Podcast: Running a product marketing focused agency
Our co-founder, Raechel Lambert, was a guest on Product Marketing Life Podcast, hosted by Mark Assini where they discuss how product marketing changes across company stages and industries, as well as what it's like running a product marketing-focused agency, and how that differs from running product marketing in-house.
Episode Highlights:
02:30 Raechel Lambert’s career started in finance and later transitioned into product marketing
05:26 Skills that can be leveraged and translated into product marketing
06:56 Raechel's experience from joining Intercom's product marketing in the early days (she was the fifth-ever pmm)
09:25 Olivine's specific focus on Product Marketing
11:44 When Raechel realized product marketing was going to be a hot area of marketing
15:00 Benefits of working with a product marketing agency for B2B SaaS companies
18:16 How we work with existing in-house product marketing teams
20:03 Agencies have a bad reputation
23:21 How product marketing changes across company stages and industries
29:47 Sometimes working with an agency isn’t the best option
32:22 Product marketing skills that are useful no matter the company stage or industry
36:04 Join sales calls to really understand customers (Envoy example)
39:13 What companies that reach out to Olivine are typically looking for
42:26 Dream client? Doing good and doing well: Safer
Episode Transcript:
0:00 Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Product Marketing Life Podcast brought to you by the Product Marketing Alliance. I'm your host, Mark Assini, Product Marketing Manager at Jobber. As part of this series, I'm chatting with PMMs all over the world about a product marketing topic of their choice.
00:17 On this week's episode, I'm joined by Raechel Lambert, co-founder and VP of Product Marketing at Olivine. Raechel held a variety of product marketing related roles throughout her career. In fact, she was one of the first Product Marketers to join Intercom in its early years. Since then, Raechel's launched Olivine Marketing, a full-stack product marketing agency that helps growth stage B2B SaaS companies with product marketing strategy, branding in websites as well as sales enablement. They also have two sister brands, Olivine Films, which produces cinematic high-impact marketing videos, and The Founder's Marketing Playbook, which is their self-service strategy program for early-stage founders.
00:51 During our chat, Raechel and I discussed how product marketing can change across different companies, depending on their stage as well as their industry. We also talked about what it's like running a product marketing focused agency and how it differs from running product marketing in-house, and why a company might choose to partner with an agency like Olivine versus launching the function internally.
01:10 But before we get into my conversation with Raechel, I've got some exciting news from the Product Marketing Alliance to share with you. Are you wondering how to align the product marketing function at your organization? Do your internal teams have little or no understanding of what product marketing is and the benefits you bring to the fore? Are you sick of being misunderstood? Product Marketing Alliance’s brand new book Misunderstood features firsthand knowledge, techniques and key settings to help you demystify product marketing, elevate the function and gain the recognition you and fellow PMMs deserve.
01:39 Learn how to effectively communicate the value you bring to key processes such as positioning, personas, segmentation, OKRs and gain supplementary intel from the likes of G2, Hotjar, Intercom, Zendesk, Adobe and Drift. Misunderstood is packed with takeaways that propel the value of your role and the overall importance of the PMM function, and it isn't to be missed. Get your copy at pmmalliance.co/misunderstood. All right, with out of the way, let's get into it.
02:09 Hey Raechel, how's it going?
02:11 Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me.
02:14 That's great. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate you joining me today, and I was super excited to chat with you.
02:19 Yeah, me too. It should be fun.
02:20 Awesome. So before we get into it, it'd be great if you could give our listeners a quick overview of your career so far up to where you are now with Olivine.
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Raechel Lambert’s career started in finance and later transitioned into product marketing
02:30 Oh, right. I started my career in finance, I studied Finance and Economics in college, and I worked in the finance industry for six years before moving from Boston to San Francisco. I joined a tech startup called Sauce Labs. I was a finance manager there. I did not really enjoy finance and was not particularly good at it. Early in my career, I thought that was just being an adult in life and you just hate your job and just suck it up and get over it. But while I was at Sauce Labs, I was kind of seeing what other people were doing and I was really interested in marketing.
3:06 I've always been really creative and a great writer, so I started to gravitate towards that. There was a CMO at Sauce Labs who was moving on to a different company, and he invited me to join him as a marketer and just get my feet wet. Figure out what was what. Very general marketing. No specific area of expertise. It was doomed to fail. We all got laid off pretty soon after and I was afraid I'd have to go back to finance because I'd only been in marketing for six months.
