Let’s step into these shoes for a minute. You’re the sole marketer at a B2B startup. You’ve been hustling, pitching investors, and finally you close your Series A. Suddenly, you have the budget to make real progress. What do you do next?

Here’s the lesson that stood out to me in a recent guest application: “There is no real progress in marketing, especially in B2B and post-Series A, without product marketing.”

I love that lesson and I think of product marketing as the translator between what engineers build and what customers truly need.

To hear the story behind that lesson – and many more insights born from wrestling with real revenue goals – I spoke with Asaf Raz, VP of Marketing at Agora [https://agorareal.com/]. 

Agora secured $34 million in Series B funding last year and has raised a total of $63 million in funds so far.

Raz manages a team of 12 demand gen, product marketing, creative, and field marketing professionals.

Lessons learned

• Marketing can’t be successful without being connected to sales goals
• One of the most important things about being a marketing executive is to know your market really well, knowing the actual people.
• There is no real progress in marketing, especially in B2B and post-Series A, without product marketing
• There’s nothing helpful that comes from complaining about things and blaming other people for your problems 
• Take full ownership
• Frame for persuasion

Discussed in this episode

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $5,000 each to eligible companies. Learn more at https://meclabs.com/research/5k-engineering-voucher

Product Quality: Marketing's job is to help the product win (podcast episode #97) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/product-quality]

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy) [https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/marketing-career]

Customer-First Marketing: The customer is always right … but not always right for your company [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/b2c-marketing-2/customer-is-always-right-but-not-always/]

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How ordinary marketers are learning to write high-impact copy [https://www.meclabs.com/training/misc/optsummit/slides/10-Flint-McGlaughlin-MECLABS-Copywriting-FINAL.pdf]

Turn content into pipeline – In this episode, Raz discusses how he uses a podcast to better understand prospects and get more deals. Build your own playbook to get more leads with your content using a multi-agent protocol workflow. Launch the workflow [https://win.meclabsai.com/build-lead-gen] (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

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