Product Marketing Alliance

THIS is great Product Marketing 🔥 Compare these two scenarios Scenario 1) You read this on the Bentley website Bentley's description of what they call: "Paint Protection Film" “When heat is applied, any fine scratches and swirl marks will be removed, ensuring your car’s exterior finish remains as good as it was the day it left the factory" VS Scenario 2) You watch this in practice With spray paint and fire... Which one is going to stick in your memory? Duh right? Friendly reminder: Your features need more showmanship If a lux brand like Bentley can push the envelope Then so can you ✌️

Want better messaging? Try Emma Stratton 's VBF framework Emma runs Punchy: A consulting and training firm that helps fast-growing B2B tech companies win on positioning and messaging. AKA "Messaging that's as awesome as your technology" Quick story for you PMMs. This was from Emma's biotech startup days: 3 ML prodigies built revolutionary cancer diagnostics. The CTO was nineteen years old. Their pitch? "Cloud storage! Big data analytics!" Emma's reaction? "Meh" What ACTUALLY mattered to their customers? 1. Doctors could collaborate in real time 2. AI caught cancer patterns human eyes missed 3. Patients got faster, more accurate diagnoses So. How can YOU use it? Here's a simple breakdown: The VBF Rule (Value Benefit Feature) 1) VALUE FIRST The big outcome people actually want Example: "Fix issues before customers notice" Not: "Our intuitive dashboard..." 2) BENEFIT SECOND The superpower they'll get Example: "See your entire stack's performance" Not: "Using our consolidated data..." 3) FEATURE LAST The tech that makes it possible Example: "...in one dashboard" Not: "Leveraging our proprietary algorithm..." -- P.S. Make sure you give Emma a follow btw!

Early bird pricing for PMM Festival New York ends TODAY at midnight. 👀 And before you say "I'll look at it later", later is how you end up paying more. July 8 at Convene, 30 Hudson Yards. One full day built around participation. From live messaging challenges, AI workshops, Career Q&As to honest conversations with PMM leaders from Spotify, Google, IBM, Intuit, Reddit, and more. Oh, and your ticket gets you into 4 other GTM tracks in the same building. CS. RevOps. Sales Enablement. PLG. Hop between rooms. Build your own day. No fixed schedule, no missing out. Today's when the price goes up. You know what to do. 🎟️ Grab your early bird ticket → https://lnkd.in/egCF5MUp P.S. Not sure if the agenda is right for you? We built a quiz that maps your conference style to a personalised festival day. Just take 2 minutes. 👉 Find your festival identity: https://lnkd.in/ejA3j5BP

I want to be straight with you. If you’re at a typical mid-market SaaS company, your CEO probably has a few thousand LinkedIn followers and posts twice a year. Your VP Sales thinks LinkedIn is for outreach. Your engineers don’t post anything at all. So when everyone’s talking about people-led marketing - Lovable, Cursor, exec influencer programs, founder voices doing more brand work than the company account - is any of this relevant to you? The answer is yes. Because the underlying shift is happening regardless of whether your company is set up for it. More buyer attention is moving to human-led channels - LinkedIn feeds, podcasts, communities. Brand pages still matter, but they're increasingly the validation step, not the discovery one. The question to ask: how do we get people-led benefit with who we actually have in the company - or who we can find? That’s a PMM job. Let me unpack it.

Full circle innovation ♻️ Quick story for you: I've talked to PMMs from a few companies over the last year who have seen their entire department get gutted and replaced with AI where leadership feel that AI can confidently manage this work now. Then a few months later... The lagging indicators are no longer lagging. They're full blown red and KPIs are way way down. In a panic frenzy, they post a handful of jobs. Recruiting back the PMMs and marketers they exited. We've seen it happen with sales at AI companies claiming the "AI SDR" has solved it all and will generate leads 24/7. We've seen it happen with engineers. And we will continue to see this trend play out. Here's the part I think a lot of executives have lost the plot on: AI shoots for the average. Thats how the technology works. You're getting an output that is the mean. Which means when every company in your category is running their positioning through the same model, prompting it in roughly the same ways, feeding it roughly the same competitor pages... you all end up converging on the same homepage. Same hero copy structure. Same three pillar value prop. Same "we believe" intro paragraph. Even if you customize the prompts. Even if you fine tune on your own data. The underlying framework producing the output is still the same framework everyone else is using. So where does the edge actually come from? This line is famous for a reason: Be different, not better. Better puts you in a head to head comparison cycle where you're evaluated against the category leader on their terms. Different puts you in your own category where buyers evaluate you on a separate level of merit entirely. And differentiation in positioning comes from something AI fundamentally cannot replicate at scale. Every human PMM has their own independent experience, their own history, their own set of customer conversations that shaped how they think about the problem. That one to one lived context is what produces messaging that doesn't pattern match to the rest of the category. It shows up in the small stuff. The phrasing that feels slightly off rhythm in a good way. The way an analogy lands because it came from a real conversation. The point of view that has a person behind it. When buyers land on your page, they're picking up signals you don't even realize you're sending. Subconsciously they're going "this feels like the other 4 vendors I just looked at" or "wait, this one sounds like an actual person wrote it" That second reaction is the one that converts. The companies that win the next 2 years won't be the ones who automated positioning the fastest. They'll be the ones who realized positioning was one of the few remaining places where being human is the actual moat. Invest in your PMMs. Invest in your creatives. They really freaking matter and always will ✌️

