Our featured member this month is Johannah Gay, a seasoned B2B marketing manager with over two decades of professional experience. She has held titles from project manager to product marketing manager. Based in France, she’s gained most of her experience within the Internet and Telecom sectors. Johannah is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Web Geo Services. She primarily works on marketing strategy and execution, as well as positioning and messaging development.
Johannah has been leading and building her company’s product marketing sector. In fact, she recently developed the messaging for a product at her own company. As with many evolving companies, the task of incorporating product marketing-specific resources is important and sometimes daunting. Especially in companies where the role of product marketers is little known, it takes a true expert to be able to define this role internally.
“Any messaging work is a collective work, you need to collect information among several key people inside and outside your company.”
Johannah Gay, CMO at Web Geo Services
Behind the Scenes: Developing the Messaging
Through her work as Product Marketing Lead, she’s learned some valuable insight. Johannah is a firm believer that messaging work is collective work. It involves the collection of information from people in various positions within and outside of your company. In order to develop successful positioning and messaging, collaborating with sales, pre-sales engineers, product management, and customer support, is just as important as gathering information from customers and competitors.
If possible, this information gathering can happen on the CEO level, as it is important to come into the marketing space with an alignment of your company’s long-term vision. Another vital first-step is gathering knowledge of and analyzing your company’s competitors. This context is important in choosing your product’s category and identifying where you will be competing in the market.
There is no doubt that consistent communication within a company is critical. Johannah emphasizes the value of following the evolution of your product by regularly keeping in touch with your product manager. Knowing how your product has developed and changed over time will help guide your messaging while anticipating future evolutions. Synthesize the various perspectives received from the information gathered and use that to guide and adjust your messaging.
The bottom line is that successful positioning and messaging comes out of a collaborative process.
About Johannah Gay
I’m Product Marketing Lead at Web Geo Services, I gained my experience both in Internet and Telecom sectors, mainly in B2B. I’ve always been at the junction of technology and customer needs and love to work with multidisciplinary teams.
