Product Marketing's Value Goes Up When it Shifts Left

Why Product Marketing in B2B Must Shift Left to Drive More Value

In this episode of Troupe's Said Differently podcast, the show about B2B messaging and storytelling veers into more strategic territory. Product Marketing is so much more than crafting messages, managing launch plans, and developing content. Guest Tom Crist, who is a principal at product marketing consultancy Fluvio Marketing and an ambassador for the Product Marketing Alliance, talks about their team's survey finding and report about how PMMs can close the revenue gap by being brought in earlier.

Key moments in the conversation:

03:41 = Product Marketing still struggles with a misunderstanding of its role. Tom acknowledges it’s not often taught in business curriculum programs and that a consumer-brand product marketer still looks different than it does in tech and B2B.

07:45 = To that end: how do you hire and manage a Product Marketing role you don’t really understand? Tom says the expectation for this position should not be to staff a glorified content creator or project manager, but someone who can understand the customer deeply and bring that knowledge back to product and GTM strategy.

10:55 = Fluvio’s report on the "PMM Revenue Gap: Why Product Marketing is Often Measured Too Late to Matter." Product Marketing still often left out of the early decision-making process around what to build, for who, why and the goals, because they aren’t valued for expertise on the buyer.

15:22 = Difficulty of a product marketer to move into that strategic influence role if there are founders in that role or someone else who has historically held that territory. The report found that bringing data and insights to the table significantly outpaced other reasons for earning that seat.

18:24 = Practical things that PMMs can do to shift left. On his list: Take the time to conduct the market and buyer research. Seek segmentation characterized by useful specificity that can inform demand generation campaigns.

23:19 = Emphasis on the metrics for PMMs, which is the output, what you are measuring. There’s been a hesitation to standardize PMM KPIs due to attribution complexity, which Fluvio highlights in their report, and solutions like Troupe are putting data metrics around measuring messaging impact.

30:05 = What are the traits of a ‘superstar’ PMM that you would hire today, what experience and characteristics do they have? Knowing the domain of the market and buyer you’re targeting, and if you don’t have it, what is your process and work in getting to deeply understand it. Need to also understand all the elements of the entire PMM umbrella, not be highly specialized in just one piece. Also being an internal champion for your role and your strategic opportunity.

Said Differently is sponsored by Troupe, the AI hub for messaging success. You can watch the video versions of these podcasts on our YouTube playlist.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:15

Hi everybody, welcome to today's episode of Said Differently, the show about B2B go-to-market storytelling and messaging sponsored by Troop. I am your host, Jennifer Socora. I am an advisor for Troop, and I'm joined today by our guest, Tom Christ from Cluvio Marketing. Tom will introduce himself more properly in a moment, but really excited to have him. Met Tom and the Fluvio team back in mid-2025, and we've been talking to them since then, and they've published some great reports in the product marketing arena. And we're going to be talking today about why product marketing should shift left to capture more value, not just for themselves, but for the business as a whole. So pretty exciting topic. Tom, you um kind of lead the product marketing consulting, you know, efforts over at Fluvio, or maybe frame it for us. Tell us what you do and how you got there.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Yeah, absolutely. So uh thanks so much for having me on. Super excited to be here. Uh I lead the consulting function at Fluvio. We are a very specialist product marketing consulting firm. Uh, if you want to hear the tagline uh level, it's generally helping organizations, generally mid-sized to enterprise level, um, accelerate their prop marketing function. That could, of course, mean a lot of things from building a team from scratch to integrating an acquisition to just making sure everybody's working within the same proven frameworks and making sure that they're maximizing impact and making sure that everyone is delivering the best possible experience for the function and as it relates to this pretty closely, how are you building influence and actually getting to be more of a strategic operator versus the box nobody wants to be stuck in, which is repeatable launch monkey or uh or asset creator? So of course, love chatting about this. Um, I lead the team, I've been involved in now over four years, a little over 40 engagements personally, drawing for many more. Um, so hopefully able to take some of that experience and bring it in here. Uh, personally had that little bit of a unique starting point with a product management plus product marketing internship at a telco way, way, way back when. Okay. Let's not dated. Um, but got my foot in the door after that in sales and general marketing, always a few opportunities to be rather data focused, including in some very transaction-heavy uh settings, and hopefully parlayed that into the ability to focus teams on metrics and influence. And again, going back to today's topic, how can we build a team that hits there? So, yeah, super excited to dive in.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