03:37 But I kind of threw a Hail Mary, and I had heard about this new startup that seemed pretty hot called Intercom, and they had a product marketing role open. So despite being laid off, I put all my eggs in one basket and only applied to that job. Which probably wasn't wise, but luckily it worked out. I got the job there and was on a really talented team of product marketers at Intercom for three years. I launched two products: Operator, which is the bot in the messenger and then the Help Center articles product.
04:12 After that, I tried going a little bit back to my roots and was the Head of Marketing at a fintech startup, but just wasn't a great fit. So I kind of went rogue and started freelancing on my own and ended up making more money and really liking grocery shopping during the day when everyone else was at work. So I stuck with that for a while and then my co-founder at Olivine, Ashley Wilson, her and I had met in 2012 at Sauce Labs, she'd been freelancing as well, and we joined forces to form Olivine, started out with just her me and a couple of designers, and now we're a team of 17 people all over the world.
04:49 That's incredible. I always find the journeys that the guests that I have on the show go through. I've had a couple mentioned that they started in industries like finance or accounting, and they've made the switch. And what they find so fascinating is what skills they find they're able to leverage and translate into the world of product marketing. So I'm curious, even in the first six months you mentioned at Sauce Labs and then ultimately at Intercom, were there any skills you're able to pull back on from your time in finance that you found really helped you and really helped you progress as quickly as you did?
Skills that can be leveraged and translated into product marketing
05:26 Totally. Product marketers all come from different backgrounds. When I was emceeing the Product Marketing Alliance conference, I always asked this and I got amazing answers. One person was even a firefighter before and I thought that was epic. I think finance translates more than one might think, very analytical, really comfortable looking at data, pricing strategy. All that came in handy, and also just tying my work and my value to business goals and really caring about driving revenue and driving growth.
06:02 You know, sometimes marketing can be a little wishy-washy. And so I think leaders really appreciate my kind of revenue-oriented mindset. Also, project management and dealing with lots of different people. Product marketers have a lot to do, and they can have a lot of influence because they don't usually have a lot of direct reports. So be able to project manage big projects that have a lot of dependencies. I think that translates super wild to product marketing.
06:32 I definitely agree with you there. And I'm curious, what was it like being very early on in your product marketing career at a company like Intercom that now is huge? I think almost every product marketer at some point has come across Intercom, if they're not an active customer themselves. What was it like being part of that team in the early days, if you wouldn't mind sharing?
Raechel's experience from joining Intercom's product marketing in the early days (she was the fifth-ever pmm)
06:56 Oh, it was exhilarating and humbling. Everyone there was incredibly smart. I came in really wide eyed and really eager to learn. I'd gotten to the point in my finance career where it felt like I should know things. People came to me and if I didn't know the answer, I'd tell them I was busy and that I'd get back to them. But since I was coming into marketing as a beginner and everyone knew that, I didn't hide that, I really dropped my ego and just took a learner's mindset and was just like “I don't know what that is. Please, tell me what that is” and really tried to learn as much as I could.
07:37 And the team was incredible. A bunch of the PMMs that work there came from [big companies], my boss at the time, he came from Atlassian. After he left Intercom, he went to Loom. I had PMMs from New Relic. Really impressive people. I learned a lot from them. And we were a pretty tight knit crew, a really small team, especially in the early days at Intercom. So yeah, it was humbling and invigorating all at the same time. It was a great experience. I really loved working at Intercom and I would totally do it all over again. It was probably the best learning experience of my life.
08:16 That's really great to hear. I feel like a lot of product marketers as they [are part] of these new teams, smaller teams, more agile teams and having that kind of learning mentality only helps you accelerate your growth, not just within that company in your career, that much faster. So I'm sure the experience that you had in Intercom is one that a lot of product marketers have experienced themselves or actively pursued. I know that's something that I myself have looked to pursue in my current role, and it's definitely paid off in a lot of ways already in the short amount of time that I've been with my current team. So, I think that's a great approach and you picked a great company to start with. Intercom, like I said, is pretty massive at this point. So hats off there.
08:56 So aside from, like you mentioned, the ability to go grocery shopping in the middle of the day and take care of things while everybody else is working, I'm curious: what was the inspiration behind Olivine? I mean, I personally never come across an agency so focused on product marketing, like Olivine is. Was there a moment? Was there a specific gap in the market that you identified that made you realize “Hey, this is something that we can really make a go of and could turn into a fully fledged agency and employ a good sized team”?
