Maia Wells:
Welcome back. I'm your host Maia Morgan Wells. Today, I welcome Shelby Britton, a director of product marketing currently at Cloudinary, who previously spent 13 years at Adobe. We're diving in today about product marketing as a hybrid role that sits at the center of the SaaS marketing universe. From marketing to product to the business line, product marketing brings the moving parts together. And Shelby has some important advice for us about steeping yourself in metrics and staying involved in business goals. Shelby Britton, I'm pleased to welcome you to The Marketing Hero Podcast.
Shelby Britton:
Thanks for having me, looking forward to it.
Maia Wells:
Well, let's begin with a question we like to ask all of our guests, what's your favorite part of your career and how did you figure that out?
Shelby Britton:
Let's see. My favorite part, it's what I'm doing now. I didn't start my career in product marketing, I actually started my career in field marketing and demand gen, but I always loved diving into the business strategy and the data, sticking my nose into the middle of what the business unit was doing. So, a few years after doing that at Adobe, I had a manager who was leading the product business unit, and I had been so closely aligned to that team that we just started to have this conversation and it turned into, "Hey, what is it that you love to do?" And as I was explaining it, she told me, "You know what? You probably should be in product marketing. What you're describing about what you love is really more aligned to product marketing." Not that I didn't like what I was doing, but I just tended to drift that way. So they made room for me on the product marketing team and moved me over, and I've been there ever since, going over a decade now.
Maia Wells:
Wow. Tell us a little bit more about those aspects of what you were doing at the time that ended up being product marketing naturally. Are those the business goals that you were more interested in? Tell us a little bit more about picking out those little aspects that turned out to be product marketing, just naturally for you.
Shelby Britton:
I was always interested in coming up with the strategy plans. And if I wasn't coming up with them, I wanted to know what they were. I wanted to have input. I wanted to help steer the ship in the direction that it should go. I really enjoy market research, competitive research, keeping an eye out for what's happening in the market, reading the tea leaves on where we should go. So I always had an opinion, even in field marketing and in demand gen on, Hey, I think this product needs to go in this direction and we should message it this way. And we should capture this part of the market. Have we thought about going after this segment of the market? And those type of things were the things that led me in that direction, more of product marketing rather than taking what product marketing was creating and developing programs for field marketing and demand gen around that. I wanted to be part of the creation of that strategy and the direction of the ship.
Maia Wells:
How was that transition for you, going from demand gen and creating those programs as part of your job into steering the direction? Was that transition hard for you? It seems like it was pretty natural that you liked to do those things. Tell me a little bit more about what that transition was like, going from demand generation into product marketing, where you are now.
Shelby Britton:
At the time, it was pretty easy because I was already in the mix. The way that it really happened for me at Adobe was, while I was in field marketing and demand gen, I was very closely aligned to that product marketing team. And as I was becoming closer to what they were doing, I was providing input. They were valuing my input. I would come to them with ideas, backed up by data and research and they appreciated it. So they did invite me more and more to the meetings that they were having. They would include me in projects. We were working really closely aligned, as product marketing should be pretty closely aligned to the various different marketing functions and other functions throughout the company.
But I think that was just a natural alignment. So, I was already starting to do some of those things, so it was a pretty natural transition into the product marketing team. I had already been working with that team pretty closely, already been doing some of those things. So it wasn't too much of a lift and shift for me. I think the tougher part was giving up some of my demand gen field marketing responsibilities, as far as... That is fun to me too, so I had to give that over. I had to be done with that and turn it over to the other team. Okay, you guys can do that now.
Maia Wells:
Do you feel like most demand generation people understand metrics enough and understand the functions of product marketers enough, in general?
Shelby Britton:
Yes and no. I think it depends on the team. My experience at Adobe was that, there are so many products that Adobe has. And there was one demand gen team trying to generate leads for all of them. Whereas in product marketing, we have the luxury of focusing on one product or one product suite. The demand gen team typically has to look across all of them. So they do dive into the metrics, but not... At least in my experience at a company like Adobe, not in the sense that we would in product marketing. We're really living in the data. We're understanding what's happening in the market. What demand gen wants from us is, Hey, who do I need to target? What do I need to say? What's the hook? What's the persona? What do they care about?
