Product Marketing

Purpose and Role

The Product Marketing function supports the sustainable growth of the product by building awareness, generating demand, enabling sales, and fostering adoption. It acts as a strategic function that connects the product’s value proposition with the market, translating business and product goals into coherent, measurable initiatives across channels and touchpoints.

Product Marketing is responsible for defining and maintaining the product positioning and messaging, ensuring consistency, clarity, and relevance across market-facing communications. Through this responsibility, Product Marketing ensures that the product is clearly differentiated, correctly understood, and effectively represented across all stages of the customer journey.

The function operates across the full customer lifecycle - from first exposure to the brand, through evaluation and purchase, and into product advocacy - working in close collaboration with Sales, Product Management, and Customer Success.

Marketing Vision

The Product Marketing function embraces both:

• Traditional Marketing responsibilities, such as brand awareness, demand generation, communication, and pipeline contribution
• An extended, sales-impact-driven vision, where Product Marketing actively supports revenue creation at an account level, enabling Sales with insights, content, positioning, and targeted initiatives aimed at high-value accounts

In this model, Product Marketing contributes not only to the generation of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that support product discovery at a sales level, but also to the identification, nurturing, and activation of Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) that support direct deal creation and acceleration, supporting a more integrated and effective Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy.

Each campaign or Product Marketing area is associated with specific success metrics, while still contributing to the overall objectives of the function. Performance is continuously monitored to inform prioritization, resource allocation, and iteration.

These are further complemented by secondary metrics tied to individual initiatives (e.g. reach, engagement, adoption, conversion rates), all of which ultimately feed into the broader goals of demand generation, brand strength, and product growth.

Within the GTM framework, Product Marketing plays a central role by shaping market perception, driving pipeline creation, and enabling Sales execution through messaging, assets, insights, and account-level initiatives.

As part of the Product circle, a recurring GTM Review is held once every three weeks, during which Product Marketing, together with the other GTM functions, reviews key KPIs related to pipeline generation and deal progression. This review is supported by a shared GTM Control Plane** file, maintained in the Product circle’s SharePoint, which provides a single source of truth for GTM performance, priorities, and follow-up actions.

Risk Management

Marketing contributes to the company’s structured Risk Management process through a centralized Risk Register, maintained in SharePoint.

The Risk Register defines:

• Risk categories
• Likelihood and impact assessments
• Mitigation actions
• Associated monitoring KPIs

This process ensures proactive identification and mitigation of risks related to market positioning, pipeline generation, brand perception, execution capacity, and dependency on channels or partners.

Funnel Governance, Qualification, & Attribution framework

In alignment with the Product Marketing Vision, the function operates across two complementary but distinct progression models, with the aim of producing demo-ready* pipeline:

1. Lead-Based Funnel (MQL Model)

This represents Marketing’s traditional structured contribution to pipeline generation through awareness, demand generation, lead generation, and lifecycle progression.

Contacts are progressed from:

Subscriber → Lead → Engaged Lead → MQL

A contact may be classified as MQL when sufficient qualification evidence demonstrates readiness for Sales engagement.

Qualification criteria may include:

• Meaningful engagement following a pre-qualifying source (campaign, event)
• Sustained content interaction and website behavior
• Engagement with BOFU or strategic assets
• Direct inbound contact
• Explicit demo request

Once marked as MQL:

• The contact is updated in the CRM lifecycle stage.
• It becomes part of the structured Sales pipeline.
• Sales assumes proactive follow-up responsibility.

2. Account-Based Model (MQA Model)

Beyond individual lead qualification, Product Marketing operates an extended account-level model focused on strategically relevant and high-value companies.

Under this model, Product Marketing:

• Identifies and prioritizes accounts based on engagement and intent
• Applies deeper qualification and presales validation techniques
• Enables Sales through structured intelligence and coordinated outreach

These accounts are managed through the Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) framework.

The MQA process follows this sequence:

1. Internal review within Marketing via the MQA file available in SharePoint.
2. Application of presales techniques and intent-based validation.
3. Structured sharing with Sales through a dedicated working list.
4. Cross-functional alignment during periodic sync meetings.

*Demo-ready reflects Marketing validation that the contact is commercially relevant and ready for structured Sales follow-up - not merely that an action has occurred.

Direct requests & presales validation

Direct inbound requests - including demo submissions or direct contact messages - receive priority and structured validation before Sales handover.

These requests are:

• Reviewed directly by the Global Marketing Director
• Assessed against ICP alignment, relevance, and strategic fit
• Subject to an initial presales-oriented outreach using structured templates and contextual qualification

Direct requests may result in:

• MQL classification
• MQA prioritization
• Or structured cross-based nurturing by both marketing and sales

CRM Workflows and Automation

Automation supports both progression models.

Workflows are triggered by predefined actions and operate in the background to:

• Progress leads through lifecycle stages (Lead-Based model)
• Enrich and structure CRM data (supporting both models)

Two primary workflow categories exist:

A. Lead Progression Workflows: Triggered by engagement signals (form fills, list membership, behavioral thresholds).

Objective: structured movement toward MQL qualification.

B. CRM Enrichment Workflows: Triggered by conditional logic (intent topic identified, lifecycle duration, engagement patterns).

Objective: structured intelligence for prioritization, reporting, and account-level analysis.

Each Product Marketing macro-area may activate dedicated workflows aligned with this framework.

Attribution Framework

Internal Attribution (Performance Optimization)

For internal channel performance analysis, Marketing applies a Time-Decay Attribution Model, using a 7-day half-life formula:

y = 2^(-x/7)

This ensures:

• Recognition of multi-touch journeys
• Proximity-based weighting
• Analytical rigor for channel comparison

GTM-Level Attribution (Deal Reporting)

At the macro Go-To-Market level, attribution is analyzed using:

• Original Lead Source (OLS) and related date of creation
• Converting Source (CS) and related first date of conversion

These may include:

• Marketing channels
• Sales outreach
• Partner channels
• Other inbound sources

For high-level reporting:

• OLS = 50% credit
• CS = 50% credit

This ensures balanced recognition between sourcing and closing influence, particularly within the Deals section of the CRM, where active and progressing accounts are periodically evaluated during GTM reviews.

Through its internal MQA file, Marketing additionally tracks subsequent conversion dates for accounts that stall and later re-enter active sales progression, enabling deeper journey analysis without altering CRM attribution integrity.

Governance Principles

To preserve integrity across both models:

• Lifecycle stages must reflect objective engagement evidence
• Attribution fields (OLS, CS, enrichment properties) must remain fact-based
• Qualification criteria must be consistently applied
• MQL and MQA serve different strategic purposes and must not be conflated