Olivine's specific focus on Product Marketing
09:25 I really credit that to Ashley Wilson, the OG co-founder of Olivine. After her time at Sauce Labs, she was doing independent marketing consultancy for developer tools in the developer space. And it was really deep product marketing, really needed to understand the product and translate that into value for prospects and customers. And so she was already kind of down that road. And then when I started freelancing after my experience at Intercom, I was very specific about what kind of freelancing I was going to be doing, it was going to be product marketing. And we have had a lot of success there.
10:08 I think there's a million branding agencies and ad agencies, and we are very specific about what we do and what we don't do. When people reach out to us and it sounds like they want more generic marketing campaigns or demand gen stuff, we say “Sorry, we don't do that”. But if you want positioning, messaging, pricing strategy, you want to launch a product and make a big splash, you want to start moving to solution selling and train your sales team, we are the ones for you. We're very specific and that's kind of perpetuated itself, and we tend to attract really product-focused product-first companies and we only work in the B2B SaaS space, so we don't do any consumer products.
10:53 I myself have spent some time in the agency world and I too couldn't agree more that there are millions of branding and ad agencies out there, and it seems like a lot of them try to do everything for everyone. And I can imagine that part of why Olivine has been so successful is because you have been so focused. I think it's incredible that you've been able to say, “Hey, we're only going to work with B2B SaaS companies. We're going to be hyper focused on product marketing” and you're not afraid to turn away clients who might not necessarily fit with what you want to do. I think that's really refreshing in the agency world, especially agencies. When they start out, they just want to get as many clients as possible, even if it's not necessarily the best fit. So I applaud you for that, and it obviously speaks to the success that Olivine has experienced so far, so early on in its life.
When Raechel realized product marketing was going to be a hot area of marketing
11:44 We've been lucky too. My first hint of when product marketing was really going to become a thing (which I feel like it's become a thing in the past five years or so) was when I was an Intercom, we all had to write a quarterly blog post. It was just a requirement from the content marketing team to help the SEO engine and didn't really think much about it. But I wrote about my experience of launching the Help Center product, and the whole premise of the piece was how product marketing helps build products. And it’s basically about trying to find that unique, differentiated story in the market when you can't win on features, how do you go to market with that? And how does the story influence what you build and what not?
12:32 For many years, the blog post ranked number one in Google search for the term Product Marketing. And I was like “Whoa”. People are really interested in this, but there's not a lot going on in this space. The fact that someone like me, a new two year end product marketer can rank number one. Now, granted, much smarter people have come along and written content, and now that ranks. But that was my first hint like, “Oh, there's something here”. And not to say it went viral in the sense of a consumer space. But like in the small world of Silicon Valley B2B SaaS, it did pretty well. I think product focused companies really want their marketing team to understand their product and be able to translate that into value and sometimes brand agencies or ad agencies don't take the time, or they don't have the technical expertise to understand it.
13:28 It's funny you bring up the quarterly blog post at Intercom because it's actually one of those blog posts that you wrote where I came across your profile for the first time and then I came across you again on LinkedIn as someone, a third degree or second degree connection, had shared a post that you had written with Olivine. Even to this day, those posts are still generating a lot of buzz and awareness for you, which is great.
13:54 I had no idea that writing that blog post was going to help me eat for a really long time when I wrote it. But that's how I landed my first freelancing clients: people who followed the Twitter link or found me on LinkedIn and reached out. But, when I was writing it, I had no idea that it would feed me for a long time.
14:14 Well, there you go. There are product marketers, myself included, who moan about being targeted as glorified blog post writers, you know, suck it up. Do it. Look at how well it could turn out for you in the long term.
14:27 Totally, totally.
14:29 So on the topic of Olivine, because I just find this part of this merging of two worlds that I've very much been exposed to: product marketing and agencies. I'm curious, what in your mind and your perspective, are the benefits for a B2B SaaS company and working with an agency like yours, as opposed to bringing in product marketing in-house, especially if they are still very early on in their own development as an organization. What are some of the reasons why working with an agency like yours would be the way to go?
Benefits of working with a product marketing agency for B2B SaaS companies
15:00 It's not for everyone. I've had a few people tell me “I would never in a million years outsource the most strategic marketing to an agency”, and I totally get that. That said, we have an incredible team of people who've worked at some of the top companies. I've worked at Intercom. We have people who worked at Salesforce, Zendesk. Because we aren't in-house long term, we really get to see how product marketing is done and what works and what doesn't across a ton of different companies and industries, and we work with early stage to IPO, we’ve had two publicly traded clients, ServiceNow and now Heartland, and we’ve worked a lot in the growth stage. Companies like Envoy, Gladly, Eventbrite, Diligent, Hired. We have experience in-house and through Olivine at a lot of different stages and then across a bunch of different industries, too. We’ve worked specifically in the developer tool space and the analytics fintech space and some other like workplace technology spaces, so we can help companies bring in some fresh frameworks and some best practices that we just know because we've been doing it and seeing them for a long time. That's one.
