r/ProductMarketing

Running a B2B SaaS ad campaign — decent CTR, reasonable CPC, but zero demo bookings so far.

Before we sink more budget in, I want direct feedback from the target buyer (mid-market SaaS CS/onboarding leaders) to figure out if we've got the right audience or need to shift.

Used SurveyMonkey years ago — fine for volume, but ideally I'd get a real conversation with 10-20 people in that exact audience.

Any recommendations for $1K or under?

with the wrong competitors?

AI tools generally understand our product category, but they often compare us with companies our customers rarely consider.

That changes the framing of the answer and makes some of our strongest features seem irrelevant. Meanwhile, the competitors we actually encounter in sales conversations barely appear.

Could this be coming from software-directory categories, old positioning or the language used in customer reviews? Has anyone managed to change these associations?

I got laid off a couple months ago and have been taking some recruiter calls and interviews. Ultimately, I’m optimistic, but all I can say is, things feel very different rn compared to anytime I’ve interviewed in the last 10 years.

Some things I’ve noticed:

-It seems everyone has forgotten about the chaos in tech over the last 6 years: Covid, rising interests rates, AI. I’ve unfortunately found myself at a string of start ups that didn’t have a business model that could weather higher interest rates or compete against new AI competitors. This means I have committed the great sin of having 3 employers over the last 5 years. Each recruiter I talk to has given me a steely eyed stare and asked me to explain myself. A few years ago, you didn’t have to do that…

-People think 2 months out of the job market is actually 2 years. I got laid off 2 months ago, but that hasn’t stopped recruiters from asking “oh did you even have a chance to use AI?”. Like WTF is wrong with these people. Of course I did… I didn’t just wake up from a coma.

-Another thing that I think is just a part of our new world - location bias. 2 years ago my wife and I decided to buy a house and start a family. We bought where we could afford, which in this economy meant buying a 2bd house 45 miles away from SF for 800k. It’s far, but it’s not that far. I’m willing to make the commute and that’s all that should matter. But try to explain the commute to some fresh faced recruiter who had only ever lived in SF or is remote and has never been to the Bay. To people like this, you basically live on the moon.

I know it’s a tighter job market and companies can be more selective, but the attitude is just so palpable these days. Anyways, good luck out there all!

I recently had a very good chat with a prospect. Centered around their current system and aimed at convincing them to switch loyalties.

We're not there yet,...they "seem" to be happy with their current setup. BUT it wasn't all a bust. I was able to tell:

- We have a pretty good product. We might not be where we want to be yet but yeah, we're doing very well in comparison.

- The hero in our category actually isn't all that. Yet they seem to have the Lion's share of the market.

- Frustration seems to be increasing, fast!

I haven't given up on my prospect. I'm restructuring my approach to position our offering better. I think there's a solid chance here...

Really appreciate all the insight and personal experiences shared in my previous post. And I agree....Good customer insight can be a game changer.

Kinda feels like too much work though? Especially in a larger scale, with many customers to get insight from. A contributor mentioned 30-50 customers as a good number they use to validate that a signal actually is a signal and not minority noise. Another contributor mentioned (and I agree too) that a minority opinion, even really good insight/feedback from one customer can be more valuable than 50!

My question is, in small to medium sized businesses specifically, (I'd love to hear stories from enterprise too though) how do you keep up with getting customer feedback and turning it into something that is actually useful? And how do you filter quality vs quantity?

And how do you do it frequently and consistently? Customer sentiment changes really quickly, so how do you make sure you always have fresh intel and are not spending too much time and effort chasing your own tail?

Our feedback ends up scattered across Gong calls and Intercom and a graveyard of NPS comments we never really read.

So we've been shopping for proper VoC tools and got down to 3 so far: Chattermill feels very enterprise for a team our size, Unwrap is interesting on the ticket-clustering side, and BuildBetter because it handles internal meetings too, not just customer-facing stuff.

Anyway, who did you pick and what broke first?

We're starting to expand outside North America and are looking at LATAM and APAC. Building relationships with local publishers from scratch has been much harder than we expected, so we're considering working with an affiliate marketing agency instead.

A few questions for anyone who's done this:

1. How do you usually handle payouts and multiple currencies?
2. Any must-have fraud prevention or compliance tools before launching in new markets?
3. What questions help you tell whether an agency has real publisher relationships instead of just reselling another network?
4. Any affiliate marketing agency you'd genuinely recommend for international expansion

After being a generalist marketing director at my organization for a few years, we were acquired a couple years ago and have been growing and shifting to scaling mode. We are only a sales-led growth company, with ABM campaigns and Field Marketing/events as our key strategy and channels currently.