Give me the ICP, the ideal customer profile. And they'll take it from there. They're not going and diving into that. They're not finding out that information on their own, they're relying on us to come up with that. In my current role at Cloudinary, I find the team... Because there's not as many products, the demand gen team is a little more into the data. However, they're still relying on product marketing to come up with the ICP and the pain points and what to say. And what's the messaging, what's the best thing to say to this group of people. So, that's not different.
Maia Wells:
Do you feel like demand generation folks should ask more questions about those things and understand the why a bit more? Because what I hear you saying is, "Let me come up with a strategy, let me come up with a go-to-market. I will tell you, demand gen people," or whoever else in marketing. There's a lot of different marketing roles that rely on that to do our jobs. And I'm in demand gen myself, so I'm asking these questions almost as a selfish reason too, because I'd like to know how to better execute. Do you find that people in demand generation should be asking more questions or should be understanding more of the why behind our go-to-market strategies?
Or is it better for them or us to just take it and run with it, understand and trust that you've done your job well so that then they can go and do their job well? Because now you're a product marketing leader, what we're talking about with that transition was quite a long time ago. You're the one that's leading things now. Do you feel like it helps demand generation do their job better to ask those questions of why? Or do you think it's just more of like, Hey, take our work and run with it?
Shelby Britton:
No, I do. I do think it's really important that demand gen, they do start asking the why or dig in a little bit. And no, they don't... They have so many things that they have to do, they don't have to know everything that we have learned or do the market research. But I do think it's important. The best demand generation folks that I've worked with before have dug into the product a little bit more, understood the product a little bit better, have asked about the messaging, dug into the persona. They have a really good understanding of the product, the market and the persona. Whether they discovered that information on their own or we gave it to them and they really took the time to learn it, to ask questions, to make sure that they understood it.
Because what I found is, the demand gen folks that took the time to really understand it... And I understand some demand gen folks have a lot of products to understand, so I'm sympathetic to that. But the ones that took the time to do it, the quality of their work is on target. It's really spot on. It really talks to... It talks about the product correctly. It says the right things to the right people. I can tell when a demand gen person has maybe not done that much homework and really took the time to read through the materials, to understand the product, to understand the market and the personas. Because the stuff that ends up getting written, like the copy of whatever campaign that they're running, it tends to be a little off. It's not quite accurate, it's not an accurate product description. And you can tell the audience that it would be sent to would know immediately.
If you're sending it to, for example, a technical audience and you had the terminology wrong, then it would not resonate with that person. And that person would immediately be able to call BS on that. Like, okay, they don't know what they're talking about. This company doesn't know what they're talking about. They're not talking to me the right way. So, you can tell that. There does have to be a certain level of accuracy in the way that we write copy about a product to a specific audience. And I think that translation between product marketing and the other teams that use our material needs to happen in a very robust way. So that the folks that are using the material the product marketing creates, is able to fully understand it and be able to use it on their own without product marketing having to go back and review every campaign that they're coming up with.
Maia Wells:
Isn't it interesting how one little word and one little ad can just make so much difference. It's amazing. What is the role of product in your life right now, in terms of working with Cloudinary? You're leading product marketing in certain ways. Do you interact with product folks a lot? Because it seems like one of the basics of the job is really understanding the product well and being able to translate that to different people who are working with it. How often do you interact with people from product, how steeped in that are you in your day-to-day?
Shelby Britton:
My day-to-day at Cloudinary, I'm not as steeped in product management, product roadmap, influencing a product roadmap as I was in my 13 years at Adobe. In my many years at Adobe, I was very closely aligned to the product management team, influencing the roadmap, making suggestions. Really closely aligned. And that's usually the case for a product marketer, is that you would be very closely aligned to the product management team. You work as a team together to feed product management the market research and the competitive intelligence. Product management's doing some of that on their own too, but you work as a really close team. The only reason I'm not as involved in that today at Cloudinary is, Cloudinary brought me in to look at their platform and all of their solutions. So I'm not directly aligned to a specific product.
I'm not sitting on a core team with a product manager on a particular product. So I'm looking at, how can Cloudinary position all of their products together as a suite? How do we position the platform? How does Cloudinary, now that they're a multi-product company, sell bigger deals, multi-product deals? How do we sell solutions rather than one product at a time? That's kind of how I'm looking at it now. I'm not quite as aligned as I was previously, but that doesn't mean I'm not meeting with product managers. I'm meeting with product managers more on the multi-product experience, the platform. Anything that looks at the umbrella of all the products together, I would be talking to product management about that.
