The real Sophie Melinick and Grossberd songs on the new ShoutOut podcast./G-CMO
The real Sophie Melnik./Sabin Sharon
The G-CMO Forum, which aims to position the global marketing community in Israel as a leader in its field, has taken on a mission over the past five years: to train the future generation of global marketing professionals.
Sophie Melnik Amitai, VP of Global Marketing and founding partner
, told Vala about the forum and the vision behind the course.
According to her, "The forum was established 7 years ago to create a good, inclusive, relevant and professional networking environment for VPs of Global Marketing who work in global companies, startups and funds venture capital, in which the forum is concentrated, to provide them with a place to meet, consult, lean on and learn from each other.
"In recent years, there has been a turnaround with global companies that were founded in Israel and repositioned the country from a "Startup Nation" to a "Scale Up Nation". As a result, more organizations choose to keep their global marketing headquarters in Israel," says Sophie.
The forum was founded in 2017, by Melnik Ameti, Shiri Grossberd and Efrat Penigzon (who has since retired) and grew from 5 members in its early days to 170 today. When all the members are the most senior marketing function in the global company. Among our members you can find companies such as CATO, Checkpoint, FIVERR, as well as global Israeli companies such as Soda Stream and Line. In addition, we have a wide variety of startups in the fields of cyber, foodtech, HR tech, cleantech, AI and almost every field you can think of. In fact, 90% of the companies operating in Israel in Global are members of the forum.
The Product Marketing Mastery Program course, or PMM's for short, that the organization is launching these days is part of the G-CMO Academy, the courses and training arm of the forum where members of the forum give lectures and share their practical experience. In addition, the organization led by CEO Orit Cohen, manages two more communities: NEXT is the number 2 community in VP-level companies, and the RISE community, which is a community of rising stars in the field. Sophie notes that there is a close relationship between all the forum communities and emphasizes: "We had It is important that it be a practical course that will really give its graduates the necessary tools, we researched the issues with the members of the forum and based on this feedback we built, together with them, the syllabus for the program."
How does the course serve the goals of the forum?
"One of the goals of the forum is to produce a pool of talents and make them available. Once, when an Israeli CEO would transfer the core of the business to the US, as many startups do now, there was a tendency to recruit an American VP of Marketing because they claimed that there was not enough talent here. The forum came to prove that there is a talent pool here big enough to choose from here the next VP of Global Marketing," says Sophie.
"Another and equally important goal of the forum is to produce our successors - the next generation of Israeli global marketing VPs. To this end, we teach MBA courses at the Hebrew University, the College of Management and the Interdisciplinary College. In addition, we produce our own courses such as GO GLOBAL, a popular course that we did in two cycles in partnership with the Center for Executive Training at the Hebrew University, which is designed to train employees in Israeli companies to make the leap to global companies."
You are again emphasizing the issue of globalism. why is it important? How is it different from what marketing people do here in Israel?
"People want this jump. They work in Israel on a certain scale and they want to experiment with larger companies, to be exposed to other cultures, other work methods, budgets of a different order, and of course there is a nod to high-tech. Today, 50% of high-tech workers are not programmers. As soon as this understanding This decrease increased the desirability of good marketing people," says Sophie.
"Our PMM's course was created following conversations in the NEXT community, in which the claim came up again that there are not enough talents to fill the positions in the field. As of today, from a quick search on LinkedIn, we saw that there are more than 30 vacancies, and on the other hand, there are people who are looking for work and just need to make adjustments in order to increase and upgrade the offer that is available to them. The good news is that product marketing can come from many disciplines - from content, from digital, from social or programming."
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So what exactly is PMM? What does this role include and why do you need it?
Michal Saber, Vice President of Marketing and Education at Nayax./Courtesy of the photographs
Michal Saber, VP of Product Marketing & Education at NAYAX, the content coordinator of the course
: "Each PMM is a unicorn. No one is the same as the other. In each company, the role varies according to the industry in which the company operates, the markets the company wants to penetrate or sell, the size of the company, Customer segmentation, B2B/B2C, small vs. large business customers. Of course, there is also a direct connection to the stage the company is in financially, and the degree of complexity of the product itself and its maturity for the various markets must always be taken into account. The difference in the job description from company to company raised the need for standardization in the field and this is the main reason That's why we decided to take up the gauntlet and hold the course."
