Prove Product Marketing Value Like a Cordial PMM

0:02Julien Sauvage:Hi friends, welcome to Product Marketing Adventures, the only show that takes you beyond theory and into the real execution of product marketing. My name is Elle Grossenbacher, your trusted guide and host of this show. In each episode, I bring in expert product marketers to co-host two segments of this show. First, a case study example of their work, followed by a messaging critique for companies we admire. So if you're a PMM looking for practical guidance and inspiration, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's go.

0:42Julien Sauvage:Every product marketer on the face of the earth knows this feeling. Walking into any conversation, whether it's with sales or product or any executive, and feeling like you're mentally prepared to be on the defensive. already ready to prove yourself before the conversation even starts. Because half the time, no one really understands what product marketing actually does. And what's worse, most product marketers never get taught on how to prove their value. We know how to build messaging. We know how to create narratives. We know how to launch products. But showing the impact of all of that work, translating it into something that the business can see and measure and believe in, that's where so many PMMs get stuck.

1:23Julien Sauvage:So today, we're getting real about how PMMs can demonstrate their value in a way that's simple, credible, and impossible to misunderstand. Which brings me to today's guest. It is my absolute pleasure to have Julian Sauvage on the show. Although he's become an adored CMO, he came from strong PMM roots. In fact, he's one of the few marketing leaders who's basically done at all, from early career PMM work to CMO. Well, for more than 15 years, he's helped B2B SaaS companies go from having customers say things like, so what do you guys even do, to how did I ever live without this? And if that wasn't all, he's done it at incredible brands like Salesforce, Gong, Clary, and now Cordial.

2:07Julien Sauvage:Today at Cordial, he leads as CMO, building from the ground up, shaping brand, go-to-market strategy, demand generation, customer marketing, and all of that, turning brand investments into measurable pipeline. On top of that, Julian is an advisor and investor and a vocal thought leader who isn't afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. Julian, it's amazing to have you on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we're here. Awesome. Okay, let's dive right in. So today's topic is around proving the impact of messaging. So help me create some context for our listeners here. Let's diagnose the problem a little bit.

2:45Julien Sauvage:Why is it so hard for PMMs to prove impact? I think it is hard to prove impact because there's a lot of different choices that PMMs can have, right, in terms of like where they can prove the impact. When you think about it, PMM really spans across all the different, you know, stages of the funnel. And you can have impact at the top of the pre-funnel with like awareness type metrics. You can have, of course, impact at the top of the funnel. You can help sales accelerate their deals. You can even help CS with product adoption. The menu is so vast. And I think because of that, that's a challenge because PMMs tend to be very cross-functional and they want to please many stakeholders.

3:33and as such, they can't pick the one metric. And so my advice is always pick one metric of that menu of like 10 metrics. All of them look yummy, but you got to pick that one entree or that one dessert. And that's going to be where you're going to build your plan around. That's going to become your raison d 'être, if you will. And that'll help you basically understand where to start and stop and how to better explain what you're doing to your stakeholders. So picking one metric is everything.

4:05Julien Sauvage:Yeah, it's a bit more manageable too. It's also a nice work for sure. Or you can go a little deeper and then you can expand. But yeah, I'm big on like picking that one metric. That's the best way to clarify what we're doing to everybody else. Yeah. And you've clearly throughout your career have had multiple examples of excellent product marketing and proving value for PMMs. But for today's conversation, I want to focus on one particular example. and really, I think, where it all started. So specifically around influencing revenue. So for the first segment of our show, I want to start with a case study on how you approached this when you became the VP of product marketing at Gong.

4:46Julien Sauvage:And then I want to take that experience and fast forward into your career now at Cordial and see how maybe your team at Cordial is using the same playbook, how it's evolved over time. So I guess take me back to when it all started, What was going on at Gong when you set out to create that measurable impact and how you decided you wanted to measure the narrative that was influencing sales? Yeah, so it was back in 2021. So it's been a while now, but I always like talking about that example because Gong was a big brand, still is, but was really an upcoming and bigger brand back then. And I think some of that work kind of helped shape what the brand had become.

5:29So back then, end of, or like mid-2021, if I recall, we were kind of like combining a rebrand with a new narrative. And the visual brand is still what it is today, by the way. So the new narrative was, I think it was a little bigger and bolder than what we had before. A little more enterprise ready as well. It was differentiated. But then, of course, the question is always from sales is, cool PMM, how is this actually helping me win deals and win them faster and win bigger deals, right? And so at the time, there was no real credible way of proving that. Yes, we would have content management systems and whatnot to track adoption of your sales deck.

