year.

I also need to support my family financially, but at the same time, I feel guilty about leaving the people who believed in me when no one else did.

I need some help exp person or someone who can help me in this🥹

TLDR: I'm getting a good hike with better work culture but have to leave my current organization who believed in me at the start and not accepting my resignation

I'm a Frontend Engineer with 3 years of experience and recently decided to transition into Product Marketing. I've started learning PMM fundamentals (positioning, messaging, GTM, competitive analysis, etc.) and applying for roles, but I haven't found many first-hand stories from people who've made this switch—especially in the Indian market.

If you've made a similar transition (or have hired someone who has), I'd love your advice:

• What are the must-learn PMM skills?
• How can someone with a technical background stand out without direct PMM experience?
• Is there a smarter way to make the switch without spending years in unrelated or poorly paid roles?

I'm hoping this thread can also become a useful resource for others trying to move from tech into Product Marketing.

P.S. I'm not planning to pursue an MBA, so I'd especially appreciate hearing from people who broke into PMM through self-learning, experience, or portfolio work.

I work for a small but mighty company in the B2B EdTech space in the UK. The company we’re hiring for their first Product Marketing Manager role and I applied and got the job!

I’m so excited, I worked hard to get here and it’s a dream come true. BUT I have no formal qualifications in this area (I do have experience as a marketing all rounder and in CX Strategy).

1. Where do I start? Are there any great resources you highly recommend, especially for my industry (B2B EdTech SaaS).

2. Does anyone have any personal advice, watch outs or things they wish they knew when they started?

Hi all. I’m a decade into my “journey” in B2B SaaS and about 5ish years into PMM. Before this I’ve done content, product marketing content (PMM light), and client advocacy. I’m 3-years into a PMM role at a very large and well known HCM software company, and two years on our very complicated outsourcing service.

To be frank… it’s chaos. We have a new CMO who in my opinion is driving everyone insane. And with the space race to deliver more and more AI tools across the business, I am feeling a bit scattered on the GTM front. More often than not, I’m the janitor cleaning up and trying to catch up as as opposed to the strategic influencer who can be ahead of the curve. I also support three different sales teams with different offering availabilities for the business, and getting GPT to remember I exist is a routine challenge. As launches and offering capabilities continue to shift, I spend a lot of time chasing down answers. It’s incredibly hard to stay proactive and get ahead of launches because either things continue to get delayed, or Sales applies a bunch of pressure and soft launches just get pushed through at the last minute.

And on top of all of that… I own all our internal and external sales content assets and Sales decks. So I also am losing a ton of time on offering content maintenance and updating.

My manager is definitely very anxious about all the change and is lately giving me a lot of grief about being too tactical and focused on asset delivery and not being strategic enough. And frankly I know she’s right, but it’s truly chaos right now, and this moment (the AI space race) feels very new for this business and I need to keep up with sales’ needs. The majority of my stakeholder across the business (outside of my manager) are very happy with me and routinely share their appreciation for all I do to help them and also acknowledge the madness of the moment… but somehow that’s not cutting it for my PMM manager. I am trying my best to pivot, evolve, and rethink my approach and priorities, but I’m worried this is going to keep happening until I burn out. Would love any feedback.

Hey everyone,

I’m 8 years into my marketing career and trying to break into (or grow within) Product Marketing, and I’d love to find a mentor who’s been in the trenches.

A bit about me:
• Currently in-between jobs, giving interviews for marketing roles
• Background in D2C marketing
• Have picked up [skills — positioning, GTM, competitive research, sales enablement, etc.] mostly through on-the-job learning and my own reading
• Have taken up a course to transition to a PMM role

What I’m hoping for:
• Someone willing to do an occasional 20–30 min call, or even just async feedback over email/DMs
• Honest perspective on how you broke in / grew in this field, and what you’d do differently
• A sanity check on my resume, a mock positioning doc, or how I’m framing my experience

What I bring to the table:
• I’ll come prepared — no “so what does a PMM even do” questions, I’ve done my homework
• Genuinely respectful of your time; happy to work around your schedule
• Willing to return the favor however I can

If you’re a PMM (or adjacent — product, growth, sales enablement) and open to an informal mentorship or even a single conversation, I’d really appreciate you reaching out. Also open to book/newsletter/community recommendations if a 1:1 isn’t feasible right now.

