#159 Partnering With Marketing To Skyrocket Presales Reach

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Notes:

Neeraj is the founder of Snackwyze. Snackwyze is a software product to help SaaS sellers create interactive walkthroughs, step-by-step guides, tours & demos from screen recordings in seconds. Before starting his own company, he was the Product Marketing Lead at Cisco for 8 years.

In this episode, Neeraj tells us what his role is as a product marketer, how it’s different from corporate marketing and somewhat similar to sales engineering, how he founded his own company, and what Sales Engineers can learn from product marketing as a skill.

Key Takeaways:

Tune in to our conversation and learn about:

- 01:38 Where the inspiration for Snackwyze came from
- 04:26 His transition from being a hardware engineer to product marketer at Cisco
- 08:34 The difference between product marketing and corporate marketing
- 12:44 Why it’s important for product marketers to find alignment with the goal of enterprise marketing
- 12:56 Expectations from marketing vs the expectations from sales with respect to what is a qualified lead
- 18:43 How can a Sales Engineer go into product marketing?
- 20:14 Biggest blunders Neeraj used to make as a product marketer and how he learned from them
- 24:18 Does having an MBA or coming from a more technical background help with being a better product marketer?
- 27:30 Neeraj’s recommendations learning by doing for people who want to get into product marketing
- 32:08 What he learned from Sales Engineers that he was able to implement as a marketer
- 39:24 Facts about being a product marketer that would surprise any SE

Quotes:

“Your job as a Product Marketing Manager is to communicate or establish that channel of trust with your prospects, activities, product launches, all that, at scale.” – Neeraj Dhulekar

“A PMM should really be tied with the SE in capturing the used cases and then convert all of that into the customer, messaging, and positioning of the product, so all of you are on the same page.” – Neeraj Dhulekar

“It’s sort of on-the-job training, If you know the product, all that remains to be done is the soft skills, communicate with the customer, everything else can be learned on the job.” – Neeraj Dhulekar

“As a product marketer, when you talk about competitive things it’s really important for you to highlight the benefits over anything else.” – Neeraj Dhulekar

“The best way to learn is by actually doing.” – Ramzi Marjaba