16:20 Another one is hiring is really freaking hard. We've been working with companies and they're like “OK, we're just going to work with you for a little bit until we hire our first product marketer”. And then a year later, they haven't placed a team, so it was a good thing we were there getting something done because hiring is just very time consuming.
16:40 And the last thing I was going to add is we bring fresh eyes to challenge the status quo of your company and some of the thoughts that you kind of get in these ruts about “This is who we are. This is how we're positioning ourselves and this is how we're messaging ourselves”. And so sometimes an outside voice can really bring people to the table with kind of a neutrality. We can bring some fresh eyes, challenge things, and drive some alignment. Sometimes it goes down to: “OK, this is what you're saying. This is what we think you mean. Is that what you mean?” And they're like “No”. OK, then we're going to have to rewrite that. So it’s about getting people out of their own ruts.
17:22 Especially with early stage companies. A lot of messaging or positioning just came from a CEO fever dream: they had a dream and they woke up the next morning “This is our new pitch deck” and they're very excited about it. But there is a formula to a lot of this stuff. And sure, everyone needs to add their own secret sauce and magic to it, but a lot of this stuff has been tried and true, and we can expose our clients to it.
17:47 I love that idea of the CEO fever dream, I feel like a lot of product marketers have probably had that experience. And I'm curious, of the clients that you've had so far, or maybe ones that you've come across in early conversations to partner with, have you worked with clients where they've already got an in-house product marketing team or at least one product marketer and they‘re just looking for that additional support that for whatever reason, they're just not able to find in-house?
How we work with existing in-house product marketing teams
18:16 Totally. Sometimes companies have a product marketer, but they're just one person, and the product marketer really wants some mentorship or coaching or just like a sounding board. It's not that they need a mentor per se, but just a sounding board to figure out if you feel crazy or not. Another thing is just muscle, pure muscle execution: data sheets and battle cards and product landing pages and sales pitch decks. When you're trying to go vertical or you're solution selling, that’s really time consuming. You can have people pitch in from across the org, but sometimes you just need a little bit of muscle.
19:00 But oftentimes we come in and there isn't a product marketer. They're just starting out their marketing and they've decided astutely, I might add, just start with product marketing. So that's wise. But then we've also worked with big companies. We worked with ServiceNow, a publicly traded company. They decided to launch and spin off a totally new brand and product and just hadn't been able to build that in-house team, even though they had lots of smart product marketers and marketing people under the main ServiceNow brand. So we just helped them execute that. Other times, the VPs of product marketing go on maternity leave and they just need someone to come in and help keep things organized and humming while they're gone.
19:43 Have you found, for the most part, that those product marketers or product marketing teams have been receptive to working with an outside agency? Because, in my own experience, not often, but in some cases there is some friction or some friction can arise between the in-house team and the agency team, especially if a lot of those skill sets or responsibilities overlap.
20:03 Totally, that happens. Politics is two people in a room, but usually the way we kick things off is we do a series of workshops that bring people from across the company, and I like to think that we prove our value pretty quickly where we're introducing new concepts or we're getting scratching under the surface or getting to a solution that they haven't been to before and they are like, “OK, then they thought out”. I find sometimes sales and product people are a little more untouchable. They're just busy and they're like, “who are these people?” Agencies have terrible reputations, and they don't want to talk to an agency. But I will say, we have a lot of example work on our website, and we've all worked at pretty impressive companies, so I think that helps. It’s definitely hard to break in at the beginning if you were just starting an agency or just starting to freelance from cold, but we've been at it for a little while. So I think it's getting easier.
Agencies have a bad reputation
20:03 For sure. Like you said, I feel like everybody at some point has either heard a story about a bad experience with an agency or has been burned by an agency themselves. And unfortunately, like you said, because there's so many of them there, the chances of that happening are higher than I think a lot of agencies would like to admit.
20:18 And sometimes I get blindsided by it because I have actually never worked with an agency, even though I run an agency, which is kind of dumb, I guess. But when I was at Sauce Labs, I worked in finance and Ashley was the Head of Marketing, and she dealt with all the agencies. So, I paid them, but I didn't interact with them. And then by the time I got to Intercom, Intercom had a very strict No agencies policy. I don't know how they did it, but literally everything was in-house. And then I freelanced, and then I started an agency. So sometimes I'm a little naive to the impressions or like bad reps the agencies can get.
