Susanna Bogardus
B2B Saas product marketing leader
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Table of contents
Professional History
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Commercialization
Values
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Go-to-Market Planning
Approach to Operationalizing Product Marketing
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Post-Launch Measurement
Market Analysis
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Contact
Professional History
2010 - 2016
Account manager roles in Adtech industries. Developed close relationships with customers and sales teams while optimizing online ad campaign performance. First managerial role.
2016
First demand generation role, leveraging AdTech expertise to generate new revenue streams. Managed DG team.
2017
First GTM role - oversaw research, preparation, and expansion into new markets. PoC for over 60 local chapters and 100 brand ambassadors. Developed event calendar and global, regional, and local partnerships to capture market share.
2018 - 2022
Developed brand, product, and growth marketing strategies at B2B SaaS eHR, Unified Practice. Promoted to COO and oversaw inbound sales, customer success, and customer support. Managed 9 direct reports through major business changes including COVID and acquisition of company by Fullsteam.
2022 - Now
Seasoned product marketing professional with over a dozen strategic launches across a variety of business needs and audiences. Develops key strategies as well as operational and tactical implementation for early-stage and high-growth companies.
values
- LEARNING - Experiment, test, fail fast, gather feedback, validate findings, share learnings - Markets and customer needs change. I am always taking new information in to learn how to be more efficient, effective, and drive impact.
- TIME - Time is a valuable resource for companies and for customers. Everything I create should add value and be a quality use of time for anyone reviewing or engaging with my work.
- TRANSPARENCY - Effective product marketers are clear communicators. Internal teams should know what I’m working on and how it will add value for them. Customers should understand how the product benefits them and why they should choose this product. Transparency facilitates loyalty and retention through openness, communication, and accountability.
Approach to Operationalizing Product Marketing
To bring a product or feature to market, I use structured methods to deploy, measure, and manage:
- Market Analysis
- Commercialization
- Go-to-Market Planning
- Post-Launch Measurement
When these steps are used effectively, product marketing:
- Broadcasts the voice of the customer across the company (internal function)
- Ensures target audience will buy and choose the product
Market Analysis
The biggest benefit of a strong product marketing strategy is understanding audiences deeply to interpret and anticipate their needs. This drives differentiation, defensibility, and loyalty. My market analysis expertise includes the following:
Understand the Market
- Customer and audience research
- Competitor analysis
- Internal stakeholder interviews
- Developing use case maps
- Problem
- Persona
- Alternatives
- Frequency
- “Why”?
Influence the Roadmap
- Provide customer and market data insights to engineering and product teams so they can validate the market and decide what and who to build for
- Ex: Deployed “willingness to pay” survey to gather data insights for the product team to prioritize the roadmap based on revenue potential of roadmap features
Cross-Pollinate Learnings
- Share learnings and resulting decisions to other marketing teams to create unifying marketing strategy
- Drive sales enablement and sales efficiency by improving messaging and communication around product differentiators by audience segment
- Landing Pages
- Pitch Decks
- Sales Training
- Case Studies/Use Cases
- Multi-threading
Commercialization
Positioning
- Leveraging Marketing Analysis insights, positioning guides product decisions, aligns the org, and ensures consistency.
- Determines WHO is the target audience, WHAT value they get from the product, WHY this value matters to them, and HOW the product uniquely delivers this value.
- Positioning is a strategic decision about how to communicate the value we bring with our product and features.
- Portfolio examples include launching new Generative AI features to 360Learning’s core audience and providing that audience with a clear understanding of HOW AI can benefit them and WHY it matters.
- Product marketing research contributes insights that influence pricing:
- Understand how the customer values the product and how can we make sure price scales with the perceived value
- Understand cognitive and physical friction that prevents growth loops in acquiring and retaining customers and share data-backed product and marketing suggestions to reduce friction
- Provide motivational boosts (social proof, case studies, analyst relations, ROI Calculators etc). (I’ve developed a “PMM Source of Truth” document internal teams can reference for these motivational boosts in previous roles, as well as revamped pricing pages and strategies, and deployed an ROI calculator).
Packaging
Pricing
The psychology that supports pricing, packaging is an equation:
Perceived Value > Perceived Price + Friction
- Anchor price relative to other factors (e.g. time over money, against “doing nothing”, quality, ease of switching, or the competition)
- Remove “paradox of choice” and cognitive friction by making it clear what buyers get for the price and offering a recommendation based on buyer’s goals
- I’ve successfully repackaged underperforming solutions by changing the perceived value and reducing friction
Go-to-market planning
A tactical, step-by-step plan that exposes the customer to the product for the first time:
- Builds alignment on goals across the organization
- Identifies key input metrics
- Builds the strategies that prioritize goals, and the timelines, metrics, and key activities to reach these goals
- Draws a straight line between PMM activities and resulting business value
- I have launched several Tier 1 projects and have a history of successfully delivering toward product and marketing goals
North Star Goals
Outcomes we want to accomplish across the marketing portfolio - aligns product marketing with brand and growth marketing teams
- Acquisition - users have opportunity to start using product
- Retention - collect data on whether users are consistent, habitual users
- Monetization - purchase decision
Input Metrics
Identifies goals and initiatives that will help achieve North Star Goals, input metrics should answer:
- Exposure - did we reach the right audience (CTR, open rates, engagement, views)?
- Performance - did the audience take action based on launch activities (conversion, adoption, sentiment scores, win rates)?
Planning a GTM Roadmap
I’ve developed both a 3 Tier and 4-Tier Methodology to outline product marketing activities in prior roles
- Set up Strategy
- Scope launches and set goals and metrics
- Define effort for campaigns
- Plan/Validate Activities
- Organize channels
- Plan timing and milestones
- Create messaging by segment
- Constant Communication
- Inform stakeholders
- Set expectations
Post-Launch Measurement
Success (when prior steps are taken, most likely outcome)
Once a launch is projected to reach it’s goals (based on metrics and timelines determined during planning), I create a plan to transition the management to other teams (such as brand or customer success). I’ve successfully achieved goals in 12 out of 14 Tier 1 launches.
Triaging Concerns
If a product launch is not projected to reach goals, I’ve used a funnel analysis to determine where to focus:
- Define all sets of the customer journey as they relate to this product launch
- Calculate drop-offs
- Diagnose a problem:
- Reach
- Conversion
- Engagement
- Reach - If we aren’t reaching the right audience, it won’t matter much if we optimize conversion
- Diagnosing reach: validate that page views come from awareness (direct) not performance. If awareness campaign is too general, we’re reaching people who aren’t ready to convert.
- Check: is targeted channel conversion > than overall channel conversion? (Yes = reach issue)
- Conversion - Not enough conversion in funnel to reach outcomes.
- Assess audience - (ex. where do freemium vs. paid customer acquisitions originate)
- Assess messaging - divert to better performing messaging/channels
- Engagement - Do users become habitual after initial adoption?
- Customer win/loss interviews
- Surveys
