Kristina Jaramillo recently asked on LinkedIn – what role aligns the closest to ABM: demand generation, field marketing, or product marketing. She asked this question because Nick Bennett at Alyce mentioned that field marketing should be focused on the middle and bottom of the funnel. They capture the demand that the demand generation team created. As ABM should be about accelerating higher-value deals to revenue — and not sourcing the pipeline, he feels that ABM and field marketing are similar in many ways.
At Personal ABM, we agree that ABM aligns more with field marketing than demand gen. But we are on the fence when it comes to which team is closely aligned with ABM: product marketing or field marketing. Product marketers are the connectors of the business, and they are able to help GTM teams nurture from a sales, marketing, customer success, and product perspective.
In the podcast below, Kristina Jaramillo and Eric Gruber discuss with Christine Friscic (Peak Community member and product marketing leader at Gainsight) the role product marketing should play in ABM.
Here Are the Key Points from This Podcast with Christine Friscic:
- For ABM to work effectively, we need to GTM as one team. We need to go beyond alignment and become interdependent. Product marketing is in a unique position as they are the ones that should embed themselves inside demand gen, content, sales, marketing, and customer success teams and every team inside the organization. Product marketers can bring great insight into what’s going in inside the business and what challenges we need to solve.
- Gainsight’s product marketing team re-established a tightly-knitted pod between demand gen, sales, and marketing teams. They had product marketers that were aligned to a sales segment. They work closely with the sales leaders. They are in the trenches working with the AEs to open conversations, nurture relationships, and close deals. So product marketers bring more to the table than product knowledge. They bring an understanding of what’s happening in the field.
- To give sellers and buyers what is needed for a signed deal to happen, Gainsight’s product marketing team is shifting sales and marketing motions, conversations, and interactions. They had to shift the focus from thinking about what sellers and marketers want their future and existing customers to know and have in their hands and have the teams adopt a more buyer-centric model. In this model, the teams focus on what the buyers need at every stage of the sales cycle and look at it from their perspective. The teams think about the struggling moments and challenges that buyers have at each stage.
- Most programs miss the enablement layer between sales and marketing – and product marketing is uniquely positioned to provide this enablement. In the podcast, you’ll learn about the account-enablement that’s needed, including account intelligence, content for specific selling conversations and specific internal buying conversations and making sure that each touchpoint and interaction is personally relevant to target accounts.
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