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5 Ways Running Revenue Operations Made Me a Better Product Marketer
This follows my last post on how responsibility for product management, Revenue Operations, and marketing made me a better product marketer. Running RevOps gave me firsthand exposure to sales cycles, customer objections, and why deals were won, lost, or stalled, rather than relying on secondhand sales feedback. Here are five lessons I subsequently applied to…
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My biggest product marketing lessons from leading product, marketing, and revops
Over the years, I have had the unusual opportunity to lead marketing, product management, and revenue operations. Sitting in all three seats changed how I think about product marketing. It made one thing very clear: product marketing creates the most value when it helps connect what the market needs, what the product can deliver, and…
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Our Product Is Entering a New Industry. Don’t Recycle the Messaging
Positioning a product for a new industry is not about taking your existing messaging and adding a few industry terms. The buyers are different, their priorities are different, and the problems and business outcomes they care about may be very different. Having led industry marketing for a major ERP vendor, and more recently working with…
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5 Reasons Your ABM Program Is Falling Short
One of my friends, a CMO, asked me for advice on improving her company’s ABM (Account-Based Marketing) programs. Like many companies, they had invested in ABM as an alternative to the traditional lead-based funnel, which was no longer delivering results. But their ABM programs weren’t delivering either. That conversation got me thinking about the challenges…
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Great positioning starts with great research. Here is my approach.
When working with a client on developing a story for a new market, I have learned not to jump too quickly into the output. First, I want to understand what customers in that market actually need. I usually start by talking to sales and SEs who have sold into relevant accounts, either at the current…
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The 90% Rule That Could Change Content Marketing
One of the biggest changes Gen AI is bringing to marketing is speed. You can now create a very good two-minute animated video to explain a complex idea without waiting for corporate marketing, an agency, or a production team. For social media and email campaigns, that matters. The animated video doesn’t always need to be…
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AI May Make Your Career Detours More Valuable
Shopify COO Jess Hertz recently described a shift from the traditional “T-shaped” person, someone with broad capabilities and deep expertise in one area, to what she calls an “X-shaped” person. As she put it, AI requires people with “multiple spikes of expertise” who can absorb complexity, learn new spaces quickly, and become capable across several…
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The same sale. Four very different reactions.
Labor Day is here, and with it comes a wave of retail sales. They seem to bring out different behaviors in all of us. There are the deal hunters, like my wife, who will happily wait for the annual Nordstrom sale because finding a great deal is part of the fun. Then there are the…
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Why customer opinions matter less than you think
Karina didn’t launch her denim brand by analyzing spreadsheets. She launched it by solving a personal frustration. She wanted premium jeans that women could comfortably wear from morning through dinner. What followed wasn’t endless planning—it was raw execution: prototypes, fabric tests, fit changes, waistband tweaks, and manufacturing hurdles. Watching KarinaJ Denim come to life up…
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What My Garden Gives Me Before Monday
On weekends, I like to spend some time taking care of my garden. I have citrus trees, a small rose garden, and an assortment of flowering plants. Right now, I’m also trying to revive my hydrangeas. There is always something that needs watering, trimming, feeding, moving, or a little extra attention. I enjoy the work…
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Agentic AI Can Do Competitive Analysis. But Can You Trust It?
Chatbots such as ChatGPT have changed how I do competitive analysis—but they hasn’t replaced judgment. I use AI chatbots to build the initial framework and analysis, pointing them to any internal analysis/notes, competitor’s white papers and data sheets, their product documentation (if available), pointers to customer reviews (from Gartner peer insights, G2, etc), and any…
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Multiple Clients. Competing Priorities. Constant Context Switching. Here’s How I Keep It Straight.
One of the challenges of working with multiple consulting clients, or even working as a General Manager or a C-level executive in a company, is constantly shifting your attention from one very different problem to another. As an independent consultant, on any given day, I may move from network security to AI to MDM, while…
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