Suzy Meriwether: “Enterprise customers want to know, ‘How does it make my job easier?’”

Women in Product Austin is kicking off a new interview series that focuses on how local technology leaders are adapting to COVID-19. For the month of January, we sat down with Suzy Meriwether, Senior Director of Product & Customer Marketing at Revionics, which applies AI to make pricing recommendations for high volume, low margin retailers. At Revionics, Suzy has been working on creating go-to-market strategies for target markets such as groceries and drugstores.

Suzy’s career in product marketing has spanned 15 years and stints at IBM, Oracle, RetailMeNot, and Volusion. While she started her career in engineering activities, she gravitated towards the marketing side of the business. That interest led her into partner and channel marketing, and grew into the product marketing career she enjoys now.

I spoke with Suzy about the impact of COVID-19 on product marketing, how product managers can collaborate effectively with product marketers, and what a product marketing leader looks like.

Has the COVID-19 pandemic brought different competencies required to lead a function into focus?

You know, I think the fundamentals remain the same. You just have to do the fundamentals much better.

Messaging is core to what product marketing does. Before the pandemic, messaging that was only OK would be adequate, but now it has to be really spot on, customer-centric, and address the “What’s in it for me?” question. Everyone has Zoom fatigue. The messaging has to be about the customer and how you solve their problems.

You can’t have something that requires the target market or buyer to think. It has to be front and center: “This is how it makes your job easier.” A dynamic salesperson can keep someone’s attention in person. But in a Zoom meeting, it’s so hard. There are a lot of slides with a lot of words. You’re going to listen, or you’re going to read. You’re not going to do both. Or, you’re going to zone out. You always have to think about it from the side of the person sitting on the other end of the camera.

Has the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated or halted shifts in the way product marketing is done, at your org or in the wider landscape?

It’s interesting that as more companies realize the critical nature of product marketing, product marketers are being brought into companies at all sizes. Now I see startups and smaller companies are hiring product marketers, where it used to be more common at larger companies. It’s great that we’re getting recognized as a critical discipline that a company needs.

When COVID-19 hit, hiring for product marketing stopped, but now companies are investing heavily. Organizations are thinking, “The world is not going to end, and we have to be better at go-to-market, and the people who are good at that are product marketing.”

Can you tell me about how preparing for product launches or creating go-to-market strategies has adapted to the challenges of this year?

It’s crucial to understand the market, buyer personas, and the person who signs the PO.

Does that business buyer have the same priorities and problems as they did pre-COVID-19? It’s important to recheck assumptions on who the target buyer is. What are the business problems they’re trying to solve? If the company was targeting retail apparel with pricing, guess who’s in financial trouble? For us, that means refocusing on retailers that are really succeeding: groceries, sporting goods, and places like Costco where you buy things for the home and things to eat.

Not only is it important to focus on the buyer and the markets, it’s also key to focus on the geographies. For instance, COVID-19 has hit Latin American countries harder and their economies have been struggling lately. Do you invest in Latin America? Is the revenue there? Those fundamentals we started 2020 off with have changed.

What are the key differences between product marketing at an established corporation, as opposed to a growth-stage startup? What does enterprise product marketing mean?

When you get to be very large, like IBM or Oracle, product marketing has a very defined role around go-to-market. There are dedicated teams that handle sales enablement and analyst relations, which product marketing would own in a midsize or smaller org.

Let’s pull apart “enterprise.” It means the buyer is an enterprise company, as opposed to a small or medium sized business (SMB) or a consumer. It reflects the target buyer and what size they are. Selling software to a Fortune 500 is very different to selling to an SMB. The target for our product is large grocery stores, drugstores, specialty goods stores. A 5 person ski chain in Colorado that doesn’t spend a lot in IT infrastructure isn’t the target market.

I’ve spent my career mostly selling solutions to large companies, but I’ve also spent some time selling to SMBs. The difference is in the go-to-market strategy and who your buyer is and where they get their information.

How does product management’s focus on personas differ from product marketing’s?

It depends on the product and company philosophy. Product management, in my experience, is maniacally focused on the user and the nuts and bolts of enterprise products. The old user interfaces that look like a souped up excel spreadsheet isn’t acceptable today.

But the business buyer wants to understand how it solves their business problems. Typically, it will vary by company and the size of the product management and product marketing functions. The influencer personas are a nice overlap between the two disciplines.

What does collaboration with product management look like? What does a product manager who is a strong collaborator with your function do?

That collaboration needs to be open and transparent. With product management, we collaborate on release and launch plans. As product marketers, we need to know, “What’s in the roadmap? What’s fallen out? What do these enhancements mean to the customer? What marketing materials need to be updated?”

The strongest collaborators across the board understand and have empathy with someone else’s role. My favorite interactions are with people who understand the questions I’m asking, who understand messaging basics, and come with solid answers.

Product marketing will ask product management, “Who cares about this feature? What does this feature do?” In return, it’s important for product marketing to have empathy and understand that roadmaps change, and why product management can’t commit to a six month roadmap. I’ve put together major tier launch plans only for budgets to be cut and those plans don’t come to fruition because product managers are balancing resources.

What kind of organization makes sense for a product marketer who’s early career?

It 100% depends on the team and the manager. If you get on a team with experienced product marketers, you’ll grow. If your manager doesn’t know about product marketing and just has that name in their title, it’s not going to help you grow into core skills.

How does the space or vertical you work in affect the skills required for your role? Or are those skills more of a function of the size or maturity of your org?

I’ve always maintained the premise that a good, skilled marketer can learn the market faster than you can teach someone to be a product marketer. It’s a completely different skill set and perspective on markets, prospects, and messaging. A good product marketer can pick up a new product in a new market in under 3 months.

There are many paths into product marketing. I’ve worked with people who moved over from product management, analytics, and marketing. The hallmark of a great product marketer is they’re analytical and creative. It’s key that they’re able to balance the technology and analytics with creativity. If you’re a great creative marketer, you really have to understand the technology or you’re going to struggle.

What do you look for in strong product marketers? What does a product marketing leader look like?

I think the product marketing leader needs to have those creative and analytical skills, but also be a negotiator and a mentor. They need to have hands-on experience to coach and mentor their team and make them effective.

The negotiating part is spending time with peers in marketing, sales, and product management, and making sure they’re aligned. I’ve done messaging workshops only to find out they’re not targeting the same customer. It requires constantly communicating to related groups to make sure everyone’s working on the right path, and if something like COVID-19 happens, address the need to pivot. It’s easy to work in silos, even in small companies, and assume that everyone knows what you’re doing.

Finally, are there questions you’d have liked to be asked? Or, wisdom that you’d like to share?

Yeah, I think as a product marketer, it’s important to never assume and always ask questions. I’ve joined companies who say, “This is the buyer persona,” but they didn’t have the data. There are a lot of organizational assumptions and tribal knowledge that isn’t factual.

Always be open, but ask those right questions. Nothing will kill a product’s success quicker than something someone said three years ago that’s not actually true.

Thanks to Kristina Kernaghan for editing.