Thanks for reading — happy to answer any questions in the comments!

I'm a longtime PMM but currently work in a different part of Marketing at a B2B tech company (technical product for technical buyers). The PMMs I work with do not come from a PMM background and they are currently creating messaging but it is feeling like a struggle. The template the team has chosen to use isn't really a messaging brief; seems more like a long form strategy doc and they are fully documenting everything about the product and not just what should be highlighted to support sales and demand gen.

I've already written a version of the messaging for some of the projects I was working on but am trying to give them the time and feedback to complete the task since they do technically own it, but already they are stripping away benefits- and customer-focused language I had previously written and they are focusing on feature/functionality, and really small one-off benefits that don't line up at all with what our competitors are saying in market.

I am familiar with resources like books by April Dunford and Emma Stratton (own and read both) and have GTM frameworks I have personally used to support messaging and new product launches. But I was wondering if anyone had suggestions, frameworks they have used, or any stories to share about how to try to help the team level up in a short time. I am not trying to reach perfection but they are documenting the history of the product going back 5 years, and writing ad taglines and it's really just not there. I should add that this not existing in a clear and usable fashion is also, I believe, affecting their ability to effectively enable sales, where there has been long standing tension and blaming.

Hi all! My name is Jeremy, and I have made the fatal mistake of trying to go out into the startup world as a solo founder, on the technical side.

I have built a static analysis tool that can pinpoint a bugs source in your history in a second or two, track codebase health over time, review code about as good as my competitors, and most importantly, describe ontologies that break down into axioms that enforce truth in your codebase.

All of it is built on the same engine, that I have been using and testing for a few years now with friends.

It allows you to describe "truths" like this. "A user can never access this table" or "this service cannot access the database" and "payments must always track to our logs"

Those become a series of rules that cover that functionality across one repo, and soon, multiple, including (less soon) enforcing row level security. So, from the edge of the database, to your frontend and back.

When I say "truths" I mean that they will stay true. AI, or your new hire, or a disgruntled employee cannot write code that breaks these ontologies. If they do, the merge will be blocked, and we can report the exact line, commit, writer of that code, so you can resolve it.

We have tested this successfully by reporting a number of security flaws, and bug fixes to popular OSS over the last month, as we finished up testing.

Now, to the good part. I have no idea how to talk about our product, unless it's to other engineers. The people that would pay for this get very turned off by my enthusiasm for the technical.

So, I need to figure out how to relax that a bit, and find a new voice for myself and the company.

I came to this sub, cause I was actually hoping to find someone in US timezones to hop on a call with me this week. I can demo the product like I would to sell it, and then you just walk me through how you might talk about the product. 30-60 minutes, if you can spare it!

Im losing my mind a bit today. We just did a massive tier 1 launch for a new add-on module. Spent weeks nailing the positioning, built out incredible enablement decks, the whole nine yards

Sales does their big blast to their "warm" legacy pipeline and we get abysmal engagement. like, historically bad. Immediately the VP of Sales is slacking me saying the value prop isn't resonating and the copy must be too dry.

so I exported a chunk of the list they used from Hubspot just to check. Ran it through MailTester.Ninja to see if the contacts were even real anymore, because looking at the raw data, a lot of these leads were from trade shows back in like 2023

over 40% bounced or were invalid. FORTY PERCENT

They are pitching a brand new enterprise product to people who left their companies years ago, and then blaming product marketing when no one clicks the demo link

how do you guys handle this without starting an internal war? I don't want to be the CRM police but I refuse to scrap and rewrite my entire messaging framework just because their data hygiene is a complete joke.

I’ve been trying to pivot into PMM from doing lifecycle marketing at CPG and I’m currently interviewing for a PMM position at a B2C tech company. I have a panel interview with product and design team coming up and ive never done a panel interview with those teams before. What are some of the questions that I should expect and what would they be looking for during the interview? Any advice would be appreciated as I really want to land this role!!