Yeah, I think it's really, you know, it's great to hear that Fluvio really focuses on product marketing because you do meet, you know, as a former head of marketing myself, like you would find agencies who, you know, specialize in a lot of agency type things, but didn't really understand the real practice of product marketing. And it is a really specific discipline that's often undervalued and underappreciated. And you know, so it's been around for decades though, and um but yet it's still really struggling for organizations to understand what do product marketers do? What are they accountable for? Like, do they just go when I need like some product spec sheet or product, you know, messaging or something? So, why do you think that is, Tom? I mean, you've you've been doing this for a while for your clients at Fluvio, you've done, you've come up through this role. Why is product marketing still struggling to figure out where it where it lives? Why do people not get it? What's going on?

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Yeah, I obviously there are a number of factors. My take on this is that the people in uh the decision-making roles and who are helping define what an organization is were not exactly taught this in their bachelor of business degree in college as part of as part of the mix. Um, it was something that I wasn't terribly aware of until that internship that I mentioned a while back came up way again, way back when.

SPEAKER_02 4:47

But yeah, I had never heard of it when I started my career. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Neither had I. I really lucked into it, frankly, out of out of the gate. And because it's something that matured late after the product management revolution around the turn of millennium, um, the question becomes how do these things work together? How are they different? This isn't something that someone learned, it's something that it's been on-the-job training, or perhaps a uh perhaps an interaction with others or within a given organization versus being baked into this is how a marketing department and a business operates. And the easy contrast in both candidates that we talk to from time to time and with just general approach is the B2C or consumer packaged goods brand manager that really owns the strategy for let's say you owned a specific yogurt brand. You own the strategy and you own the execution and you own everything. Consumer data and research and drawing on a huge team, and you're this really cool all-in-one owner of what happens with your brand. Well, we're in technology, we're often dealing with platforms, we're dealing with products, we're dealing with product managers, we're dealing with we're dealing with the dev teams and engineering. Yeah. They're all deciding what's being brought to market, and then hopefully they've got a product marketing department. And the classic case of engaging when we decide to build something or after they've built something ends up tying prop marketers to metrics that they haven't set. So what you result in is somebody who's not really well understood, who's forced to who's forced to explain and defend and then go execute on metrics that were set by someone else without their input. And as we'll get into, I think a little bit later, they didn't have an they didn't have an early seat at the table, and they weren't earning the right to make that argument either. So I want to take a little bit of the pressure off of some of the rest of the business too for understanding prop marketing and put a little bit more pressure back on the teams, the prop marketing teams themselves, of what are you doing to earn that seat and earn the right to have a decision versus just being the recipient of X items coming out, we're gonna be charging Y for it, and we have Z total financial target. Yeah, go make it work.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

That's a great point. I and I know we're that's gonna be the bulk of our conversation is digging into what product marketing can actually do to sort of assert themselves, claim, you know, and and what steps they can be taking to elevate themselves, but also contribute more, right? It's not just, hey, I'm here to promote myself. It's I need to contribute more to this organization in a really meaningful way. But before we get to that, I think without a company understanding what the role is, it can also be difficult to hire for that role, right? So you don't like how do you even define what is the I know I've when I've come in as a consultant for companies as a fractional CMO, um often, you know, and I recommend, well, you really need to hire a product marketer. I sometimes have had to educate even the CEO what that what that is, right? What is that person doing, or what should they be doing for you? And then once you know what that is, now you can go higher for it. If you want just somebody who's a glorified content person, that's not project manager. Yeah. Is the other is the other hole that you're going to do all the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Yeah. And I've had some really great talent partners in the past when you've been building departments from scratch, uh, back in the day, in-house or refocusing or adding to. And ultimately, a lot of time what I ended up doing was sitting down and going through resumes with them, which I don't think was their favorite and certainly wasn't mine either from a waste from a uh from a time spent perspective. But to your point, those folk, the CEO isn't deciding, and the hiring and the talent person isn't hiring for product marketers every day of the week. There, it's either a new function or it's one that's frankly less frequent versus a number of the other roles than the organization. And its lack of definition makes it really hard for them to understand who's a good candidate and who's not, even if they don't have X exact title fits on the resume. And there's not a great shortcut to get to that, but if you want to talk about what is the ultimate role of the product marketer, it's really understanding the customer that they're tied to. And I think that goes back to some org design pieces as well that people get caught up on. Should we hire some people and attach them to these products? Should we hire some people and attach them to research and competitive and different areas of responsibility for the product marketer? In most scenarios, um, I would say that going back to are they an expert on the customer? Are they tied to a specific buyer? And are they going to ultimately be the expert and champion on that within the go-to-market team and process is the ultimate role that you're asking them to do? All of the other pieces, whether it's go to market launch or whether it's research or whether it's voice of customer or messaging validation, those are all in service of how can I best know what my buyer or set of buyers that I'm set to really care about, and how can I bring that to the business in a way that's going to actually make a difference on the decisions that are made and how we go out and attack that specific segment.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

