If your marketing efforts aren’t focused on driving pipeline, you’re focused on the wrong things.
B2B marketing leaders have been held accountable to revenue KPIs for years now, but the mindset shift is still making its way through many organizations. One of the areas where this shift has been slower? Product marketing. Too often, product marketing is still treated as a messaging and positioning function—something that exists primarily to support the latest feature launch. But product marketing has the power to be so much more than that.
If you want to maximize your marketing impact, your product marketing team should be a key driver of revenue and pipeline growth. Here’s how:
Shift Your Mindset: Product Marketing is the Connective Tissue
In the old way of thinking, product marketing was a handoff function—marketing created content, sales pitched it, and customer success tried to retain the customer afterward. That siloed approach no longer works.
Product marketing should be the connective tissue aligning product, sales, marketing, and customer success. When done right, product marketing ensures that:
- Product offerings align with real customer pain points.
- Messaging isn’t just “accurate”—it’s effective at moving deals forward.
- Sales and marketing are using the same language to engage buyers.
- The product roadmap is informed by market demand and revenue impact.
When product marketing is embedded in revenue strategy, it doesn’t just support pipeline—it fuels it.
What Product Marketing Should Own
Fully leaveraging product marketing’s role means empowering them to own strategic outcomes that drive revenue. If you’re the marketing leader at your organization, it’s your job to advocate for your product team so that they can grow into their potential and drive real revenue transformation.
Here’s what that should look like:
- Align product offerings with true customer needs – Move beyond feature lists. What real-world problems do your buyers need solved?
- Help shape pricing strategies – Pricing isn’t just a financial decision—it’s a go-to-market strategy.
- Align sales enablement with buyer needs – Equip sales teams with the right tools, content, and messaging at the right time.
- Drive cross-functional cohesion around messaging – If marketing says one thing and sales says another, deals stall.
- Inform and align product roadmaps – Don’t just ship features. Ship what drives retention, upsell, and expansion.
- Centralize customer insights – Product marketing should be a hub of intelligence, gathering feedback from sales, customer success, and the market.
- Optimize everything for pipeline generation – Every strategy, asset, and launch should connect back to revenue impact.
Sounds Like a Lot? It Is. Here’s How to Make It Work.
Product marketing’s role is a heavy lift—unless you properly enable them. Here’s how to make sure your product team isn’t drowning under the weight of these responsibilities:
- Talk to product marketing before development begins – Involve them before your product team starts working on a new feature. This ensures alignment with customer needs from the start.
- Advocate for product marketing to join sales calls and discovery meetings – The best product marketers don’t sit behind desks—they listen to real buyers in real conversations.
- Prioritize customer lifetime value (LTV), not just net-new acquisition – Product marketing shouldn’t just be focused on landing new customers. They should be equally focused on expanding and retaining existing ones.
Product Marketing is a Revenue Driver—Not Just a Messaging Function
Your product marketing team isn’t just there to craft messaging for the next launch. When properly leveraged, they drive cross-functional cohesion, customer intelligence, and ultimately, pipeline growth.
For a deep dive into how product marketing can become a revenue-driving function, check out our latest episode of Growth Driver featuring Sam Melnick: