This article originates from Zack's presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in Chicago, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
My name is Zack Wenthe, and I’m the CDP Evangelist for Treasure Data. I work in the product marketing org, which is part of our marketing org. My job is to go out and share what the customer data platform (CDP) is and what we do.
More importantly, though, I'm a marketer and I talk to marketers. Today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the rise of the PMM evangelist and why this is the perfect role for your product marketing teams.
I’ll look specifically at:
- Why it’s time for product marketers to step out from behind the curtain
- The power of community evangelism
- Dedicated evangelism
- A day in the life of an evangelist
- What I’ve learned
- The secrets of storytelling
- Leading your customers down the ‘yellow brick road’
A little backstory…
Before I jump into it, let me tell you a story. Recently, my grandmother passed away (it’s not a sad story; she lived an amazing life). As a family, we got together and had an opportunity to talk about stories and things we remembered about her.
One of the stories that came to my mind was from when I was four years old. My parents were going to the hospital to have my brother, and I was not happy about it. I wanted to go with them, and I was throwing a huge fit.
My grandmother came over and bribed me to calm down with dinner and a movie. It was 1985, so it wasn't like we turned on Netflix – it was whatever was on TV that night – but I was just happy to watch a movie. What we watched was The Wizard of Oz.
As a four-and-a-half-year-old, I was enthralled. I spent the next year talking about this movie and everything that happened in it. Every year, they replayed it on TV, and I got to remember how much I loved this movie and how much I hated my brother (just kidding!).
And so, when I was preparing for this article, I thought it was only appropriate that I used The Wizard of Oz as an example.
Why it’s time for product marketers to step out from behind the curtain
When we think of evangelism, we tend to picture big scary heads talking – the heads of our executives and founders. This works because they're passionate, so evangelism comes to them naturally.
However, the reality is that there is often someone behind the curtain: the product marketing team. We're pulling the levers, creating narratives, doing the positioning, and sometimes we need to step out from behind the curtain and own the story.
Owning the story is essential, and today, I hope to convince you of its importance. When you do, you can help a whole loving band of characters.
You can provide your marketing team with a message that they had in their hearts all along. You can help your customer success team have more heart and empathy with customers. You can give your pre-sales team the courage to tell customers stories while getting away from features. You can even help sales have a brain!
... Just kidding. What I mean is that sales teams are always craving knowledge, and as a PMM you’re perfectly placed to give it to them.
Now, it’s important to note that this loving band of characters isn't just supporting players in this movie – they are the stars, but so is the wizard. The same applies to evangelism in your company. You and your teams have a starring role to play.
The power of community evangelism
We can break evangelism down into two types: community evangelism and dedicated evangelism. Community evangelism is where your entire organization is working together to share the same message, with each team sharing it in its own unique way.
If you're just getting started, community evangelism is an easy way to get going, so let's a little deeper into what the heck that means.
Community evangelism provides the ability to multiply a message. If you put out a press release today, how long will it live in the market where people are reading it? Maybe three or four days, or perhaps only a few hours, depending on how interesting you are.
Similarly, if you post something on your LinkedIn company page, how many people see it? It depends on the size of your page. Unfortunately, LinkedIn company pages have one of the worst reaches of all social platforms.
Marketing messages tend to be thrown out into a small echo chamber of employees who follow the company page, some industry people, and that’s about it.
Community evangelism allows companies to create a multiplying effect. For instance, if I send out a message – it could be about a launch or a case study, for instance – the sales team can pick it up and add their spin on it.
If you have 20 salespeople, that message is amplified 20 times. If the CS team does the same thing, the power of that message multiplies further.
However, many people make the mistake of just writing a boilerplate social post, and having everyone post the same thing.
To truly get an impact from your community evangelism, you need to teach everyone how to enhance their storytelling. Help them to add their own spins to the core message, and you'll be amazed at the impact it can have.
Let's a B2B feature launch as an example. This feature is important to our customers, but a press release is probably not going to get picked up, so instead, we tell a story about a pain point that a customer is experiencing. We’ll put that message out there and teach sales how to add their spin to it.
Now, salespeople love to talk and add their flair, so all of a sudden, this message is going to become folklore. It will get repeated in customer meetings and posted on social media. When you give salespeople permission to tell a story and show them how they will do it. That’s such a powerful tool for your company.
Unfortunately, most salespeople forget to add their spin to stories. That means when you're working on enhancing storytelling, you need to be the champion of the story. Give them some frameworks, ideas, and examples, and remind them to do it every once in a while.
At Treasure Data, we use a program called PostBeyond, which is a distributed social platform. It allows our marketing team to write messages that anyone in our organization can then post on Twitter or LinkedIn.
That in and of itself is a great way to get your social posts out there. However, we take it a step further by encouraging our team members to add their own flavor to the messages and turn them into stories.
We ask them to share the message with a specific customer and say, "I saw this and thought of you," or, "This may solve a bigger problem for you." This gives our company a real voice in the marketplace.
At the end of the day, people buy from people they like or from brands that feel good to them. The easiest way to feel good about something is by having a personal connection to it.
When your salespeople, CSMs, or marketing team members are out there sharing a story and explaining how a feature may solve a bigger problem, it creates that connection and resonates with your customers.
Dedicated evangelism
Community evangelism is a great starting point. But how you get real gains is by giving somebody, even halftime, the dedicated opportunity to get out and talk – and talk often. Dedicated evangelism is what I do; part of my job is going out and spreading our message through podcasts, for instance.
The funny part is when I go out and talk, I don't necessarily talk about customer data platforms. My job is to talk to marketers about things that they're struggling with – what's going on with TikTok? What's going on on LinkedIn? How do we deal with first-party data? How do you deal with Google not making its mind up about cookies?
All these things bouncing around in marketers' heads are what I talk about.
Whether it's on a podcast, on a webinar, at a trade show, or at industry events like this, these are opportunities to build awareness of your brand. That’s the opportunity that dedicated evangelism offers – the opportunity to build a brand both for your company and (more selfishly) for you personally.
This is vital because ultimately one of the biggest challenges we all face is awareness, especially in B2B, but even more in B2C, as budgets are getting tightened, ads are harder to pay for, everything gets more convoluted, and there's more noise in the marketplace.
