The Saassy guide to structuring product marketing teams in the time of product-led
The structure of product marketing teams is largely determined by two factors: the growth stage of the company and its business model. With the rise of product-led, product marketing teams are becoming hybrid as they have to support two different business models (sales-led and product-led) and acquisition paths into the product (sales-assisted and self-serve).
But how do you structure the team exactly? This is a question I’ve been hearing from a lot of companies who are going product-led, and I’ve had the chance to discuss with other PLG companies - from promising start-ups like YouSign to well-established leaders like Atlassian. Read below for the findings.
Sales-assisted vs self-serve acquisition paths
In one of his many brilliant articles, Kyle Polar describes how PLG companies are doubling down on sales. In fact, about 10% of Atlassian’s workforce have « sales » in their title on LinkedIn. Canva made headlines among the PLG community recently when they started looking for a Head of Product-Led Sales.
In the B2B world, there are two different ways how a PLG company can integrate sales into the process:
Option 1: Separate sales-assisted and PLG paths
Some B2B products work well through the self-serve path only for specific groups of customers. This is especially true for companies that started off with the traditional model, and decided to add PLG later on - meaning, their product wasn’t construed to sell through a simple experience.
Customers who prefer a sales-assisted path are those who have reached an advanced level of complexity or scale. These customers consider a self-serve path “a waste of time” because it doesn’t quickly answer their questions if the solution can be customized to their needs, meet their advanced use cases or scale to their size. These customers prefer to talk to a pre-sales consultant or an account exec. If the sales-assisted path is not available to them, they may go to your competitor who can answer their questions.
A company may therefore have two different acquisition paths from the get-go: a self-serve for smaller customer with simpler needs, and a sales-led paths for enterprise companies with more complex needs.
Option 2: Adding sales into the PLG process
The second option, which is more in line with the PLG model, is to start off with a self-serve model, and introduce sales at a strategic point of the user journey. Done right, this is a powerful tactic. A sales-assisted approach can increase free-to-paid conversion 3.5x when compared to self-serve (read these findings by Tomasz Tunguz).
Sales can be introduced when a user reaches their free limit, qualifies as a product-qualified lead, or to remove roadblocks when the user hits red tape within their company, or they can be introduced even at a later stage to expand the usage within the account.
The structure of product marketing in PLG companies
Because most PLG companies have both sales-assisted and self-serve acquisition-expansion flows, product marketing mirrors that structure. Product marketing team is typically split into two sub-teams depending on the user path into the product: the sales-led, and product-led.
These sub-teams each follow a different structure - let’s look at each in turn.
How do you structure the sales-led PMM team?
The most common structure is to align each product marketer to a particular solution line or product. This has four key advantages:
Firstly, the scope of each product marketer is clearly demarcated;
Secondly, this structure is most commonly used across other teams, including product management, facilitating cross-functional collaboration;
Thirdly, because each product marketer is responsible for every single aspect of their solution, it is the best structure for honing product marketing skills. The product marketer gets to work on every single aspect from pricing to market research to sales enablement - rather than becoming specialized in one field;
Finally, the product-aligned structure allows for collaboration on a delivery of large projects within the product marketing team. In my previous companies, we’d do competitive refresh or market research for each product at the same time. This allowed us to learn the best practices from each other and tackle the different projects together.
But this structure has one clear disadvantage; the risk of a siloed approach to product positioning and GtM, particularly dangerous today when everything is about platforms. To minimize this risk, a senior product marketer can be responsible for the overall solution or platform, overseeing the work of more junior product marketers focusing on parts of the solution.
Another common approach is to supplement a team of solution-aligned PMMs with several specialist roles, such as sales enablement, competitive intelligence, or a vertical expert. A key advantage of this approach is to have dedicated resources focused on a particular aspect or industry - rather than a product marketer who is already juggling a number of different responsibilities.
How do you structure the self-serve PMM team?
On the other hand, PLG PMM teams are structured around the user journey, from acquisition through user onboarding to adoption and expansion. While at early stage companies, there may be one product marketer assigned for the entire journey, at larger companies there’s a product marketer - or even a team of product marketers - assigned to each key point of the journey:
Acquisition and conversion product marketer: responsible for establishing and optimizing the acquisition, sign up to free and conversion to paid.
Onboarding and education product marketer: in charge of creation and optimization of onboarding journeys specific to use case/persona; creation of educational content, including Knowledge Base and customer academy.
Adoption and expansion: responsible for development and execution of marketing-style upsell campaigns, creation of upsell strategy driven through product, and creation of in-app value-driven material driving upsells and expansions.
In addition, at early stages, the PLG PMM team can also include a Community marketer. With the expansion of product-led companies, we have seen a growth in user communities because they act as powerful multipliers of PLG strategies. From outsourcing some of user and customer care (especially needed when you have free users), building stronger connections between your users and product, driving adoption, to turning your users into champions, communities form a key part of any PLG strategy.