A Need for Product Marketing Service-Based Businesses

Super humans aren’t real. But the closest persona I can think of in the startup world is a developer that can build products fast and drive adoption through strategic marketing and sales motions. 

This persona can build and sell. Teams that can do this are extremely lean, with improved margins and a market advantage over the majority of their competition.

Sounds great, but this isn’t the reality for 99% of developers, or developer-focused companies. 

Developers know how to build products. They don’t know marketing. 

There is an assumed market need for B2B SaaS marketing and sales enablement services aimed at the developer market. Not just working with developers, but helping companies building developer-focused products. These companies are made up of technical team members and often lack the go-to-market talent they need to drive the adoption of the products or features they are shipping. 

Where a competitive advantage emerges is when the developer-focused startup can find marketers that come from technical backgrounds. These workers understand how to sell software because they’ve used and built software. 

But this talent is few and far between. Startups struggle to hire for these roles. They spend waste valuable time interviewing candidates in marketing and sales for roles they themselves do not understand. When they do hire senior go-to-market talent - executives and directors - these roles often do two things as a company is figuring out their go-to-market motion: (1) outsource demand generation related activities or (2) hire in-house talent to help execute on strategic campaigns. 

The second only works if there is a deep understanding of the value pillars behind the startup’s product and a messaging framework established behind those pillars. Accurate value pillars are established based on the real and perceived value behind a company’s product or features as understood by their ideal customer persona. In order to create these value pillars and build messaging upon them, the company must know or have a good and informed guess on who the persona they are targeting is. 

The work stated above is primarily a product marketing initiative. It is tedious work, and is very easy to get wrong. It’s also really expensive to hire a good product marketer in house, and even more expensive to make the wrong hire. 

This is where I believe it makes sense for a startup to hire a 3rd party strategic partner to help with their product marketing. This relationship would ensue on a retainer and project basis: No salary, no benefits, no interviewing, and no severance if it turns out to be the wrong partnership. 

This partner will host workshops with their go-to-market leadership. They’ll craft value pillar documentation as informed by sales calls, interviews with customers, and other research. This partner will be able to produce and ship marketing and sales enablement materials like case studies, blogs, and other content. They can develop battle cards, sales cheat sheets, and objection handling. They may even be able to help with outbound and nurture email strategy and copy. All with a technical guise, a layer of expertise that is hard to find (and will likely be kept once discovered).

And this is all they will do. Because the offer is specific for a certain type of startup: The non-super human developer-focused B2B SaaS startup.

‍