6:19But those are just vanity metrics. like they don't really prove any correlation with revenue. And so the task I had at hand with my team and my PMMs was to basically build a bit of a simple yet repeatable method using Gong itself, so Gong on Gong, and of course all the revenue data stored in CRM to basically determine whether reps using the new narrative were actually closing more deals faster, right? Right. And so the action that we took then was we kind of created that playbook, if you will. We started building what Gong was calling at the time, I think it still is called that, trackers. Some of them are a little smarter than others, a little bit of AI there.

7:06But like basically you encapsulate the essence of your POV and your positioning into a set of keywords and expressions. then we would set up these in Gong. And basically we would be able to track, you know, how the reps are using these and then kind of split the whole Salesforce into two groups, those heavily using the new narrative and those who weren't. And then what you do is basically you correlate, you know, adoption of that new messaging with downstream sales metrics. And that's what we did. And I think we could establish a clear correlation. Reps consistently using the new messaging were able to close more deals or to move through the stages of the cycle a little faster.

7:54And that's everything you need as a PMM, right? It's less how many assets and how beautiful they are you've produced. And it's more like, hey, there's tangible proof now that when you're using the new messaging, you basically end up closing more deals. Who doesn't want that?

8:11Julien Sauvage:Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So there's two things that I really love about this. The first is that it's like a super repeatable system that you and your team built. The second, and I think I mentioned this before ahead of this recording as we were preparing for this podcast episode, is that I feel so silly that as a PMM who has used Gong and other sales recording platforms, I never thought of taking the sales team and putting them into two groups. One group with the messaging, the new messaging or whatever narrative we're using, and one without and seeing which one is performing better. And it's just, it's a classic experiment that I just, I wish I would have thought of.

8:52Julien Sauvage:It's so, it's a really strong way to really prove that it's actually working versus, as you pointed out earlier, just leaning into like vanity metrics. So I love that. That was really clever. Yeah, exactly. And I will say you don't need, like it doesn't have to be gone. You can do that with Clary. You can do that with probably like the new, the Fathoms and the whatever. There are so many out there. There's like a thousand tools right now. So you kind of pick the one you want and then you track an option and the impact of your POV over one of these apps. Yeah. And I personally have experience in my career and I've heard other product marketing leaders as well say that the more you experiment and run experiments like this, the better that you get in your own, in your job, you become a more high performing marketer.

9:39Julien Sauvage:So just a little pro tip for anyone listening, run more experiments. Exactly. Yep. Now let's take your case study in this story. And let's say that I wanted to try to replicate it in my role today. Where would I get started as a PMM, you know, inspired by this case study? What would be step one? Yeah, I think step one is pick the metric you want to own or you want to influence. A little bit back to what we just said, right? The playbook you're going to build using the gong track or the whatever trackers and all of that, you need to know what success would look like. And so is it stage one conversion to stage two?

10:20Or is it ASP, average selling price or is it actual closed loan revenue, competitive win rates? I don't know, but I would assume that you really need to know the one metric you want to influence with your approach and your playbook. So that's the step one.

10:39Julien Sauvage:Yeah, of course. And I would imagine that whatever metric you pick, it's going to be different for every business depending on what your business priorities are. And then likewise, whatever tools you have access to. So, yeah, there's a reason why you are shipping this new positioning at this point. Right. And it's and so it's kind of like back to first principles in a way like, why do we even do this in the first place? Maybe we're sending a lot of deals, but the, you know, the deal amount, I mean, the deal size isn't big enough. Well, if that's the reason why that new POV was shipped, then use that as, you know, the criteria for you.

11:13Julien Sauvage:I love that. Yeah. Yeah, that's helpful. Okay, so then what's step two after I get the metric down? Yeah, step two is kind of like all the pre-measurement groundwork. You actually need to develop your message, right? And so as we know, there's plenty of frameworks to talk about this. This is not. I feel like you could do another episode about just narrative building. Just that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But like once you have that, you have your pitch, you have your POV, you have your narrative, you have the key phrases you would expect to show up in these real calls. And so typically, you would certify your go-to-market team on it.

