After attending our sales kick-off meeting for 2020, I spent some time reflecting on the year that has been and the year ahead. This comes a little later than the usual early January timeline but it coincides with my preparation for return to work after a 12-week maternity leave break.
2019 has been an incredibly busy but fun year. I joined Socrata in Oct 2018 about 5 months after its acquisition by Tyler Technologies, the largest provider of software for the public sector. At the start of 2019 Socrata was undergoing a couple of transitions: evolving from a small but category leader startup to become a part of a publicly-traded company with a billion dollars in annual revenue, and navigating a significant product evolution from an open data pioneer to an enterprise internal data-sharing platform. A transition of this nature creates exciting opportunities for all functions in a company, but it is particularly exciting for a central yet cross-functional role like product marketing.
I supported our business with a focus on a quantitative GTM plan, introducing a value-based pricing model, enabling our sales team with the stories, decks, collateral, competitive intelligence, and introducing a regular product webinar series for our customers. Working across the organization on so many interesting projects in a new category of B2G provided an incredible learning opportunity. I list the top lessons and takeaways from this year:
1. There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in Govtech!
Cities and states across the country are applying innovative solutions to solve some critical problems for the public. Be it the use of connected data across departments to address an opioid crisis or the use of IoT devices to improve public safety, there is a lot of exciting stuff happening in government. This is a great time for any technology business looking to support the public sector as they ramp up the application of tech to solve their most pressing issues. After spending years marketing and building brands in a B2C and B2B environment, the past 16 months have been an incredible learning experience about the B2G business.
2. Go to customer meetings
This one is obvious but worth emphasizing again. Observing sales-customer interactions is critical for any market-focused role in an organization but that much more necessary when executing in a new segment like I was. If I had to state the single most important thing I learned about our market it is that the technology adoption curve in this segment is long and in order to serve a customer well, it is most critical to understand where they reside on their adoption journey. In addition, because of the nature of government, there are a very large number of stakeholders in any single interaction and it is important to understand the opportunity to drive value to all stakeholders in the room. Sitting in on customer meetings and observing and listening to the conversation has helped me understand the needs of the people we serve in a way that no market report or field report ever could.
3. Prioritize and resist randomization
For product marketing, it can be tempting to jump on every immediate need from our field teams and this stems from an intention to support them to the fullest. However, it is important to remember that valuable impact is delivered when product marketing works with a plan that’s backed by data and resists randomization. There are some occasional exceptions to this rule but for the most part, this is important for success. Personally, it was humbling to be recognized in two quarterly sales meetings as the most valuable asset to our sales team.
Looking ahead to 2020 I hope to continue to push this momentum forward for the business. Apply the market understanding to our product strategy and use a potentially expanded team to be an even stronger liaison between product and sales with the goal of driving maximum value to our customers. In addition to my goals for my team, I also want to focus on getting more involved with Product Marketing Alliance or PMA. I attended my first PMA conference in San Francisco last fall and it was a fantastic experience rich with learning and peer to peer sharing. PMA holds several conferences a year with a rich list of speakers. Highly recommend PMA conferences to all my product marketing colleagues.
Sincere gratitude to my colleagues and friends at Tyler Technologies for your collaboration and support through this process. Look forward to 2020.