Maia Wells:
Then same type of question, but how often and how deeply do you interact with the C-suite and the business goals of the organization?
Shelby Britton:
At Cloudinary, quite a bit. I'm leading the team for platform and solutions, so we have to come up with our annual plan. We have to come up with the metrics on how we're going to measure that. And some of what I'm doing... When I first came in at Cloudinary, I had a very interesting project, because they brought me in to position the... How do we position the platform? It became pretty clear to me that what Cloudinary is doing is really creating a new product category. And that's pretty significant. It's a pretty significant thing to do in the digital experience space, creating a new product category, especially for a company of Cloudinary size. Now, there are one or two other vendors that are doing what Cloudinary is doing, but I had to create the rationale for, Hey, this is what the product category is. This is the rationale for creating the category, coming up with that material for the analysts and giving C-suite buy-in to that.
Do the founders, does the C-suite, do they agree with this product category? Are we really going to go after this product category creation? Got a yes, let's do that. So, we're pushing that out into the market. And then coming up with, what does that look like? How do we position all those products as a suite? What is the name of it and how do the products fit under it? Are there product families? So there was all of these pieces that had to fit into the whole narrative and the story that required a lot of cross-functional work with different product management teams. Working on different products to the C-suite, different functions. The CTO and the CEO, do they agree? And the chief product officer, do they agree with the direction that I'm going in? But that probably took about six months to get alignment across the functions, that we had the right pieces in place for the story. And then we rolled it out at the beginning of this year.
Maia Wells:
Can you back up for just one sec, because I don't know if everybody is going to know about Cloudinary quite yet. And I'm wondering if you could tell our listeners just a little bit more about that product category and the story that you're telling, where you ended up after that six months of alignment. Do you have your elevator pitch? I'm sure you've worked so hard on all of that and how to talk about it, so share that with us right now. Where did you end up? What is the result of all of that cross-functional collaboration?
Shelby Britton:
Cloudinary is a really interesting company. They've been focusing on rich media, video, imagery and other types of media since their inception. That's what they focus on. A 100% of the time they're focused on media. And there really aren't a lot of vendors in the digital experience, tech stack space that focus just on that. They started with APIs. They were very API-based, and then they started adding on practitioner applications like the digital asset management product. But the digital asset management product they have is not the traditional digital asset management product. It's very media centric. There's a lot of AI and automation throughout all of the products. So what Cloudinary has done is really positioned itself for powering visual experiences on all digital channels. We're in this experience economy right now and it's obviously very digital. Digital transformation took off several years ago and we all saw it accelerate during COVID, but it has to be...
These digital experiences have to be visual. And if they're not visually captivating, then brands aren't going to capture the attention of their audience. They're not going to keep the attention. There's a lot of competition for eyeballs on digital channels. So what Cloudinary does is, it powers those visual experiences across channels. But the problem that brands run into, like a Nike or Adidas, these big brands that have highly visual... They need to sell their products online and customers want to be able to see it from all sides and see the product before they buy it. The amount of visual media assets that you would need to power experiences on every channel to... What brands were doing is, they were manually cropping every image for every... So we do that with intelligence and automation, automatically.
We're able to allow brands to have that visual experiences across all channels without that big, heavy lift. We make it easy for them. So, what we think the category is and what we've put the stake in the ground is, this is a media experience cloud. It is an essential layer of your tech stack. So, if you don't have... If a brand doesn't have the media experience cloud, they're not going to be able to have visual experiences on every single channel, because these channels are exploding. We've got metaverse coming online now. There's a new channel all of the time, so how are you going to manage that as the channels become more and more. We're going to have connected cars soon. It's going to become unmanageable. It already is unmanageable. So, Cloudinary is able to help with that.
Maia Wells:
I want to back up for just a second, because we've been talking about a couple of different functions in the business that it seems like you sit right in the middle of. We've got the business line, we've got product, even demand gen and other functions of marketing. Do you view product marketing as a hybrid role? And can you talk more about that?
