Tips & Articles

There’s a faction of product marketing professionals who’ve long felt like the "sales-tools-on-demand" department, much to their dismay. It’s a tough predicament to get out of though when product marketing teams are structured entirely along product lines. A slight shift in alignment can transform a product marketing team into a strategic asset that’s exponentially more valuable to the company overall, not to mention the benefits it brings to product management, marketing and sales.

The intention is good – invest in features that yield the greatest return. But calculating a feature based ROI can be guesswork or subjective at best. Throw in other classifications that attempt to assign value or priority to product enhancements such as market growth features, competitive, customer satisfaction, contractual commitment, etc. and this exercise can turn into something so convoluted it’s not worth the hassle. Worse yet, it’s often difficult to make a direct connection to revenue or market share after new enhancements are released to market.

The holy grail of corporate focus is the alignment of product direction, sales, marketing and operations to a common set of priorities that put the collective weight of the company behind a few top-priority initiatives with the highest payback for the organization as a whole.

It’s not a dirty job, but someone has to do it!