22:00 And I also think we just operate differently than a normal agency. We like to really embed ourselves in a team, in a client team that we're working with, and we try to be like real partners. What that means is we might make a suggestion or share an idea that we're not the ones to execute. And that's OK. Someone else can do it. So sometimes I think people are a little surprised or find it a little refreshing that we don't quite operate like an agency. We really do care and we don't take on very many clients at a time. We like to go deep with a few clients, so we're not overworked. I have worked with dev agencies where you just got to be a squeaky wheel or nothing gets done. And that’s not how we operate. But yeah, I think sometimes I'm a little naive about agencies in general.
22:50 Now, that's totally fair, and obviously, based on what you're saying, it sounds like your clients have really appreciated that approach, not taking on too many at one time and really getting deep and being a partner. I'm sure that they appreciate that. And I think that is also evident in the range and variety of clients that you've worked with at various stages of growth and across different categories. So on that note, I'm curious, what have you seen in terms of differences between companies across those different categories and segments and stages of growth in their approach to product marketing?
How product marketing changes across company stages and industries
Product Marketing at early stage companies
23:21 I'm going to share about early stage, growth stage and enterprise companies. There are different focuses, opportunities and challenges at every stage. Early stage, and what I mean by early stage is pre-seed, maybe up to series A. The product marketing focus there is naming product naming, feature naming, positioning, messaging, finding that product market fit, early customer acquisition, trying to build customer relationships, onboarding, and making sure you keep the customers that you actually land. The opportunities in the early stage are pretty big. You can make a big impact on the org. You can have really tight relationships with product and sales. But there are challenges like a really small budget, and it's going to be DIY everything. You're going to be probably a one man band and have to do everything yourself with very little team support. So that's kind of the early stage that I've seen.
Product Marketing at growth stage companies
24:21 Then on the growth stage, and I'll call this series B through series D, your focus tends to shift to working with dimension or growth marketers. You're going to do product launches. You might be supporting a rebrand of the company. Pricing and packaging becomes really important. You'll have a lot more data available to you, so you'll be able to leverage that in your decisions and then you might start getting exposed to things like account based marketing. Or you'll be doing a lot of cross-selling, up-selling and focusing on reducing churn. And opportunities in the mid stage. I think mid-stage is really fun because there's a lot of opportunity, but a little more budget and support. So your hands aren't tied all the time. But opportunities in the growth stage are more resources and options for executing unique, splashy work. If you want to do something creative, you might have the budget and the manpower to do it. You still get to work closely with product and do strategic work that's really core to the business, and you can grow your personal brand in and out of the org. That was what happened with me in Intercom being able to write this blog post, and it kind of got me a little bit of notoriety in the PMM space.
25:30 Challenges are often or where does PMM fit in the company and how does it operate in the org? Bigger campaigns with more coordination are usually required, but PMM doesn't often control the time and goals of the contributors that they're leading to do a launch. So for example, when I was an Intercom and we launched Operator, which is the bot that lives in the messenger, I was keeping a list: there are 65 direct stakeholders that need to be informed and contributing, but none of them reported to me, so how do I influence those people to contribute and do things on time when I'm not their boss? So that can be a challenge. And then just keeping things aligned when so much is going on is another challenge of the growth stage.
Product Marketing at enterprise companies
26:18 And then for enterprise, I'm calling this after a series D publicly traded or someone or company gearing up for an IPO. It's usually all about segmentation, virtualization, sort of really focusing on certain industries or PMM maybe will focus on enterprise products versus early stage products. Or maybe they're focusing on a suite of products that are targeting the healthcare space or what have you. You're often dealing with acquisitions. So when I worked with Diligent, they hadt done 14 acquisitions in the past two years, and they needed to figure out how to tell one solution story from 14 companies and then get their sales work, who are all selling one product to now sell a suite in a couple of platforms. And that's very difficult.
27:06 Often sales training. When working with a really big, publicly traded company, they have a sales kickoff and it's 2000 people who are attending, and those are just the elite salespeople. So you have a lot of people to be thinking about in training. Also in the enterprise space, you might be thinking about new markets. Maybe companies are targeting US domestic, but they're trying to expand to Latin America. Maybe doing localization. Opportunities in the enterprise space is that you have a big brand recognition. Everybody knows who you are. You're well-funded, you're well staffed. You probably have to work life balance and a great total compensation package.