Yeah. So I guess so diving in now to the focus here, you know, in fluvial marketing, you guys have published some great reports, several per year. You published one in March 2026. I'm just glancing at my notes over here to the side. And it was based on a survey of product marketers, and it called out a revenue gap and found that product marketing is often involved and measured too late to matter. Those were the words that were used in the report, too late to matter. So when I think about a product marketer who is probably kind of more downstream focused, output focused, um, kind of with the things you referenced earlier about they're sort of stuck in this zone. They're being friend zoned, but whatever the version of that is for a product market.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Um, what do you mean by too late to matter? What to talk a little bit more about this report and what you guys found?

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Yeah, absolutely. So uh as you mentioned, we run a number of reports focused on generally product marketing leadership and marketing and product leadership and finding out where they're focused and what their challenges are. This one was specifically around uh how product marketing is tied to revenue and where there's a where there's a gap within it, and ultimately what's the influence that's built based on how product marketing is measured. Um, when you talk about being too late, it's probably even when you're thinking about what uh a good case might be where, hey, we're brought in before uh we're brought in before product actually starts building it with engineering's help. We're brought in maybe well ahead of the launch. I'm actually of the mind, and we're of the, oh we are of the mind, that that is still far too late. Your decision to build this thing was already a build-by-partner decision that was made by the team earlier on. Um your decision to make this a capability that will make you stickier or something that you feel that customers will pay for was made before prop marketing was involved. So if we go back to the thesis of what is a prop marketer supposed to be responsible for, well, they're supposed to be the expert on the customer. And if we decided that the customer or the prospect, or whichever uh whichever level of life cycle you're looking at, um, is ready to pay for this, which is going to make a material difference. So this is going to be a competitive mode or whatever the case may be. But you didn't ask the person who's supposed to be responsible for knowing the customer.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

They become an order taker, really.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

You're already an order taker, and you hear people say, Oh, I'm so glad that we got information about this launch, or I just had time to build messaging instead of it coming out and I learned about it in release notes. Well, you're still too late. You should have been there earlier, and now you're again reactive to a goal that was already set, or worse, you're creating a goal because nobody figured out a goal, but you're tied to the very murky, did we do a good job of bringing this thing to market or going after a new segment or whatever the case may be. I've been a little bit overly specific, perhaps, on something that was developed, but same goes for market entry or going after a new segment or vertical or the rest. If you're not able to help set what the goal will be, you're just going to be ascribed something, again, almost hopefully, or you're at least going to be ascribed to the vague success of something that's coming forward. And the only way that you're going to earn that seat is by if you're not getting it today, outside of constant education and all the things that you spoke about earlier, are by proving to those teams that you do know the customer and bring value to them that gets you into that room. I know one of my favorite memories is thinking back to when we were standing up a product marketing team from scratch in in-house days, maybe six, seven years ago. And the biggest win that we got early on was being involved in three, six, twelve, twenty-four-month planning sessions with product. So we could be on the ground floor, we could bring things to the table, we could present to the organization, and then you're starting to build that foundation early, but that requires you to have done all of that work ahead of time.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

That's true. I I think part of this too is uh I know and maybe you don't run into this as much at Fluvio because you are working with more established and larger sized businesses, but sometimes it can be difficult for a product marketer to move into that role because it's often held very closely by the founders, or maybe somebody, yeah, a founder or uh members of the executive team who've been there longer than you who are very attached to being in that role. And even though they don't consider themselves a product marketer, they're the ones really driving the shape and decisions around the product. And it's I don't know, have you run into that where the product marketers just sort of can't like that's territory that they can't seem to get into?