11:53And now you have your tracker set up in Gong. So you're kind of like ready for the next step, which is starting to measure stuff.

12:00Julien Sauvage:I love that. Okay. So I've got my metric set up. And then I do other pre-work where I have the narrative built out. Then what's step three? Yeah, I would say step three is a little bit what I just mentioned, like the, I would say the roll up of the positioning or of the messaging, right? The new deck, the new demo, the new whatever. We all know that training, one-off trainings are pretty much useless. So it's all about repeating it, reinforcing it, getting people certified on it. As I said, you can make it fun. You can have prices and incentives and gamify it and you have a leaderboard and you see who's, you know, doing a good job at taking the certification and whatnot.

12:42So everybody in tech and in sales in particular is competitive in nature. So I think you play off that to make sure people really are trained and like the new pitch is ingrained in how they think and speak.

12:55Julien Sauvage:Yeah, yet another topic that we could do an entire episode on is sales enablement and sales training. Yeah, so many things to talk about. Yes, okay. So we picked the metric, we've built the messaging, we enabled sales. What happens next? Well, you've got to start measuring, right? So sales now is like actually taking active calls with your clients, your customers, your prospects. So, you know, depending on your, I guess, transactional volume of calls, then you need to wait until you have a critical mass of calls to be able to do a more robust analysis. But typically takes, you know, a few days, a few weeks, depending on your go-to-market and your ICP, I guess.

13:34Julien Sauvage:Yeah. And whatever metric, I would imagine whatever metric you choose too, right? That's right. Yeah. If you choose more, that's a good point. If you choose more like downstream metrics, like win rates against competitor A, then you actually got to wait until a few cycles are complete, lost or won before you can actually measure that stuff for sure. You have your trackers, as I said, in any of these apps. And as I said, organically, you can see who's heavily adopting the new POV and who's not. And then you define the median. And that's what creates that almost A-B testing of reps, behavior adopters, and the ones who aren't really using the new POV.

14:20It could be balling too, by the way, if you want to be fancy, I'm not. But like if you want to do like four or five, whatever, but I would start small and simple.

14:28Julien Sauvage:Whatever makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I do want to call out because I think, I don't know if I mentioned it as I was kind of summarizing the steps. In the pre, I guess like pre-training or pre-experiment, the part of your step two, to actually create the trackers and whatever tool you're using to just make your life way less manual. Like there's probably even AI built into some of that. So yeah, definitely a piece that you wouldn't want to miss in some of that operational setup. Okay, so now that I have everything set up and I've now run my experiment, I'm assuming all these tools, Gong, Clary, whatever, probably also have some kind of like exporting report analysis that they can run.

15:09Julien Sauvage:What happens once you get the analysis back or complete the analysis on the experiment? Yeah, I would say that that's a good point. The level of analytical views that you get pretty much highly depends on the app. Like certain apps are just better at providing reporting and dashboards off, you know, out of the box, if you will. I remember back then at Gone221, the reporting wasn't as, how should I say, comprehensive. And so we actually ended up exporting a lot of that data and then building, RevOps would own that, building some charts in basically Excel to compare the group A and B. But I would say pick your reporting tool of choice.

15:55It could be inside the conversation intelligence app itself, or it could be outside. And then while you show the wins, you highlight the reps who adopted the message and who are crushing it on that one metric that you picked, step one. And then you show the other ones. And that's how you're going to close the loop by showing how the message ties back to the metric you initially picked and set. So in our example, if you said, I need to close bigger deals, but my close rates are great. I just need bigger deals. Then that's the one metric. And then hopefully group A, behavior adopters, their average setting price on average is higher than the one of group B.

16:38And that's enough proof, right?

16:40Julien Sauvage:I would guess that your stakeholders would be really excited to see that kind of result. Also, the team that's in the camp using old message with a lower steel size is probably a little bummed that they didn't get the bigger. Well, now they know what to do. They know that they need to embrace the new message and hop on that train. So it's, it becomes, it lifts everybody's boats in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure this probably changes a little bit based on what metric you're using. But I guess if we're talking about impacting revenue, it will absolutely include sales or some kind of sales leader.

17:18Julien Sauvage:But can you like just quickly give some examples of good stakeholders to use as you're doing a feedback loop? Yeah, as you said, I think it is highly dependent on the metric you picked. If it's relevant to more like net new logos and net new business, then sales is going to be there. Marketing is going to be there. If you're a P &G company and you want to measure how your narrative is impacting product adoption or product utilization, then you're going to have PMs and even ENG and product in the room. So it kind of depends. If your metric is NDR and NPS or churn rather, then CS would be in the room.

