Glorified project managers or going fractional?

Product marketers, especially in founding role, are being perceived as glorified project manager or content marketers.

The same can also happen if you’re fractional and trying to deliver results, basically, you stop focusing on strategy and just try to create more assets to please founders.

On reddit, a lot of PMMs have bad experience with B2B SaaS startups and sole product marketing roles.

And we can’t blame them, founders want PMM to get results, but they don’t understand that marketing is an investment.

But a part goes with explaining what your role is, and how can you own specific actions to get there.

So there’s a question that starts making a lot of noise out there:

“Should I take the fractional route and help multiple companies, or keep being treated as a dumping ground?”

We can’t answer for you.

But we can show you what happen when you bet on yourself.

Welcome to the next episode of Dying 4 Influence. The weekly newsletter for misunderstood B2B product marketers.

Know how the best PMMs operate in B2B. Get a dose of knowledge to stand tall in a sea of unseasoned marketing.

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🎨 Betting on yourself

I remember when we went to Drive last September, disguised as marketers.

Business wasn’t doing so well last summer, but I left fired up for Fall.

All because of one important talk: The one from Lashay Lewis.

She basically tried to convince us to go all in as fractional, by telling her story and how she did it.

"Micro action, macro patience."

Micro action = Work like tomorrow doesn't exist. Take small, consistent steps EVERY day.

Macro patience = Understand that the big payoff might be 6-12 months away.

After a year running my own consultancy, I can say that momentum is a powerful force.

"When you take it one day at a time and understand every little thing you do is creating something for you down the line... that momentum starts to pick up and you start feeling yourself a little bit."

Lashay applied this philosophy when building her consulting business. She went from making $75K max per year to $30K monthly when she finally went all-in.

→ What small action have you been putting off that could create momentum?

→ What results are you being impatient about that need more time?

"Everything that you ever wanted is on the other side of the thing you're most afraid of."

She shared how fear almost kept her from reaching this objective, if you’ve been dealing with imposter syndrome and you’re scared of going on your own, this episode is for you!

Why Your Bottom-Funnel Content Isn't Converting (And How to Fix It)

Ever notice how your top-funnel blog posts get tons of traffic, but your bottom-funnel content barely drives any conversions?

You're not alone. And it's not (just) your writing.

Lashay identified what she calls "the bottom of funnel gap" – a critical breakdown that happens in most marketing organizations.

Here's how to fix it:

The Solution: Cross-Functional Information Gathering

According to Lashay, no single team holds all the answers. You need to ask targeted questions to multiple teams:

From Sales:

• Which prospects are buying the solution?

• What are their most common pain points?

• What's the most common title of the person buying?

From Product Marketing:

• What are the capabilities of the product?

• Who are we competing with from a feature perspective?

• How does the product fit contextually into the customer's workflow?

From Customer Success:

• Who are the largest accounts?

• Who do we view as our best customers?

• What customers have a low support headache?

This cross-functional approach ensures your bottom-funnel content has:

1️⃣ The right context (pain points and challenges)

2️⃣ The right specificity (technical details and capabilities)

3️⃣ The right focus (what matters most to actual buyers)

Three Steps to Implement This Approach

1. Create a Bottom-Funnel Question Framework Make a list of specific questions for each team. Lashay has generously offered her framework with 30+ questions in the show notes.

2. Schedule Cross-Functional Interviews Don't just email these questions. Set up 30-minute interviews with representatives from sales, product marketing, and customer success.

3. Develop Product-Specific Content Templates Based on the intelligence gathered, create bottom-funnel content templates that incorporate:

   • Specific pain points (from sales)

   • Technical capabilities (from product marketing)

   • Real success stories (from customer success)

The result?

Bottom-funnel content that converts because it speaks directly to what your buyers actually care about, with the technical depth they expect.

🎙Featured Episode:
The Bottom of Funnel Gap: Why Content Marketers Need Product Marketers w/ Lashay Lewis

Check the full episode with Lashay Lewis, learning about her path as a solopreneur but also practical frameworks to collaborate with multiple teams and get more conversions with your content engine.

In this 41 minutes convo, we chat about:

• Why the knowledge level of the reader being higher than the writer kills bottom-funnel content conversions

• The reason most marketing teams fail to create effective bottom-funnel content 

• "Micro action, macro patience": The mindset shift that can transform your career in 6 months

• Why most companies operate like high school cliques, and how to break those silos

• The uncomfortable truth: freelance writers can't create effective technical bottom-funnel content

Check out the episode here!

🎙️ Lashay’s Podcast Episode 

Anthony Pierri shouted us out

After compulsively trolling him on social media, he shared the hot take that PMMs should not be responsible on sales enablement.

This is what he wrote:

_{“Many PMMs hate that they have to create decks at all.}

_{We're Not Marketers} 💀 _{was started by PMMs who wanted to fight this very notion that should be making slide decks in the first place.}

_{And yes, PMMs should own a lot of high level strategy — but the issue is that EVERY department owns a piece of strategy.}

_{It’s truly a shared responsibility (you don’t want strategy to be locked away in one department anyways).”}

It’s great because that’s precisely what causes the role to become even more of an asset-creating function, while it’s purpose is to lead new product to the right markets.

If it starts as a half-product, half-marketing role, it’s giving more liberty to focus on ragging problems like churn with onboarding by example.

And the end, everyone in startups should be a marketer, that’s what most people told us at Drive.

We still don’t know if PMMs should own strategy or sales enablement.

But his shout-out just made us a bit less dead 💀

🤭We did a thing

How many of you caught our April’s fool joke?

We tried not being cringe but at the end, cringe might be the new LinkedIn secret formula, just look at Nick Power 👀 selfies!

P.S. We knew Nick before he took over LinkedIn, is that enough street cred?