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Absolutely. And it takes, again, being scrappy and proving your point, uh, which is an ugly answer, but totally true. Yeah. Um, we, as part of this data, we asked what has ultimately earned product marketing a seat at the executive table or strategy table.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

And there were some here and there answers on I had an executive sponsor that was super helpful, or I aligned my whole self to revenue, which I'll mention again later, and it is important, but wasn't the top thing here. Even beyond cross-functional trust, even beyond you know, being an expert on competitors, it was just bringing data and insights to the table, got a third more uh ticks than any other answer on there. And I think that you know, I I wouldn't have uh I couldn't have staged this better if I tried. It really is the case that um even if a team loves you, even if you've got uh a CMO or a CPO that's thrusting you into every scenario they can, if you're not bringing something new from the customer base to the table, you're much less likely to earn that scene.

SPEAKER_02 17:13

Yeah, that's I love that's really I can totally see that. So, like said differently, like you you said you got to bring something new, tell them something they don't know, or tell them something that will inspire or open some eyes, right? That that you've done the work on.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

I I think back to as well, um past experiences with building partner organizations. If you're trying to partner with a much larger organization to cross-sell your product or to sell or to sell through to say an enterprise organization, you can beat down that partner's door all day, and they're not going to care until you bring some sort of new business or something really exciting to them. If you're selling something, especially that has an analog within what they can do themselves or otherwise. And it's just like with product marketing make them care, bring something to the table, prove value early. And again, the data I can talk all day, but luckily the data backs me up exactly. Um that's exactly what all right.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

So practical things that, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. What are you gonna please? So practical things that product marketers can do, you've already mentioned a couple. One is like get into some sort of a product planning cadence or time horizon, right? Where you're reasoning and planning out 12 months, six months, et cetera. The other is bring data, bring some knowledge, bring some data, tell people something new. Are there other practical things that you would say the PMMs can do to build influence or just you know get that earning there?

SPEAKER_00 18:54

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm always going to talk about carving out time for, and even when you talked about job description earlier, I want to make sure that part of the job description is carving out dedicated time for voice of customer, market research, competitive intel. That has to be a specific defended part of your week and month because it's the first thing to go when you've got hair on fire and last-minute requests and everything else. That's also where you slip into becoming a tactical person and burnout, and either you exit or somebody exits you because you're not doing you're you're not doing what the role ultimately needs to do to win.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Um sorry to interrupt, but if I could just add real quick there. I always, you know, when I kind of sat in a product marketing seat uh a while back, like the worst I ever felt was if somebody in, you know, an executive or somebody came up to me and knew something about a competitor that I didn't, you know. Yeah, like that's gonna happen, of course, but like something substantial about their product offering that I missed, ugh, not a good feel.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

No, not a good feeling. Impossible to totally cover, but there are, but that's but if you've got that's also a one data point opinion. So if you have a bank of information and verified state and uh verify actual statements from other customers about how they feel about this category or this specific competitor, the rest, then you're arguing with a single data point versus the only data point.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

So yeah, and you're bringing more context, you're bringing more, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

There's that. Um the other piece is what we've been talking about and asking folks to focus on a lot through this discussion is the inbound side of things, the research, the building your ICPs, the building your personas and messaging to them. Um, the other thing that's very helpful with that is how much can you pair those down to hit specificity? If your target is CISOs and you're going after every information security officer at a certain level of firmographics, okay, so are a million other solutions. If you're able to slice it down to what are I I want to I want to partner with my demand gen partners and I want to build a campaign for this ICP, this persona that has this specific problem that we can identify in this way and get beyond the basic firmographics and jobs to be done that any good persona and ICP can have and get down to a different level of specificity, excuse me, and then have them tie their results back to that specific level. You can get into it's just a good tactical way to get out of. I think we did a great job with personas, and hopefully that made our marketing campaigns better to we use this signal that we could find within the specific persona. We built specific messaging for it, and that outperformed another campaign by X percent. Which one of those? Stories sounds better.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

And I love just trying to get scratched and do little stuff. Very coincidentally, before we recorded this today, one of our team members wrote an article on some sentiment analysis and share voice work that they've done across a few different projects. If you look at the prop marketing job description, that's not on there. But if you want to think about what are we talking about over time, what is our thought leadership covering? What's the velocity of it? What are our competitors doing? Hugely successful projects that don't fit the cookie cutter uh definition of prop marketing, but do that did end up driving a tremendous amount of value and strategy change for more than one organization that we did them with. So I would challenge you to not just think about customer surveys, prospect interviews, listening to God calls. What are some of the different angles that you can take to again bring some of those data and insights to the table that are going to get people to actually care?

