Signs You Need to Invest in Your Product Marketing
Ten reasons that it might be time to up your PMM game
My work with The Product Marketer has led to a lot of conversations with business owners, CMOs, and PMMs across Europe about how Product Marketing is going at their companies. And I’m struck by a few themes:
Everyone has a slightly different view of what Product Marketing should be for their business.
Many are behind on hiring and need a PMM or Head of Product Marketing yesterday.
Even when they are hiring, most companies aren’t investing enough in Product Marketing to sufficiently support their growth goals.
If you’re reading this, chances are you already understand the importance of Product Marketing. So instead of me preaching to the choir, here’s a post for you to share with your CPO, CMO, or whoever needs convincing, that now might be the time to raise your Product Marketing game.
Signs You Need to Invest in Your Product Marketing
1. No one can agree on who your ideal customer is
It’s surprising how often companies lack alignment on their target customer. The knowledge can end up living in silos.
User Research or Customer Support might know the customer well, but it’s not shared widely across the business. A sales rep might understand their own customer segment deeply but not the broader set of profiles that the company sells to.
A PMM can introduce an Audience Framework. A single source of truth that gives you:
Holistic segmentation based on Total Addressable Market.
Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) for each segment.
Personas that bring ICPs to life.
Positioning and messaging for each persona, ensuring consistency across the business.
2. Marketing and Sales don’t know what’s on the product roadmap
If your product team isn’t regularly engaging with commercial teams, that’s a clear sign you need Product Marketing.
PMMs bridge the gap between product and go-to-market teams, ensuring:
Alignment on product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
Awareness of release dates and launch plans.
Stronger collaboration across sales, marketing, and customer success.
3. Your product team isn’t aware of what the competition is doing
It’s easy for product teams to operate in a vacuum, focusing on their own roadmap and existing customer base. While being customer-obsessed should definitely be the top priority, being competitor-aware is a close second.
A strong competitive intelligence programme - led by Product Marketing -provides:
Strategic insights to help product teams make informed decisions.
Tactical intelligence to arm marketing and sales with effective messaging.
High-level summaries for updating C-suite and investors.
4. You don’t know why you’re losing deals
Without a structured system, deal-loss reasons can feel anecdotal, with product gaps often taking the blame.
Product Marketing can implement a win-loss analysis programme that:
Gathers direct feedback from prospects and customers.
Surfaces insights on why deals are won or lost.
Helps inform sales strategy, pricing, and product development.
Takes an objective, data-driven view on why you’re losing deals.
5. There’s an endless debate about product direction
At most tech companies, everybody has a view on the product strategy, from what features to build, to which customers segments to prioritise. This is really healthy. But at some point you need to break through the debate and move forward.
Without clear insights, these questions lead to internal gridlock. Product Marketing can provide a data-driven perspective that considers customer needs, market dynamics, and business goals - helping teams make better, faster decisions.
6. No one owns positioning and messaging
Positioning is one of those concepts everyone agrees is crucial, yet very few organisations have a clear owner for it.
A PMM ensures that positioning and messaging:
Are structured, insight-driven, and clearly documented.
Align internal teams around a shared narrative.
Differentiate the product in a way that actually resonates with customers.
7. Sales doesn’t have a compelling story
In the early days of a startup, when founders and early sales reps drive growth, there’s often little need for a formal sales narrative. Everyone does their own thing, perhaps adapting the founder’s pitch from the early days of growth.
But as you scale (especially when moving upmarket) you need consistency.
Product Marketing can help craft a clear, compelling sales narrative. The bread and butter of a B2B PMM is building sales enablement collateral that empowers the sales team to close more deals. When done well, the relationship between Product Marketing and Sales can be one of the most impactful partnerships in the whole company.
8. Your product launches are falling flat
Launching a product isn’t just about hitting the release button and waiting for the masses to arrive (also known as the Field of Dreams approach.) If recent launches haven’t matched your expectations, it’s definitely time to start investing in Product Marketing or rethinking how you approach this function.
A PMM-led launch process ensures:
All teams are bought in on positioning and messaging before launch.
Marketing, sales, and customer success are briefed and ready to amplify the release well ahead of time.
A structured launch framework that optimises for the metrics you’re going after on a particular release.
9. Customers don’t know what’s new
A product team that ships regularly is a beautiful thing, but it creates a problem to solve for. How do you ensure customers know about all your new releases?
If adoption is lower than expected, it could be a sign that Product Marketing isn’t playing a strong enough role in:
Customer communication (release notes, in-app messaging, email campaigns).
Education and enablement (webinars, help centre content, video tutorials).
Driving engagement and usage (segmented adoption campaigns).
Product Marketing doesn’t need to lead these activities (it’s always best to have these run by channel owners) but it’s essential to have Product Marketing plugged in to all your customer-facing comms, to make sure new products are finding the right customers.
10. Your retention rates aren’t where they should be
Business growth is, of course, not just just about acquisition. Retention is a critical piece of the puzzle that Product Marketing can help with:
Helping identify where customers are dropping off and why.
Creating a feedback loop between product and commercial teams to help tackle product gaps and fixes.
Crafting messaging that reinforces value post-signup.
Partnering with Customer Success teams to inform targeted retention campaigns.
Time to Invest?
If one (or more) of these signs rings true for you, it’s probably time to invest in Product Marketing. Whether that means hiring your first PMM, building out the team, or giving Product Marketing a stronger voice internally, you’ll likely see a big impact - and quickly.
Need help making the case? Feel free to share this post with your leadership team - or reply to this email if you'd to chat more about it.
Cheers! 👋