Shelby Britton:
It's a little bit of a hybrid role, maybe in the sense that you have to understand what the other functions are doing so that you can meet their needs. Because these internal cross-functional teams are internal customers of the material that we create. So, I see it as being this central hub, if you will, within a company that helps serve the different cross-functional teams in the various needs that they have. We're providing that content with... [inaudible 00:18:49], what do they need? And they usually... Sometimes they'll have an intake form that we need to fill out. Then there's the field marketing teams, what do they need? What does sales need? So we're always doing sales enablement, making sure that sales understands how to talk about the product, how to pitch. We're training them on the personas, training them on questions, discovery questions, objections, how to handle objections, things like that. There's all these teams that we work with. So in that sense, I see it as this central hub within the organization to help all the other groups do their job better.
Maia Wells:
It's definitely an important role for everybody involved in selling any type of software or SaaS to have that product marketing leadership, to really follow the data-backed strategies that you all come up with. I'm wondering, because I'd like to talk a little bit more about data. I know that you as a professional love relying on data. I don't know anyone that is successful in this industry that doesn't like data, that doesn't like to pay attention to metrics and base our work off of that. What metrics do you pay attention to on a daily basis in your job? What's most important to you as a product marketer, as you're selling Cloudinary?
Shelby Britton:
There's a lot of metrics, and I'll just combine my past experience with even before where I'm at now. We've got to look at the pipeline. We should be looking at the pipeline all the time. We should be looking at the metrics for how things are converting if we've rolled out a campaign. So previous role, product marketing would oftentimes roll out a larger campaign. Hey, there's this market segment we want to go after, we've got this great product innovation we're releasing at the same time. Let's do something around that. So, we'll help the different functional teams launch the campaign for that. We'll enable the sales teams to catch the leads and talk to them appropriately. So we're looking at the whole thing, we're working with demand gen and field marketing to find out, how is the messaging landing as you're running this campaign? What are the conversion rates?
How is it working for you? And then once the leads come in, are they... Are we generating pipe from this new campaign that we're running? How's the sales team doing in converting it? We'll also look at... That's something that's in-market. Then we'll also be looking at data. At the close of every quarter, going back and looking at the data, looking at the pipeline, what came in, what segments did we capture these from, the pipelines? Are we seeing any anomalies? Are we seeing certain trends that we're not maybe utilizing that we should? For example, there's a trend of... I saw a trend recently working with the business lines, that we're selling a lot in the software and technology industry. And we didn't anticipate that, we've been focusing on retail, because they have really highly visual eCommerce experiences. But there was something going on.
It was the third largest industry that we sold to last year. What's up with that? What should we be doing more to amplify that. So we dug in a little bit and it looked like these software and technology companies were actually using our technology in an OEM kind of a way. They were using it to power visual experiences for their technology. So I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting." They were using it to help them build their visual needs in their software, instead of DIYing it. They're relying on rich media experts to power that part of their technology. So, how can we capitalize on that? How can we amplify that story? Can we put a sales play, wrap a sales play around it? We have yet to go there, but it's something that we're noodling on. How do we get better at that and get more deals out of it?
Maia Wells:
Definitely. If I can ask just a little bit more of a detailed technical question, where do you get the data that you look at? Do you have a sense of what the tools are that you're using to capture that data and to visualize it?
Shelby Britton:
It's all the above. There was a really great Power BI tool that I've used, both at these companies that I've worked with in the last few years. Salesforce, I can go in and I can pull my own reports on my product the way that I want to see them. So, I'm always in Salesforce. If there's a BI dashboard available, I will use that. The analytics teams that I've worked with in the past have been really great. If there's not something on the dashboard that I think I need, they're great at creating that. So we'll usually do an end-of-quarter quarterly business review, and the different functional teams will share out how things went.
As a product marketer, I really see product marketers as being the business owner for that product or whatever area they're focusing on. So they should be looking at cross-functionally, what are they doing? And it's not that we're... We're not there to tell these teams necessarily how to do their job or anything like that. We're there to collect data from them, see how things are going, see how we can help improve overall. Did what we give you help? If not, okay, take that back, make some changes to it. If there's a sales play and it doesn't go well, then we retire it at the end of the year. Or mid-year, if it's really failing. Because we just...