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Yeah. And that's a great segue to the next question I had. Getting close to what's happening there on those sort of front lines and customer-prospect interactions, PMA, you're involved with, which is the product marketing alliance. And they also published uh fairly recently here in early 2026 their leadership report for product marketers. And they had a particular emphasis in this report on metrics and measurement. And I think that's you know interesting because we're talking about shifting left, which is getting involved much, much earlier in the process to be strategic. But the output is the metrics, right? Which is what are you measuring, which is way at the other end, right? That's sort of at the end of the cycle, and then that feeds back in. You've got your little great little feedback loop. Um, but you know, the KPIs and the metrics, you know, product marketing hasn't been like, hasn't really owned its had its own KPIs, you know, maybe some like competitive win rate or competitive, you know, um analysis type stuff. Um, maybe some, you know, look at you know, deal size and things like that, are we, you know, increasing our deal size? But you know, your report, um, looking at my notes again, you acknowledge this attribution complexity when it comes to getting to metrics, right? Because product marketing is just one piece of a much bigger engine that brings a deal forward through a cycle to a close. And so, how do you isolate where product marketing is actually playing a real role? Obviously, we're tackling that at Troop by isolating messaging and story and how product marketers are influencing that. Um, but how important do you think it is to have really clear KPIs that product marketers own, especially connected to revenue growth and that revenue gap that you identified in your report?

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Yeah, it's a thorny one. Um, you mentioned win rates, it's one of my favorite examples because it's both something that product marketing is often tied to from a KPI perspective and is also affected by product capabilities and changes in the market and competitor and competitor angles. And you got an amazing new sales leader and and and and and a hundred other things that you could add on to that list. So I don't think there's any avoiding tying the product marketing function to an OKR within the organization, and the one that makes the most sense is revenue.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

So I agree, and I don't know why.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

We can talk about all of the hair here and there, but if you want your organization to carry the weight that it should, you're going to have to tie to some sort of revenue metric. Some people get really specific with hitting the, and I've seen hit 80% of the overall revenue goals for the go-to-markets that you execute within a given time. You can get really fancy with it. Um, Mops is not optimizing for product marketing. Sorry. You're going to you're going to have to figure out these individual elements. But again, whatever you can do to add a little bit of specificity is great, but ultimately you're going to be tied to an overall revenue number, and you're probably going to end up being tied to um either something related to a specific go-to-market or go-to-markets as a whole, or something that has a lot of hair on it, like win rates.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Yeah, and I think CMOs need to, you know, really drive this forward. If product marketing is rolling up to the CMO, which I think often is the case, although sometimes product marketing lives in product, sometimes it lives in the revenue org, you know. Um, but whoever's managing it also needs to take that accountability and ownership and and and make sure that they're being very specific about what product marketing is accountable for and in terms of owning numbers, not deliverables.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

And that, yes. And it is really easy also for the bad situation of we came out with X number of case studies or whatever other mess that's it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

There's so many analytic reports we were in, right? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Um it's all about narrative clarity. Just like if you're building something for your product, you're hoping that let's say your CM, uh let's hoping that your CMO has a really strong story around what prop marketing is bringing to the table. And do they have the proof points to back it up? It's getting we're kind of uh backing my way into an awkward uh messaging framework and validation metaphor. But the the general thought is do we have a really strong story about how prop marketing is contributing to these wins that we have as an organization? Are there people within the organization backing that up? Are we getting thanking stand-ups? Is something that we're doing getting brought up at when there's an SLT meeting? Is the product of the sales lead super appreciative? What's happening? Is a specific initiative wildly successful in adoption rates among the among the among the business? Those are not the ultimate things that we're going to be tied to, but it is the supporting uh proof points along with what you're doing, uh, to from a from a metrics standpoint for them to build a super clear story to go make a case for more investment or whatever the whatever the specific need may be come budget time.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

Yeah, and and and it feeds back to shift left, which is because once you have this information, this data, you can then take that back and say, okay, well, what is it about what how we're communicating what's in this product today, or how we're communicating competitively, or to certain markets, or to certain personas that is or isn't working, right? And so is this now, is this a product issue? Is this a sales training issue? Is it something else? Is it a market shift? Like you, but you need that data so that you can go back to the kind of ground zero and figure out okay, what do we need to do to address now upstream so that we can fix what's happening later down the road?

