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The Strategic Role of Product Marketing in B2B Growth
If you’re a B2B CMO, you’ve likely faced the challenge of aligning marketing, sales, and product teams while ensuring your go-to-market (GTM) strategy delivers results. Having led global marketing organizations for over 20 years, I’ve seen firsthand how product marketing—when done right—can be the key to accelerating growth, improving sales effectiveness, and refining market positioning. Yet, many companies either underutilize or mis-position this function, missing out on its full strategic potential.
Whether you’re scaling a high-growth SaaS company, repositioning your brand in a competitive market, or trying to improve sales and marketing alignment, this article will provide clarity on the role of product marketing. If you’ve ever struggled with unclear product messaging, ineffective demand generation campaigns, or a disconnect between sales and marketing, the insights shared here will help you navigate those challenges.
This article unpacks the essential role of product marketing, providing practical insights into how it should interact with demand generation and content, where it should sit organizationally, and how to secure executive buy-in. A few key takeaways:
- Product marketing is the strategic connector between product, sales, and marketing—it ensures messaging resonates, campaigns convert, and GTM execution aligns with business priorities.
- Integration is everything (regardless of where product marketing sits) —when product marketing, demand gen, and content work in silos, growth slows. Cross-functional collaboration is key.
- Hiring great product marketers takes time; external resources can be a force multiplier when agility is required.
Product Marketing: The Strategic Connector
Product marketing is often misunderstood. It’s not just about crafting messaging or creating content; it’s the glue that connects product management, sales, demand generation, and customer success. In a B2B organization, product marketers act as the central hub, bringing market expertise, customer insights, and competitive intelligence to the table. They bridge the gap between the product team that builds, the marketing team that promotes, and the sales team that sells.
Yet, too often, product marketing is either undervalued or misused. In some organizations, they become glorified PowerPoint cleaners for sales teams. In others, they’re sidelined because their impact isn’t directly tied to revenue numbers. The reality? A well-functioning product marketing team ensures that messaging resonates, go-to-market (GTM) strategies align, and the company is positioned to win.
How Product Marketing, Demand Gen, and Content Should Work Together
The biggest mistake organizations make is allowing these functions to operate in silos. The magic happens when product marketing, demand generation, and content marketing come together.
Each function looks at the same campaign results but from different angles:
– Demand generation analyzes pipeline impact, conversion rates, and channel performance.
– Product marketing evaluates whether messaging is landing with the right audience and how the market is responding.
– Content teams assess engagement, storytelling effectiveness, and brand perception.
When these teams meet regularly, they don’t just report numbers—they interpret them. A demand gen team might flag a low conversion rate, while a product marketer identifies that the messaging needs refining. When these insights flow freely, you build a system that adapts quickly and improves over time.
Where Should Product Marketing Sit? The Great Debate
I’ve seen product marketing sit in both product management and marketing. Each has its rationale. When it’s under product, it’s often because leadership believes product marketing has become too “sales-oriented” and needs to be more product-focused. The risk? It turns into an extension of product management focused too much on features and not enough on customer pain points.
On the other hand, when product marketing is under marketing, it ensures strong alignment with demand gen and sales enablement. But if not well-integrated with product, it risks losing insight into the roadmap and innovation.
The best setup? It’s a trick question, the answer is regardless of where they sit, product marketing needs to straddle both the product and marketing teams. Regardless of reporting structure, they must maintain deep connections with both teams to ensure customer voice is heard while keeping GTM strategy in sync with product direction.
Executive Buy-In: Making the Case for Product Marketing
One of the biggest hurdles product marketing faces is proving its value to executives. CEOs and CFOs want hard numbers. They want to know, “What’s the ROI of product marketing?”
The key to executive buy-in is aligning with business priorities:
– For sales leaders: Position product marketing as the driver of better sales enablement, improved training, and stronger qualification processes which can ultimately lead to reducing sales cycles and/or increasing win rates.
– For product leaders: Showcase how product marketing enhances competitive positioning, supports launches, and provides critical customer insights.
– For CFOs: Make the case that without strong product marketing, demand gen campaigns fail, sales cycles lengthen, and revenue growth slows.
Winning executive buy-in isn’t about one big pitch—it’s about consistently demonstrating impact across the organization.
Staffing and When to Bring in External Product Marketing Resources
Even with executive support, hiring great product marketers takes time—often six months or more. And in the meantime, businesses still need to launch products, refine messaging, and support sales. That’s where external product marketing resources come in.
Bringing in outside expertise can be a game-changer when:
– You’re entering a new market and need a fresh perspective.
– Your team is stretched thin, but launches and GTM motions can’t wait.
– You need specialized skills like competitive intelligence or sales enablement.
– You want to refine messaging quickly without overburdening internal teams.
Short-term product marketing support ensures momentum without long-term headcount commitments. The key is integrating external resources effectively so they complement, not replace, your internal team. Working with a product marketing agency can help drive results faster.
A product marketing agency like Aventi Group specializes in stepping in as an extension of your team, providing senior-level product marketing expertise exactly when and where you need it. Whether you need a full go-to-market strategy, sales enablement content, competitive analysis, or product launch execution, Aventi Group has the expertise to deliver. With a team of seasoned product marketers who have worked across industries, they bring an objective, outside-in perspective that helps refine your positioning, accelerate launches, and drive measurable impact. Instead of waiting months to build an in-house team, companies can leverage Aventi’s expertise immediately. That has worked for me successfully many times over.
Final Thoughts
Product marketing is a critical function that ensures the company’s message resonates, campaigns drive results, and sales teams are armed to win. Without it, organizations risk product centric, feature focused messaging that doesn’t connect with customers, or demand gen efforts that fall flat because they’re misaligned with the market.
The best companies recognize product marketing’s value and give it the seat at the table it deserves. If it’s not positioned correctly, the entire GTM strategy suffers. But when product marketing, demand gen, and content work in lockstep, the impact is undeniable—and measurable.