27:44 But the challenges are that there's a lot of bureaucracy. It makes work very slow, brand and legal have a lot of say on literally everything. There are some companies that are so far along that legal has to review every single landing page that goes out, every single email that goes out and, Holy hell, is that time consuming. And then working within existing paradigms and processes. At some of these big companies, people have been working there for a really long time. As a PMM like myself, who's kind of post digital transformation, I don't really know what digital transformation is because I've never worked at a company that wasn't already digital. So there can be a lot of challenges there. Finally, collaboration can get harder because there's just so many people and politics. That was long.
28:33 No, that’s incredibly helpful. I think that's such a great overview. And I think to any of our listeners who found that as informative as I just did, you've got a nice blog right up about exactly that topic: How Product Marketing changes at every company stage. So for anybody looking to learn more. Or even if they're considering what kind of company they themselves want to work at as a PMM I think that's an incredibly helpful framework to kind of get a sense of the types of opportunities and challenges they might face.
28:58 I know you also just launched a newsletter as well, which I recently subscribed to myself and I know the first one went out just a couple of weeks ago. For anybody looking to stay up to date with what the team at Olivine are doing or just get some great insight, like the insight you just shared with us just now, I’d definitely subscribe to that newsletter.
29:23 I'm curious as you were talking and listing out some of the challenges and opportunities, have you ever partnered with a client where they've approached you with a specific problem and challenge and you looked at it where they are relative to their own stage of growth and felt “Maybe this isn't really what you should be focusing on right now. Actually, you really should be focusing on this”? Of course, you don't have to name any names, but I'm curious if that's ever happened to you.
Sometimes working with an agency isn’t the best option
29:47 Yeah, a lot of early stage companies will come to us “We need a sales pitch deck”, and I'm like, “No, you need a positioning and messaging guide because we can't write a pitch deck for you until we know what the heck it is you've built and who you're selling to and why it's different”. So we usually force their hand and make them shift.
30:07 There have been companies that I've kind of talked them out of having an agency or hiring an agency because they have plenty of funding and they have deep pockets because they raised money, but they don't have the internal resources to support an agency. Or there's no alignment across the founders and they're burning cash with us because they aren't all on the same page. Or we have a lot of muscle to offer and get a lot of work done, but they don't have time to review the work. So then it all just stagnates and gets stuck. Or they have really high expectations about us understanding their product and their industry but if it is a very, very specialized space, we explain that no one knows your customers and your space and your product as well as you do. If you don't have the time to impart that to your team or to us, this is a waste of money. And, we're expensive. So you should just stop blowing money on this until you can get your own house in order. Because an agency can definitely help you with fresh frameworks and put some muscle behind something. But if you don't know what you're trying to accomplish, then I can't help you, and probably no one else can, you have to work that out in-house.
31:23 I think it's refreshing to hear that from someone who leads their own agency because, not in my own experiences and working at the agency that I worked at, but in observing other agencies and hearing stories, I think the focus is always on billable hours.
31:40 “Let me take your money”
31:43 Exactly, without necessarily considering, is this a good fit? Are we actually going to be able to deliver value or are we actually going to get work done? So it's great to hear that at Olivine it sounds like those conversations are happening all the time. And I'm sure again, your clients, either the ones that you sign, and the ones that you politely turn away are very appreciative of that.
32:00 Maybe, maybe.
32:02 At least they wouldn't tell you to your face if they weren't so. OK, so we just spend a little bit talking about the differences between some of the clients you've had and based on the various stages of growth that they are themselves at, I'm curious, what are some of the similarities that you've observed in working with such a wide range of companies yourself?
Product marketing skills that are useful no matter the company stage or industry
32:22 There's a few things. You know, for product marketing, especially, I see a lot of templates, I see a lot of blog posts, I see a lot of resources in courses out there. But I think that the real kind of juice for product marketing is the ability to build relationships and influence people. And the reason I say that is because product marketing sits at the intersection of product sales and marketing. And so many times you show up and they're like, “I don't know what you do”. And if you can't explain that well and how you are able to help them, it's just really hard to get anything done. And, like I said before, sometimes you're in charge of this really cross-functional work, strategically shifting positioning, messaging; you're working with executive leadership, you're working with sales, you're working with product. And if you can't convince people of your ideas or your new frameworks to try, if you can't influence people and communicate your ideas, you're really going to be stuck because I do feel that product marketing has that extra special sauce, otherwise you're just not going to get anywhere.