According to her, "Broadly speaking, PMM bridges the market, the product and the sales people; its main role is to understand the market and the product well and engage in what is called Product Market Fit - the adjustment of the product to the market. The wisdom is rooted in understanding the pain of the consumers, regardless of whether they are private or business consumers. Consumer insights and understanding the personas who will use the product are a key milestone in the PMM work."
According to Michal, a product marketer should know how to answer questions like:
What market is the most suitable for the product we are marketing?
What right does the product have to "play" in these markets?
What is the unique value proposition of the product?
Who are the other players in the field and what is the differentiation of the product?
How do you make the products accessible and what marketing strategy do you use?
How do you bring the product to the market and make sure that it will not only sell, but that the customers will use it frequently, enjoy it and recommend it?
How do you ensure that the product continues to develop according to the needs of the industry?
How do you keep customers and make sure they continue to use and be satisfied?
How do you understand which capabilities should be added to remain competitive and relevant?
In one sentence, Michal points out, the mission of the PMM is to take products to market and manage their success.
What are some of the important skills of the PMM people?
"An essential specialization for PMM is storytelling. The ability to build a product story and make it accessible to a precise target audience that will connect and be excited and want to take part in the product journey. A lot depends on understanding to whom and how to make the product accessible. The narrative packaging is very important in the world of PMM and this is an acquired ability.
When it is clear in which market There is a right to play, one of the roles of the PMM is to teach and guide all the functions in the company that address the customers about the product and the market. Here the PMM is required to go through a model of training and assimilation of the marketing materials. In the world of the PMM this field is called Sales enablement - a strategic discipline, which, when properly managed, directly improves sales results in addition to building a uniform brand image and a unique tone of voice.
When the salespeople know the story, it's time to go to market. This is where the PMM meets the various marketing channels and works in collaboration with the marketing, product and support departments of the company to communicate and tell the story of the product on the exact platforms that will meet its target audience," says Michal.
"The next question is what are the channels that can be used for growth? In the business world this can be social media, sponsored and unsponsored media, professional magazines and journals, participation in events and conferences, working with influencers and opinion leaders and many other successful marketing platforms in each of these channels, in each The product story platform is changed according to the different consumers and audiences."
The role of the PMM is always to look Outside-in: to understand at what stage the customer or the candidate to become a customer is in his journey with the product.
The customer journey is usually divided into 3 stages:
Stage 1 lead to cash - from the stage of the customer's understanding that the product exists (Awareness) until he chooses the product
Step 2 Order to Activation - the customer has chosen, now he needs to start using, enjoying and possibly purchasing more.
Step 3 Growth beyond - how do you maintain the customer's loyalty and make sure that he is satisfied and at the same time how do you make knowledge and complementary products accessible to him?
In summary, the role of the PMM sits between 3 main axes: the product, the sales and the market. His role is to bridge the gaps between them, to teach, improve, optimize and refine processes, from business strategy to execution, all while keeping the customer at the center, satisfied and loyal.
Who can be a PMM?
Anyone who has a marketing inclination and comes from the worlds of content, growth, business development, sales, product, digital, learning, PR, planners, and the tangential fields can go through the training and dive into this fascinating world.
PMMs bring to the fore diverse abilities such as creativity, strategic thinking, collaboration between teams, analytics and more. They focus on the intersection that brings together the needs of the product, sales, marketing, and user experience divisions of the organization, and take all these needs into account before releasing a winning GTM plan.
What is important to know about the course?
This is the first training program of its kind in Israel, which takes experts from a variety of fields such as marcom, PR, business development, sales, digital, data and product and gives them the knowledge and tools to become PMMs in a variety of verticals and industries.
Already at the first meeting, the participants are divided into work teams and each team receives From a senior CMO in a global company, a challenge from the real world of the PMM work and the team learns how to answer the challenge throughout the program. The task: to take a feature from a product of one of the participating companies and bring it to the market. At each meeting the teams produce products, some of them individual, so that in the last meeting , they will present a case study that will include a go-to-market plan based on insights they gathered throughout the program and thus demonstrate an understanding and application of unique approaches to the world of PMM that they learned in it. The
program includes 13 sessions and starts (automatically!) on 31.3, on Sundays at 6 in the evening.
The sessions will be held in the offices of the leading companies currently recruiting for the position. Each session will include content from the best lecturers in face-to-face sessions as well as group or individual practice accompanied by senior PMMs from leading companies.
Graduates of the program join the G-CMO Academy community where they share content, share experience and knowledge and are exposed to recruitment opportunities for PMM jobs.
For more information about the course >> click
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