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 29:29

Yeah, yeah. So I think just to kind of wrap this up, what if you were to hire a superstar PMM, which I'm sure you have at Tulubio, but what when you think about how the role is changing and evolving, um, especially now that, you know, man, I was on a I was on a call earlier today with our head of product at Troop. And these guys are they're shipping features on the daily. Like I kid you not. And so that's happening, right? Because AI and and but so the role is evolving, all of our roles are evolving. But PMM, who would be the super, what traits are you looking for when you think about that product marketer who can excel, not just in the tactical execution, but at the shift left mentality, the getting involved in the like early stage strategy stuff. I mean, I guess you're looking at a mix, right? But if you could hire one, what are they what are they looking at?

SPEAKER_00 30:26

You know, yeah, three things domain expertise, commercial expertise, and can they be a champion?

SPEAKER_02 30:33

Um Tell me what do you mean by domain expertise? Do you mean the the practice of product marketing or the marketing?

SPEAKER_00 30:41

I mean the specific domain that of the buyer that you're selling to.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Um, this is this used to be really negotiable. Now it's non-negotiable. Um if you aren't demonstrating in an interview that you have a decent understanding of the buyer, I'm not saying you need to have spent 40 years in payments or some crazy thing out there, but if but have you put in the thought to understand how these buyers think, are you tailoring your conversation to it? Again, I'm not saying I would love if if you were reliant on being in the industry before, I wouldn't have a career. That's not the way that that's not the way that I came up, but you have to know your buyer, you have to you have to prove that you can learn the buyer if you don't. And and being uber specialized, and the flip side of this is that being uber specialized in a specific element of the product marketing discipline is out. Used to see roles and uh candidates that were specialized in competitive or specialized in messaging or specialized in this, that, and the other. Everybody has their superpower, and that's cool, but they're not, but companies aren't making roles uh that are unless you're getting to the highest enterprise level where the teams are enormous, right? You're not making a specialized role. You're going to be expected to serve the entire go-to-market model from front to back, and you're going to be expected to know, and coming back to the domain piece, you're going to be expected to know your customer front and back, whether you know it now or you're demonstrate ability to learn it quickly. So that's number one.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

Um, number two is product managers, I've heard many times, love to think of themselves as mini CEOs. You are the mini head of strategy, the mini chief of staff, the mini whatever uh qualifier you want to put on there. Um, that's not only just going to help you build your own career resilience because it gets you a little bit broader, also is a mind shift shift left that we've been talking about here of the real expectation of you isn't help me on this sales deck for this key deal, it's tomorrow. It's help us understand how we're going to attack this whole set of buyers.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

And that and that means they also need to be able to reach across the organization too. Like there's a big internal networking aspect to that as well, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Yeah, it's it's just table stakes, right? Like, are you a cross-functional expert? Are you going to have people that love having you there? You're gonna have people that don't love having you there, and you've got to deal with it all. Um, and part of that is the third piece, which is being a champion. We talked about not in the cheesy sports sense, but in the in the I've got to make sure that I'm the advocate for this area, this buyer or this product or whatever I'm tied to, which means that I need to evangelize it internally, which is some of that internal selling we talked about, but also just getting folks internally recognizing the value of what we're doing. You've got to evangelize it externally, being client-facing, being uh being involved in industry press, any of the areas that you may have. Again, this varies on the size of company, what you have, but either be doing it yourself or supporting the executives that are doing it. And number three, backing it up uh when you talk about it internally, with all the results that we talked about that were measured on, highlighting your wins, talking about how you talking in an all hands about how you influenced a certain thing that came forward. That's really a skill that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

And ultimately, if you're not doing that, you just run the risk of backsliding toward that state that we decided at the beginning we didn't like, which was order taker.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Yeah, definitely. I've also seen the role be have a very high degree of friction with the sales organization, too. And and but so they really need to function extremely well with the head of revenue, regardless of where they report up to.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

So yes, there is just no exceptions on product and revenue or and if customer is different than revenue with customer. Yeah, because those are those are the non-negotiable folks that if that if there's a lack of trust one way or the other that creeps in, really hard to adjust.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

Yeah, it sure is. It sure is. Um, Tom, I've really enjoyed our conversation. I'll be uh you know, keeping an eye on on more of the things that you guys publish and the work that you do. Definitely highly recommend Fluvio. You guys are an amazing team of product marketing experts. Um and uh thanks for participating in the show and being partners of Troop.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Thank you so much. Great being here. Love the conversation.

SPEAKER_02 35:35

Thanks.