Episode 21: How to pivot into a new function

In my career I’ve pivoted 3 times. I went from Sales Development (SDR)—> Product Marketing (PMM) —> Competitive (CI) —> Competitive + Pricing. Sometimes I changed companies entirely and sometimes I was able to move to a different role within the same team.

I also failed to pivot multiple times. The first was when I was an SDR trying to pivot into Customer Success in the same company. After interviewing with the team lead and VP, I received the dreaded “we decided to move on with other more experienced candidates” email.

As an internal employee my heart sunk. I knew the space, met the right people and did the work and I was still rejected. I was also a top performer in my current role (recently promoted), so I was angry and frustrated at the lack of transparency.

I ended up learning that I had addressed ‘why customer success’ questions but I didn’t answer the ‘why not sales’ question. The assumption was I wasn’t enjoying sales, so I decided to go into customer success without truly caring about the role. This was definitely not true but in retrospect I didn’t clearly articulate my 3 why’s. Here’s my approach now:

Find your community:

A phenomenal resource (in my experience) for educating yourself about a new function has been communities dedicated to evangelizing that function.

For example, when I was learning about the basics of product marketing I found Product Marketing Alliance which had courses, blogs, events, podcasts and a slack community of people currently doing the role. I had multiple mediums to get educated and then real people to pressure those concepts with.

Note: Whenever I find a membership based community I always offer to volunteer at the event in exchange for free tickets to attend or create free content in exchange for free membership.

When I was pivoting into Competitive, I found Healthy Competition which was a private community of CI practitioners sharing real tips and challenges on the day to day.

Now that I focus more on Pricing, I found that Corrily (a tool for pricing folks) has a pricing community they run called the Pricing Lounge. I’ve gotten great advice from 1-1 connections here and found people are very willing to answer questions (as long as it’s not all one-sided).

Note: For your industry / function look up the main few tools - they generally also have communities. E.g. for product managers ProductBoard has a large product community slack group they run.

Get creative to standout:

Once I was trying to get a job at Clari. I reached out on LinkedIn to the VP of Product Marketing and she accepted but never responded. I followed up a few times but got crickets.

There was an industry conference coming up for product marketing, so in my talk about sales enablement I quoted that VP 2-3 times based on research I had done about her approach.

I credited her on every slide and got great feedback on my presentation. The next day she responded on LinkedIn asking to chat. Turns out one of her old direct reports saw my presentation and sent her a picture.

Nail the 3 Why’s:

Now that you should be well educated about the foundations of the role and can now work on your story. In every interview (and interaction with the new function) clearly articulate

1. Why this company/product/market?

2. Why this role specifically?

3. Why now?

#1 almost always comes up organically, but the candidates that stand out have a more tailored answer than “it’s interesting to me right now”. Here’s how I prepped my ‘3 Why’s’ for my current role at Grafana where I went from product marketing role at an early stage to product marketing role at a later stage company:

As always, feedback is a gift and I welcome any/all feedback on this episode - good or bad. See ya next week 👋.

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✨ Special thank you to Gigi Marquez who suggested I start this newsletter 🙏7Iq