17:56So I would assume like pretty much all of good market, including, you know, products would kind of be interested, at least in that project.

18:06Julien Sauvage:Totally. Yeah. Any product manager is going to care about revenue and any good product manager anyway. The good ones for sure. The good ones care. Yeah. They want to know all of that. Okay, cool. I think we actually got a little bit of a head, but assuming there is a step six, and that is the feedback loop that we kind of touched on already. But quickly walk us through what that looks like. Yeah. Listen, no message is perfect ever. And it always changes with time. And what's top of mind for your buyer today might not be what's going to be top of mind for them in like three days or three months or three years.

18:41Right. So it keeps changing. You always have to adapt. Typically, you don't change your value propositions and your positioning statements as often because consistency and repetition are key. But the actual messaging of it and the way you approach that and talk about your value can change over time. So that's the feedback loop. That's where typically the top reps would tell you, I really like this piece. I think this piece is a little weak. or the group B would tell you what's happening with their experience. And that's how you refine your assets, your POV, your messaging. You make these updates and you keep shipping and they keep using what you're shipping.

19:30So it's kind of like a flywheel, if you will, or a new cycle that starts all over again.

19:36Julien Sauvage:Yeah. And it helps build trust with your stakeholders when they see their feedback. you know, obviously reflected in the messaging too. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. The messaging is never an ivory tower type of thing. It's always like you're in the trenches working, baking the cake, as we say, with reps for sure. Yep. Yep. Okay. So let's fast forward now to what life looks like at Cordial. Like where do you see this playbook show up and how has it evolved since its inception back in 2021? Yeah, I would say it's been refined over time. like this what i just explained was very much like the v1 if you will and we're talking four years ago or yeah more than that four and a half years ago right uh like one thing that i remember we didn't we were not really thinking about was naturally the top performing reps are going to be adopting the new message if that's a good message and so there's a bias there and you cannot attribute them winning just to the message.

20:39It's also because of all the other stuff and their salesmanship and whatnot, if you will. So what we did then at the next company is kind of like introduce a bit of a time, the time dimension, if you will, and know if with the new messaging, kind of do the before and after. Is there a delta over time between before and after for the top reps as well as for the the middle and the bottom reps, if you will. And then if you see that spike or if you see that delta, then it's a better sign of your messaging being working. So that's just one example of a tweak that we added and we've adopted over time.

21:17And there's way more. We used to do exactly what I said, but we would do that on all the gone calls. And yet you don't pitch your products all the time. So you need to limit your calls to a certain subset. You need to include email as well. So there's like a lot of different tactics and details that I'm not going to bore you with. But I would say that playbook has been refined and robustified, I don't know if that's an English word, over the years for sure.

21:46Julien Sauvage:Yeah. And everyone should take a playbook and iterate on it, like make it your own, right? This is just kind of the bare bones. But what you do with it is really what you get out of it. So I love how scientific this is. So if I just very quickly recap the steps here, step one is try to figure out what that metric is that you want to use. Step two, I think, was to actually build your narrative and to do some of that pre-work, right? The logistics, setting up your trackers. An account for you so that you can keep track. Yes, thank you. Thank you. And then step three was to enable the sales team.

22:23Julien Sauvage:Step four was to actually run the experiment and do the analysis. step five is to do the share outs and then step six i'm going to call step six the feedback where we like you get you do the iterating on the on the messaging yay okay it's actually really simple to do it's just it's so clever and scientific and it really comes it really showcases the like a true measurable impact of narratives and messaging so one last question for you before you move on to the next segment of the show. Any last advice you have for a PMM who's going to take this playbook and run with it? I think you start simple.

23:02That's for sure. As I said, you pick that one metric, only do two groups. You don't do the time thing, the delta over time. It's just too complex. I would say all of that stuff we just talked about, it's a sales metric or it's more like a downstream revenue metric we picked. maybe you're crushing things on revenue, but you need to go and explore a new segment of the market or whatever. And what keeps your CEO up at night is awareness in the enterprise segment. I'm making that up. You're crushing your mid-market, down-market revenue numbers, but you have nothing upmarket and you're going to start at the top of the funnel.