Playing to Win: Why Product Marketing Is Business Strategy
How Roger Martin’s strategy framework reveals the critical role of product marketing in business success
WRITTEN By Fluvio consultant, John Emmitt
The role of product marketing runs the constant risk of being seen as tactical. The function may be equated to doing messaging, or managing the product launch process, or even doing content marketing. However, many organizations have elevated the role of product marketing to be much more strategic. It’s no longer (only) about building a new webpage, battlecard or one-pager; it’s about how to drive business growth. This is where product marketing aligns with and becomes one with business strategy.
Roger Martin, co-author of the book, Playing to Win, How Strategy Really Works, has developed a “strategy cascade” that consists of 5 interconnected questions:
What is our winning aspiration?
Where will we play?
How will we win?
What capabilities must we have?
What management systems do we need?
We’ll see that product marketing plays a key role in answering each of these questions. As a result, the most successful companies – the ones that win– have realized that product marketing is critical to setting the strategic direction of the business.
The Playing to Win Framework — A Quick Recap
Let’s take a closer look at the strategy cascade questions.
What is our winning aspiration? The answer to this question is not only about what you want your company to be, but why. As Simon Sinek says, “start with why.” Why does your business exist, what is your purpose? For Fluvio, our “why” is to help technology companies accelerate growth. Our winning aspiration could be “we want to be the best product marketing consulting firm for B2B tech companies, to help them accelerate growth.” Winning is a key element of your aspiration – if you are not winning, you don’t have a sustainable business over the long term.
Where will we play? This question defines the market you will go after and how you’ll approach that market. This could be a particular market vertical, a geographic region, business versus consumer, online or physical store, and/or direct sales versus channel sales. This is your playing field.
How will we win? This question is about how you will win in your chosen market. What value will you deliver to your customers and how will you beat the competition? What is your competitive advantage? As Roger Martin says– “There are only two sources of competitive advantage: to operate with sustainably lower costs or to differentiate by offering a significantly better product or service” (compared to your competition).
What capabilities must we have? The answer to this question is about the strategic capabilities your business needs to win in your chosen market. For a B2B SaaS company, this could include having top-notch software engineering and UX design capabilities, as well as a strong enterprise sales team (if that’s your target market and sales motion), for example. It’s not just about having a certain set of differentiated product features today, but having the ability to develop new capabilities, before your competitors do, on an ongoing basis.
What management systems do we need? This question helps define the management structures needed to support the strategy. This includes systems to track and measure performance (KPIs), business systems to execute various functions – such as CRM, Marketing Automation, accounting,IT, and budgeting processes.
In the next section, we’ll take a look at how product marketing plays a key role in answering all of these questions.
Mapping Product Marketing to Business Strategy
Winning Aspiration → PMM as Company Positioner
Product marketing defines the company’s positioning, including identifying your main competitors, your competitive differentiators, the business value of your differentiated capabilities, your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and the market category that you best fit into. (Thank you April Dunford).
Your positioning statement describes what you do/what you provide, for whom, and the value customers derive from your product or service that no one else can deliver. Your positioning defines who you are or what you want to be.
Where to Play → PMM as Market Identifier
Product marketing is often called upon to:
Research and quantify TAM/SAM/SOM to establish a good understanding of your market opportunity.
Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – market verticals, business demographics (number of employees/staff, revenue, operating budget, geographies), etc.
Create profiles of your target Personas – PMM performs research to identify target buyers, users and influencers that would commonly be involved in making the buying decision for products or services like yours.
Perform Win/Loss analysis to validate the market selection.
How to Win → PMM as Differentiation Strategist
Product marketing is instrumental in:
Understanding the competitive landscape and defining your differentiation – the value that your product or service delivers that competitors either can’t or won’t replicate. Remember, there are only two sources of competitive advantage: to operate with sustainably lower costs or to differentiate by offering a significantly better product or service relative to your competition. Most SaaS companies have similar cost structures, so if you’re in that space, a differentiation strategy is more likely to be the approach you’ll have to take.
Building messaging frameworks that define the key messaging pillars that help GTM teams consistently tell the story about your differentiated solution.
Creating the company and product narrative that articulates unique value and drives demand.
Capabilities Required → PMM as Roadmap Visionary & Sales Enabler
There are two key areas where product marketing contributes to capabilities required for strategy success:
Product marketing should work closely with the product management team to help drive the product roadmap vision – what your dev team should build next. PMM provides critical input to this process because they often perform Voice of Customer (VoC) research. VoC feedback helps identify customer challenges and pain points that can potentially be solved by your product. It can also tell you what not to build – sometimes, what the internal team thinks is a good product capability to develop turns out to be of little interest to your customers.
Enablement is another area where product marketing contributes to required capabilities. This could involve both sales and customer success enablement and may include creation of training materials (decks), sales collateral, talking points and objection handling documents. Enablement is a critical part of building a strong GTM team.
Management Systems → PMM as Feedback Loop Creator – Metrics and KPIs
As mentioned earlier, one important aspect of having the right management systems in place to support your strategy is having the ability to track and measure performance (KPIs). Product marketing should define the set of KPIs that are tracked to ensure GTM success– conversion ratios, win/loss ratios, churn / retention rates, NRR, CAC, LTV, etc. Only by tracking performance can your organization course-correct if you aren’t hitting your targets.
As we can see, product marketing can and should play a critical role in all five questions in the Playing to Win strategy cascade. Those organizations that leverage product marketing to help define and drive business strategy are the ones that will win in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace.
If your company needs help defining its business strategy or assistance with any aspect of GTM, reach out to us at Fluvio – we’re here to help!