From Bare Strategy

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Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 7 min read

Customer marketing: the PMM's expansion revenue playbook

A store's return policy tells you what it thinks of you after the money moved. Our customer programs do the same thing, and most of them say the relationship ends at the invoice and restarts at renewal. Call that the renewal-only relationship. It costs more than anything on the dashboard shows, because the customers who already bought are the only people who can tell us whether our positioning is still true. Four programs fix it. References sorted by segment, proof that admits what was hard, enablement written to an outcome, and a community somebody actually reads. The proof is useful. The language is worth more.

Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 8 min read

Product marketing vs. product management: how to stop the overlap and start collaborating

Product management owns the roadmap. Product marketing owns the narrative. That answer is correct, and it has never once ended the argument, because the argument was never about definitions. Four decisions sit in both roles' laps. Pricing, personas, customer research, and launch. Press down on one and the others move, which means either role can get exactly what it asked for while the company loses the deal. Call that a box win. What ends the argument is writing down who decides in each of the four, before the next disagreement shows up.

Product Marketing · February 27, 2026 · 8 min read

Stakeholder management for PMMs: how to get alignment without authority

We own the messaging framework and we can't make anyone use it. Every PMM deliverable carries a distribution fee, the part that gets paid after the writing is done, in other people's calendars, and it never shows up on the plan. Non-adoption is silent, so a framework can be live, linked, approved, and dead. Pay the fee early instead. Build the relationships before there's an ask, keep a standing rhythm with the four people whose behavior your quarter depends on, hold one living positioning document the organization actually quotes, and report upward in the metric leadership already watches.

Product Marketing · February 26, 2026 · 8 min read

How to run a positioning workshop: the PMM's step-by-step playbook

Most positioning workshops end in a truce. Everyone trades away the claim they cared about, nobody's wrong, and the company comes out undifferentiated. That happens when nobody brings evidence, so opinion becomes the only currency in the room and the loudest holder sets the rate. The fix is the two weeks before the session. Stakeholder interviews in verbatim language, a competitor map built from competitors' own words, and win/loss read honestly. Then the room's job gets small. Admit the evidence, keep the claims that survive being checked, draft the statement live, and pressure test it before anyone leaves.

Sales Enablement · February 19, 2026 · 7 min read

How to build competitive battlecards that sales teams actually use

Most competitive battlecards are written to make us look good, which is why nobody opens them. A rep has about fifteen seconds and needs words to say out loud, not a feature matrix. The line that earns the open is the loss line, one honest sentence naming where this competitor beats us. Build the card around the live conversation. Interview reps first, fit it on one screen, put the traps on it, and put the card where the deal already is.

Product Marketing · February 12, 2026 · 8 min read

Analyst relations for PMMs: how to brief Gartner, Forrester, and IDC (and actually shift the placement)

Analysts already know what we sell. The forty-slide briefing is the lane we keep switching into, and it never moves. What they don't have is our read on the market and what customers did after the contract signed. What we don't have is theirs. The half of the call where information travels back toward us is the return half, and most vendors never schedule it. Protect the last fifteen minutes, spend inquiry hours as research instead of emergency support, and write down every piece of skepticism an analyst voices in passing. That skepticism is a chip in the windshield. It becomes next quarter's enterprise objection.

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