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The following post was written by RJ Gazarek, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Veracode. RJ has ten years of experience in Marketing, with the last five heavily focused on Product Marketing. With a passion in Psychology, a background in Technology, and a career in Marketing, he brings a unique perspective to the world of PMM. And when he’s not in the office, writing articles, or outside running - he can be found zoning out to his favorite video games.  

No two companies are identical in the roles and responsibility breakdown between Corporate Marketing and Product Marketing. I’d like to share with you one way I’ve seen this work successfully, and hope you can take this as a starting point to find success for you and your team. What I encourage you to remember, as with any guide, there is no “silver bullet”; you should always take these best practices and mold them to what works best for the people on your team. Additionally, I’m defining Corporate Marketing as an umbrella term for all non-product marketing functions such as Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Public Relations, Communications, and Campaign Planning (to name a few).

If you take ONE thing away, please let it be this: Trust and respect your peers on their teams to fully own what they are responsible for. Rely on them to do their job, do it well, and then leverage what they bring to the table so that you can focus on what you are good at. Look to them, lean on them, and have them fulfill their end of the bargain. And, make sure you’re doing the same.

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is an interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In this edition of Product Marketing Spotlight Series, we shine the light on Annum Munir, Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud.

Back in the 1970s, Xerox recognized the need for a support team that handled many of the basic operations and logistics essential for a successful sales team. The support team took over core sales operations such as sales planning, compensation, forecasting, and territory mapping. The team aptly named, sales operation group, created a working environment that allowed the sales crew to do their jobs with all the right tools.

At the same time, sales managers and business owners were handing out copies of Og Mandino’s, The Greatest Salesman in the World, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, and Dale Carnegie’s, How to Win Friends and Influence People, while developing sales strategies for enabling their sales team once they got out of the office and into the field.

These two processes — sales operations and sales enablement — have been running on parallel trajectories ever since.

Let’s take a closer look at the difference between sales ops and sales enablement, how each impacts your sales organization, and how to implement each to assist your sales team in winning more deals.

If there is a role in modern businesses that is less understood than Product Marketing, it is Growth. What’s more, both roles become more confusing because they often sit in similar pockets in the org chart. There are some overlaps and distinctions between the fields of Growth and Product Marketing, as well as many opportunities for these professionals to work together.