Lindsay Bayuk is the VP, Product Marketing at Pluralsight. She is passionate about technology, marketing, entrepreneurship, and is an avid connector. She resides in Salt Lake City and in her free time (likely with iPhone in hand), you can find her taking in cultural and culinary delights.

Interviewed by Shwetha Mahesh

/ / How has the product marketing function evolved in your company over the past few years?

Our team started from scratch a little over two years ago. We were lucky enough to start with a blank slate and full support from our CMO. We’ve grown from one person to 12 people. At Pluralsight, our product marketing function includes four pillars – market intelligence, positioning and messaging, product launch and sales assets. Our global product marketing team executes on all four pillars across all personas, geographies, segments and products/features. In addition, I recently introduced analyst relations and customer advocacy to our team so we can more closely work with industry analysts on shaping the tech skills development space as well as telling the stories of our customers.

/ / How many product launches do you conduct in a year? What are the challenges that you face while designing a product marketing plan?

We have a four-tier launch framework. We’ll execute one or two Tier 1 launches, a few Tier 2 launches, and many Tier 3 and Tier 4 launches in any given year. We are very fortunate to have a product team that uses Directed Discovery and has fully embraced continuous integration and delivery. They are improving experiences and shipping to production continuously. And while this is great, it can also make it difficult for sales and marketing to understand all the changes and effectively communicate them to our customers at the pace they are delivered. To bring a clear, value-driven message to our customers and the market, we find the stories in the features, bundle similar stories together and create cohesive go-to-market strategies.

/ / What tools and technologies do you use to run a successful product marketing campaign?

Our marketing teams are highly integrated and collaborative, so there isn’t a type of campaign specific to product marketing. All of our campaigns use tools across the mar-tech landscape – from design tools that visually bring our brand to life to analytics platforms for measuring impact.

/ / What are the different metrics you track for evaluation of your product marketing program performance?

Our marketing team is accountable for our B2B business pipeline. So our primary metric is pipeline attribution. We also look at pipeline influence, velocity, deal size, close rates, initial feature usage and usage of collateral by the sales team.

/ / Which digital content assets have you found to be most effective in your product marketing program?

Any time we can build assets for the sales team that they can customize without losing any brand integrity or formatting, it’s a win! We use Seismic as our sales enablement tool, which makes it really easy to distribute documents and slides that can be customized.

/ / Which online channels have you found to be most effective in meeting your product marketing goals? Which are your top three social media platforms for a product launch?

Our own platform is our best performing channel. We have a product that our users love and recommend to their friends. Other vehicles we use to get our message into the market include our sales and digital marketing teams.

/ / Can you give an example of the most exciting product marketing campaign run by your company?

In the last two years, we have launched and announced two major freemium products, Role IQ and Skill IQ, that feed the marketing funnel in a substantial way. These products, which include a social-sharing component, have also contributed to brand awareness. Since the launch of Skill IQ, more than 1.6 million technology skills have been benchmarked worldwide.

/ / What are the three product marketing tips you would want to share with our readers?

• Product marketing is data-informed storytelling. It’s a craft, not a job. And it requires creating clarity from ambiguity. My advice is to talk to as many product marketers as possible. Even then, the only way to learn product marketing is to do it.
• Product marketing is #12 on Linkedin’s list of “The most promising jobs of 2019.” If you’ve considered joining the field, now is the time! And if you’re a CMO or VP of Marketing and you don’t have a product marketing team, you’re doing it wrong. Product marketing is essential to building a data-informed, focused and persona-based go-to-market strategy.
• Product marketing has been and will continue to evolve dramatically as the processes and tools to build products and deliver messages to market change rapidly. The old world of product marketing (writing market requirement docs and building one-sheets) is dying. The new era of product marketing is focused on market and customer research, and has a fluid organizational structure that can quickly respond to market and company demands.

/ / What are the trends/technologies that you think will drive product marketing in the future? How should businesses gear up for this?

Customer obsession and, for technology businesses, continuous delivery are the two mega-trends impacting product marketing today. Product marketing is the “tip of the spear” for a go-to-market strategy. So as businesses continue to move faster, product marketing needs to maintain the lead out front.