33:35 Another thing is just understanding the landscape, product and customers. A lot of people skip over this because they're busy and they show up at their first job, “OK, I have to prove my value and get something done and execute something. I'm going to announce this feature or whatever”. And definitely, no matter what industry I work in, if I take the time to understand who they are or what their product is, who their customers are, things just go a lot better.
34:07 Being a great writer. And this is my critique of growth marketers. I think growth marketing is also having a moment, and it's very intriguing. But I do often see growth marketers are not great writers and it really holds them back. Product marketers write all the time, sales decks, email campaigns, social media, you're just constantly writing. So being a great writer never hurts.
34:37 And lastly, being super organized to lead launches or whatever you're doing that's involving the whole company. If you're thinking about the end to end user experience, you're worth thinking about demand gen at the top of the funnel and you're working with the brand team. Coming down the line here, you're talking to like sales and first touch customers, onboarding customers. You know, you're working through the whole funnel, which means you're working through the whole organization. So if you can't get along with people and add value there, you're just going to be like dead in the water.
35:07 Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. As you were speaking, there was one point that really stood out to me because it's something that we as a team, in my current organization, are really thinking thoughtfully about. You mentioned understanding the landscape and product and the customers before just diving headfirst into things. We're talking about slowing down to speed dial, there's always going to be a need for specific resources or projects that need a lot of attention. But if as the product marketing team, you can't take the time to actually take a step back and think and do the research, talk to customers, understand the competition, your product and how you kind of compare, you might think that you're getting a lot of stuff done by crossing off those tactical things, but in the long term, you're really just never gaining the momentum. You need to truly add impact. So I really want to reiterate that point because I think you kind of hit the nail on the head with that one and again, it’s something I'm experiencing right now.
Join sales calls to really understanding customers (Envoy example)
36:04 To add a little anecdote, when I was working with Envoy, the workplace experience app, they had the visitor check-in and the rooms and deliveries, management and whatnot. I've been reading Sales reports, Sales trying to inform the marketing team about what was going on in the market, and they were saying that the average customer was a little bit old school, and it was new to technology, and they were saying it gently, probably even more gently than that, and I didn't really know what they meant, so I was kind of ignoring it, which was super crappy of me, but I just wasn't really tuned into that. And then I was sitting on this like spree of sales calls one week. And by the way, sitting on sales calls is like dating, you can't just meet the love of your life after one sales call, you have to listen to a lot of them. Sometimes PMMs think “I went to two and they weren't useful, so I'm never doing it again”. I'm “Well, you have got to do more”.
37:08 Anyway, this prospect was asking a question about the product release cycle and was asking this like, “Aha, gotcha” tone. And then they asked “So you make product updates every year, right?” And I'm thinking to myself “Yeah, we'll ship it to you in a box”. And it was kind of a flick moment about everything the sales team had been saying to me but I wasn't really understanding. I realized this person does not understand agile software development. And that product gets released every day, every week. And it totally changed my approach to messaging, onboarding materials. “Holy hell, someone doesn't realize that there's agile software development where things get deployed like weekly or daily. OK, that is good to know”.
38:02 I love that story. I think it's so representative of the fact that, like you said earlier on in our conversation, product marketing is kind of having its moment. It's a thing now, but it's also still a very young thing. And because I think a lot of product marketers tend to be millennials or younger generations that have always grown up with technology, I think to your point, we can take for granted that some of the customers we’re selling to are not digital natives, they're not as comfortable with technology as we might think they are. So I think that's a great story to remind us as product marketers not to take that kind of stuff for granted, because if your customer is really struggling, it's going to make your job that much harder if you're not acknowledging that. So I thank you for sharing that because I think often product marketers need to be reminded of that.
38:43 Awesome. I have one more question here about the work that you do at Olivine and how that kind of applies to your observations about product marketing. And that's around the type of companies that tend to seek you out and your services proactively. And obviously, you mentioned that you're very thoughtful about the type of clients that you take on and the type of work that you can do for them. But is there a pattern or a specific need that you've seen come up more often that you've been able to address as an agency?
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What companies that reach out to Olivine are typically looking for
39:13 I think product first companies come to us a lot because maybe they tried hiring a freelance marketer before and their product was very technical, and so they just really needed that extra expertise. That typically happens. And then companies struggling with positioning and messaging. I think a company who knows they're struggling with positioning and messaging is already way above and beyond, ahead of the game because some founders don't even really know what that is or why they need it.