I don't know what happened, but that could happen. I haven't seen it happen. I've seen sales plays retire after a couple years of being run because the market changes and there's market shifts. But if a sales play is running really well but things are changing, then you might need to tweak that sales play. You add new sales plays, things like that. So, it's not that we're the manager or the boss of these different organizational teams, we sit in there as the business owner of the product. And we need to collect data from the different teams, so we can put together a holistic picture of what is happening with this business, with this product. And make some decisions and help steer the ship the right direction.
Maia Wells:
I hear you saying that it is important to take on some responsibility for the business side of things, which I know marketers are cringing at, because we like to stay under the radar a bit, I think a lot of the times. Do you think it's important to take on revenue responsibility as a product marketer, and why?
Shelby Britton:
Yeah. My experience has always been that product marketer is like the buck stops with the product marketing team. The product marketing team sits in the business unit. They're the ones making the decisions. And now, that's not always the case at every organization, because product marketing might sit somewhere differently. At Adobe, for example, product marketing sat in the business unit, and they were responsible for revenue goals. Our product was responsible for a certain amount of revenue. So, the CEO would come looking at the business unit. If we didn't meet our product goals, what happened?
And product marketing should know what happened. And if we don't know, that's a problem. I've also seen demand gen teams, of course, they're responsible for pipeline, for a certain number of leads, for marketing source leads, for marketing contributed leads and pipeline and closed deals. And there's all kinds of different ways of measuring all that, every company has a different way of looking at it. But I think more and more these days, I don't think you can be a marketer and not be responsible for some portion of the revenue, or your... Whether it be pipeline or closed deals, we're very data driven now. Right?
Maia Wells:
Right. And increasingly, I think we're seeing marketing and sales departments even being switched under one umbrella into a "revenue team." Have you seen that in your current job or in your career, where it's morphing into more of this revenue team or this growth team rather than separating sales and marketing?
Shelby Britton:
Yeah. I've seen a lot of different combos. Adobe was always changing things up, every few years they'd rework people and teams to see how that would go. So, I've seen product marketing sit in sales, sit in the business unit. At Cloudinary, product marketing sits in the marketing team. And Cloudinary has its own business line group that's separate, which is an interesting split that I'm navigating right now. But overall, product marketing sits in different spots. Whether one is better than the other, it's hard to say. I've seen also product marketing combined with product management, which I think is interesting and also probably really good. Because then product marketing is more closely aligned to what's happening with the product and steering the product roadmap. Having product marketing in marketing is also good, because then they can be more closely aligned to the demand gen teams and the corporate marketing team.
And having them aligned to sales is good. But regardless of where product marketing sits in the organization, product marketing needs to closely align themselves with all of those groups. We should be very closely aligned to sales. In my past life, I was helping sales with their pitch, either creating their pitch, giving their pitch at a large organization. Adobe being a Fortune 500 company with thousands of sales reps and hundreds of products. Not every account executive can be an expert in every product, so they would oftentimes rely on product marketing to come in and help them if they had a weakness in a particular product area and their customer really wanted to know about it. And the customer wanted to know about it tomorrow, then, "Hey, product marketing, can you come in and give the pitch with me?" So, we would oftentimes do that as well.
Maia Wells:
I have heard a lot lately about competitive research and product marketing, and how it's even a little bit easier these days now that everybody's online, everybody's sharing everything that they do pretty much. There's so much different material out there that we can see on our competitors. And even things like secret shoppers and businesses that offer other businesses secret shopper by proxy kind of things, let me go and check out your competition for you. What have been your experiences with competitive intelligence? Has there been any nuggets that you can share with us, things that you've learned over the years that have made it really valuable for you?
Shelby Britton:
I've seen all of those methods used. And staying on top of the competition is very important. It is an essential part of what product marketing should be doing. I've seen technical marketing teams help with some of that, or sometimes the competitive center of excellence help gather that information. Regardless of whether you have a team helping you or not, as a product marketer, you should always have your eye on the competition. I sign up for all of their newsletters. I sign up for their webinars. When I can, I'll attend. But I'm at least getting their product release updates, so I know what they're releasing product wise. Typically, if it's my product and a competitor releases something that's significantly going to impact my product. Then I usually quickly come up with, what's my perspective? What is the company's perspective on this release?