This Chipotle launch post got 12,000+ likes With a timeline drawn in paint 😂 Friendly reminder: We're entering a new age of authenticity. The really polished AI launch designs? They're getting ignored real quick. I've said it before... And I'll keep saying it... Stop. Doing. Boring. Launches. I bet you can picture the EXACT type of launch post that I'm talking about. It's a kind of abstract art blog style thumbnail. But you can tell that it was overly finessed. AKA... Layer 300 in Figma was bumped 30 times back and forth to get the exact right alignment. You can tell it had multiple stakeholders and different touches because it's generically corporate. It probably has a stock photo of someone looking slightly to the left, with a laptop, some software in the background, abstract colors and lines on top, and a logo in the bottom right. Oh and the visual? Ya it says absolutely nothing about the launch. VS Now imagine if you had channeled a little bit of this new, simplistic age of authenticity energy like Chipotle lowkey did in paint with this. (it was prob Canva but paint makes the joke better) You'd probably have gotten 10 to 100X the engagement. That isn't to say that there isn't an important place for premium design as a credibility signal to show that you're a serious brand. But your launches need to make your audience feel something. You don't have to do sketch comedy or lo fi images like this, but look at brands like SURREAL They've made slapstick style B2B humor their signature look for launches. Not only are they faster to produce creatively and easier to iterate on, but people love them. It's the only cereal I've ever seen that more marketers love than anyone else haha. That's why I'm a big fan of getting people on your team to do UGC style content where they're reacting to your launches. Connect with your audience authentically. That's what it's all about. So the next time you're doing a launch... Consider asking your team: "What can we do in MS Paint?" Channel that inner authentic energy. The current AI era calls for it ✌️

AI is brilliant at sounding right. Whether it IS right is a different problem. Run your entire competitive strategy on scraped web data, G2 reviews, and whatever an LLM could find on LinkedIn - and this is what you end up with: → A battlecard that sounds like your competitor's homepage (because it is) → "Top objections" pulled from public reviews, not the buyer sitting across from your AE → "Key differentiators" your prospect has heard four times this week from four different vendors → "Discovery questions" written for a hypothetical buyer, not the one in front of you → No idea why your champion lost internal air cover last Thursday → No idea that the prospect's CTO already tried your competitor at their last company and hated it Good competitive intel has always come from the same place: real conversations with buyers, users, and competitors. The stuff that isn't scrapeable. That's what HelloInfo does. Human-led win, loss, and competitive research, run by people whose full-time job is getting buyers to tell the truth: ✅ Why your buyer's CFO actually said no ✅ What your competitor did in the room you weren't in ✅ The "we love it" reaction in the demo that meant nothing ✅ The procurement quirk that turned a 6-week deal into a 6-month one That kind of detail comes from people. From conversations buyers will only open up in when they're talking to someone who isn't trying to sell them anything. Get the inputs right and AI can do plenty with them - format the battlecard, draft the talk track, speed up the prep. But getting them right still takes a human in the room with the buyer. That part hasn't changed.

MAXHUB , SoCal Edition🌴

IYKYK 😂 A LOT has changed in Product Marketing. So we asked Anne van der Kammen and Steven Schroeyens for their POV on rethinking PMMs role in SaaS. Their breakdown for you: 1) OLD vs NEW Product Marketing Old - Execution mindset, limited strategic influence - "Make the slides look pretty" - Unclear ownership of customer journey - All of the work, none of the targets VS New - Strategic partner driving customer insights - Cross-functional alignment champion - Clear ownership across entire customer journey - Direct impact on product success metrics 2) "Why did everything change?" Remember December 2021? It changed the SaaS landscape pretty quickly: - VCs stopped throwing money at growth-at-all-costs - Marketing budgets got slashed but expectations stayed sky-high - Companies realized burning cash on acquisition wasn't sustainable The old playbook of "spend whatever it takes to acquire customers" died. But most companies just tried to do the same things with less money. Spoiler alert: It didn't work. So, what did work? 3) "The Revenue Factory" model arrives Enter Jacco van der Kooij's Revenue Factory model. Companies pivoted to this new model - Focus on compound growth from existing customers - Build your entire operation around customer impact - Measure success across the full customer journey, not just acquisition Expansion became a higher priority metric. But many marketing teams were still measured on TOFU... (MQLs, pipeline, etc but were disconnected from post deal metrics) Which is why PMM is soo important. 4) "Where does Product Marketing fit in?" PMM is the ONLY function beside RevOps... That spans the entire customer journey. Think about that. You need PMMs who can... - Deeply understands customer impact through qualitative research - Align teams around customer value, not just features - Connect product success to specific revenue outcomes - Bridge the gap between promise and delivery AKA 1. Drive qualitative customer research 2. Own cross functional alignment 3. Focus on customer lifetime value 4. Connect product success to revenue That's the future of PMM in 2026 and beyond. -- P.S. What else would you add PMMs? Make sure you give Anne and Steven a follow btw!