39:53 I would pivot away from Olivine as an agency. Any company that's hiring product marketers in general tends to be a bit more product first. Maybe they understand that they really need someone to translate and communicate the value of what this is because it's not just like a social media app that just anyone can start using. It's a little bit more technical and understanding. And then buyers are just so much more savvy these days. They're not just buying whatever ad hits them first, they're pretty informed. And so I think companies will start seeing, “I'm trying to pitch my product, but no one really knows what it is”. And this happens a lot. They will come in with a new plan and give us this glossy pitch. And I think “Yeah, but what is it?” And if people are realizing they're having a hard time seeing that, they start trying to figure out who can help them solve this problem? And so it's often product marketers. So I think any company that's looking for product marketers already has an edge because they know that there's this kind of puzzle piece in the middle that they need to connect a bunch of different orgs.
41:10 And I think that only reinforces how important positioning and messaging really is to the success of an organization, I think to your point, a lot of founders may not understand that or even companies that are more mature and are at a certain stage of their life if they haven't had someone in-house or an agency like yours, come in and say “Hey, I don't really get what you're trying to say to me here. I’m sure in your head it makes sense, but when you say it out loud, you lose the entire room”. So if a company can't do that, get in a room and explain it to me, that's something that they need to be aware of, and it reinforces how important good positioning and messaging really is.
42:00 Well, Raechel, this has been a great conversation. I mean, I can keep talking to you about all things product marketing agency life, probably for the next several hours, but we'll call it here. And to do that, I'll ask you my last question, which is one that I ask all of my guests. And that's, if you could be a product marketer or even take on a client of any kind and work on a specific solution or product, what would it be and why?
Dream client? Doing good and doing well: Safer
42:26 I was having a “Oh, shoot” moment when I scrolled down the doc and I thought “Oh my god, I have never thought about this before”. It's kind of a hard question to ask. And definitely something in the doing good space, so I'm actually going to call a new client of ours because I genuinely had no idea about this problem, and now that I know about it, I think “Oh my god, we have to fix this”. So we recently started working with a company called Safer. They're part of Thorn, which is Ashton Kutcher's nonprofit for eliminating child sex abuse content and child sex trafficking from the world. And so Safer is there SaaS product that helps any company that has user generated content identify, flag and remove child sex abuse content.
43:16 There are big, splashy companies who are doing really well, but let's be honest, I don't think we need any more data dashboards, we've seen them all. So, it's a privilege to work on something that's doing good and is really doing important work. So I’m going to say Safer, even though I feel like a total douche for calling out one of our own clients. I'm just so excited and honored to work on this problem. And there's a ton of world problems that need working on, but it's really cool to get to work on something so important.
43:57 I think you're 100% right, I think that's such an important initiative, so I commend you for taking them on as a client and for the work that they're doing. I definitely have to check them out because, as a parent myself, that's an issue that, especially as my kids get older and start using the internet, I think every parent at some point is thinking about. But I think you're 100% right. I think that's kind of an element of deciding what your next product marketing job might look like or where your next career step is. That gets missed. We often think about how big the company is. Did they IPO? What was their latest funding round? What kind of products do they have? I use your product. I think that's all important to consider. But I think you might want to ask yourself at the same time, like what impact are we having on the world by doing this work? And I think right now, because of what's going on across the planet, across a variety of different parts of daily life, we need to be asking ourselves that more so I again, I commend you for that answer, and I couldn't agree with you more that that's definitely something that I myself in the work that I do right now at Jobber where I am proud to say that we're making an impact positively on our customers' lives and helping them run more successful businesses.
45:06 But yeah, I definitely think there are some big, important societal issues that if they just got the right attention from the right people, maybe a couple smart product marketers might not necessarily solve those problems, but at least take a step in the right direction and help as best we can. So I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that.
45:23 Thanks for asking.
45:25 Awesome, well, I'll let you go here. Like I said, I could keep talking to you for hours, but I know you're a busy person.
45:32 We can do this again next year.
45:33 Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to do that. So if any of our listeners want to reach out to you or maybe even partner with Olivine in a more professional capacity, where can they reach out? How can they connect with you or can they find you?
45:44 Hit me up on LinkedIn directly. Raechel Lambert spelled “RAE”. So I think if you get that part, you'll probably find me, or you can reach out to us through our website, www.olivinemarketing.com.
45:56 Awesome well, like I said, it's been great chatting with you, and I definitely might take you up on that offer to reconnect in a year and hear all the amazing clients that you've worked with and all the great work that you and the team are doing.
46:07 Thanks, I really had a blast. Mark, thank you so much for having me.
