This article originates from Zack’s presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in Chicago, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
My name is Zack Wenthe, and I’m the CDP Evangelist for Treasure Data. I work in the product marketing org, which is part of our marketing org. My job is to go out and share what the customer data platform (CDP) is and what we do.
More importantly, though, I’m a marketer and I talk to marketers. Today, I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the rise of the PMM evangelist and why this is the perfect role for your product marketing teams.
I’ll look specifically at:
- Why it’s time for product marketers to step out from behind the curtain
- The power of community evangelism
- Dedicated evangelism
- A day in the life of an evangelist
- What I’ve learned
- The secrets of storytelling
- Leading your customers down the ‘yellow brick road’
A little backstory…
Before I jump into it, let me tell you a story. Recently, my grandmother passed away (it’s not a sad story; she lived an amazing life). As a family, we got together and had an opportunity to talk about stories and things we remembered about her.
One of the stories that came to my mind was from when I was four years old. My parents were going to the hospital to have my brother, and I was not happy about it. I wanted to go with them, and I was throwing a huge fit.
My grandmother came over and bribed me to calm down with dinner and a movie. It was 1985, so it wasn’t like we turned on Netflix – it was whatever was on TV that night – but I was just happy to watch a movie. What we watched was The Wizard of Oz.
As a four-and-a-half-year-old, I was enthralled. I spent the next year talking about this movie and everything that happened in it. Every year, they replayed it on TV, and I got to remember how much I loved this movie and how much I hated my brother (just kidding!).
And so, when I was preparing for this article, I thought it was only appropriate that I used The Wizard of Oz as an example.
Why it’s time for product marketers to step out from behind the curtain
When we think of evangelism, we tend to picture big scary heads talking – the heads of our executives and founders. This works because they’re passionate, so evangelism comes to them naturally.