We have ambitious growth goals for next year and I’m recognizing that we need a leader for the team that has more of a demand gen background than I do - my strengths are more towards product marketing. It’s also what I personally enjoy more, and haven’t been able to dedicate much time to it this year because of my focus building and managing the existing team and trying to help us reach pipeline goals for the year.

I proposed to shift to specialize in PM, to give it the attention that role needs to help sales and marketing succeed with stronger ongoing foundations and support from that angle. I proposed this to my CMO today, but he said the CEO doesn’t believe SLG startups need someone specialized in product marketing.

What are your thoughts? How can I position this proposal to make myself and this role sound integral for our success? I see myself building essentially a new department for the org with this, but it might be an uphill battle.

I’ve heard this phrase going around more lately (not to me directly) but in general as it relates to product marketing and its evolution. If you’ve been told this or have become a more “strategic” PMM vs a tactical/execution oriented one. How did you get to that point? Resources that helped? How did you balance strategy and being able to still execute?

Hey

I’m in health tech and we have three products with one a market leader. We need to cross sell the other two as they work very well as a combo to support the healthcare workflow.

How should I go about developing and executing on this strategy? So framework, stakeholders needed and how to test the approach. Would love any help.

Hello fellow PMMs!

New sub member here. I'm a Sr. PMM at a large Fortune 500 corp. I am wondering if any of you have individually published in any trade publications or journals? (Ex:Marketing Dive, ANA magazine or really anywhere else)

l’d love to connect with you and seek some advice.
Let me know please :)

I’m planning to transition my 8 years of experience across both offline and digital marketing into product marketing.
Can I expect a salary hike on my current package, or would they consider me for an Associate Product Marketing role?

I've been thinking about this lately...We hear a lot about talking to customers and using customer feedback. But I'm curious, how much of it actually makes its way into the way a product is positioned?

Has there been a time when customers kept describing a problem or value in a way that made you rethink your messaging? What did you end up changing?

I’m curious how other B2B SaaS PMMs look into effective messaging and how it impact addoption.

I use HubSpot for campaigns and Mixpanel for product usage. I use UTM's to see adoption, but working out whether certain messaging is consistently associated with stronger product behaviour is still pretty manual. I usually end up pulling data together in Sheets with hubspot API and then a mixpannel sheet, using claude or gpt to then review.

Do any of you do it a similar way? Or do you not do that for the messaging?

I was thinking of building something for myself to see if I can try automate this. Have you found any tools that make this less manual?

Thanks for any help!

Looking for advice on an exit strategy from my current situation. Joined PMM after a couple years in digital sales and stuck here with no career growth. Comp dropped by 50%, manager and team are mid at best. Looking to change my current situation and open to ideas.

Option A - jump ship to another company and get a 20% hike. Challenge: not enough PMM experience overall and failing interviews at final stage

Option B - switch laterally to different career such as sales enablement..

working at a small B2B SaaS startup and i've been helping clean up the audience for an upcoming feature launch. originally we had a pretty large contact database and the thinking was basically... they're already in there, why not include them? but once we started actually looking at it, it got messy fast. old leads, people who changed companies, accounts that don't really match our ICP anymore, old emails, different job functions etc. we used some tools to clean up the email side, but the bigger PMM question for me is what happens after that. how aggressive are you guys with segmentation for launches?

for example, if the feature is really relevant to maybe 30% of your database, are you only messaging that 30% with very specific positioning? or do you still send a broader announcement and change the messaging depending on segment?

i'm leaning toward smaller segments + much more specific positioning, even if it makes the total reach look kinda underwhelming on paper.

We built something that serves a market the bigger players in this space never really went after. Tools like Klue, Crayon, Gong, they're not exact comparisons since they do a lot more on the integrations and compliance side, but they're the closest reference points we have. Those start anywhere from 15k to 50k a year plus depending on the deal, and a lot of that reflects real custom work and enterprise requirements. Fair enough. But a chunk of it also reflects a pre Artificial Intelligence assumption, that delivering this kind of value takes a certain amount of manual labour and infrastructure. That assumption doesn't fully hold anymore. today a lot of that gap is closed. So I don't think their pricing is fully justified today for what it actually costs to deliver similar value at a smaller scale.

That logic cuts both ways though. We're at $200 a month flat right now, no seat limit. If I hold our own team to the same standard, not charging for effort that modern tech has made cheaper, then what should we actually be charging. Part of me thinks $200 is smart pricing for an underserved segment. Part of me thinks it's just underpricing wearing a strategy costume.

Honestly the most straightforward move would be asking our own customers what they'd pay, but I keep talking myself out of it. Feels like opening that conversation risks planting doubt where there wasn't any before. Not sure if that's a real risk or just me avoiding an uncomfortable ask.

Anybody else been through this when building your Saas? Feels like a problem specific to this moment and not something the usual pricing advice really covers.