And what should I tell sales about this? Then shortly follow that up with an updated battle card and updated competitive... Whatever competitive intelligence that we have as far as content, we'll update that. I also really like to do DL deconstructions with the sales team. So, if they do a competitive rip and replace, or they win a deal where they were up against a competitor, I really like to do just a quick 20-minute interview. I put together one slide with the details about it, 20-minute interview with them. And I find that the sales team really likes... They'll watch that, they'll really enjoy that type of content because it comes from a peer. And they like to hear... One, they love to hear about the competition and how to beat the competition. And they like to hear from a peer. So, those pieces of collateral and content have worked really well to enable the sales team in competitive situations.
Maia Wells:
And you do that with video, or is that a slide with audio on that?
Shelby Britton:
I do it with a slide with audio. I usually will just do a quick Zoom call with the rep, and do that. If they don't want to be on camera, that's totally fine. [crosstalk 00:31:01] on camera if they don't want to, just make it really easy for them. But I try to get it when it's top of mind and really fresh. So right after they closed the deal, if they were up against a key competitor, what was it that helped you win? What did you learn about the competitor? Because oftentimes they'll... The sales team is a really great source of competitive intelligence, because they've just been through this cycle where their customer is actually sharing with them information that they're getting from a competitor.
Like, "Well, this competitor quoted me this for this, this and this." So you get pricing information and you get all these details about their contracts and different things about the competitor that you wouldn't normally get. That's even actually hard to get as a secret shopper, because you might not get that far into the sales process. But these customers are getting that far into the sales process and they're sharing. Sometimes they'll share. They don't always share, but they tend to be pretty open, especially if they're negotiating a price.
Maia Wells:
Sounds like such a great source of information and great that you're doing it right after those conversations, so they're fresh and top of mind and they can remember what everybody said. Definitely, that's a great tip for everyone. And in the middle of that little tip, don't gloss over the fact that that's audio or video. It's an experience that's easy to consume for the person on the other end, for that salesperson. And from what you're saying, they love it like that. So rather than a big long email, a memo, something like that. And that's a reflection of where marketing's going in general, is video and audio content, like you're listening to right now on The Marketing Heroes.
One more thing I want to ask you before we go here, Shelby, is where are you going to grow next? Where is a weak spot in your current skill set? Or maybe something you're just interested in that you'd like to expand more into. We want to know where you're going to be going next and where you're going to be expanding, either your own personal skills or what you're doing with your current job. Tell us a little bit more about that so we can see where you're going next.
Shelby Britton:
I really enjoy that strategy part, like I said, so I think I'd like to expand my strategy work. From being narrowly focused on one product or a suite of products, to looking at broadly the entire company and the strategy for the entire company. And I think I'm in a good spot right now working in that direction, because I am looking at the suite of products across a company. So, I think that gets me to where I want to go to be able to do bigger strategy. I think I would... I like product marketing, I'd probably stay here. I don't have ambitions to potentially go and do other marketing functions, that might be interesting maybe in a smaller company.
But on your point about weaknesses, I am a strong believer in not trying to fix your weakness. I'm a strong believer in managing your weakness and focusing on your strengths. I think it's a total waste of time to focus on those weaknesses and spend time doing that, because you're just going to spin your wheels out. Is that weakness ever going to turn into a strength? No. So what you need to do is manage it. Know what it is. Don't have a blind spot, manage it and then focus all your energy on your strengths, because that's going to get you where you want to go. Just don't waste your time the other way. So, that's my opinion on weaknesses.
Maia Wells:
I love it. Are you willing or able to share with us one of those weaknesses that you're managing for yourself right now?
Shelby Britton:
Sure. I tend to be a very direct communicator, which can be a positive and a minus. In certain situations, particularly as a people manager, you just need to be a straight shooter. You can't tiptoe around some things. However, it also needs to be managed in some situations to be sensitive to the current situation. What is the current situation that you're in? What is the context of the current situation right now? And should I use that type of communication to my advantage, or should I manage that communication and use a different method of communication?
Maia Wells:
Wonderful. Thank you for opening up and sharing that with us, it's hard to share our personal weaknesses. And I love your perspective on that, is let's focus on what we're strongest at. There are other people who are stronger at other things and may be strong with our weaknesses, and those can be their jobs. So, I think that's really a smart perspective. Well, thank you for joining us on The Marketing Hero Podcast today. Shelby Britton, thanks for your time.
Shelby Britton:
Thanks. Take care.