Almost every portfolio company I walk into has demand generation, sales enablement, and content. Too few have an established product marketing function. And I’d argue it’s the first marketing function you should hire, before any of the others.
Let me tell you about a website.
I joined a $400 million private equity-backed company in the revenue cycle management space. Serious business. They sold software to hospital systems to make billing faster and more accurate, to speed up collections from patients, to improve cash flow for the hospital. Real problems, real money, a buyer with a real headache.
The homepage showed happy people on a beach.
I remember asking the marketing team, “What are we selling here? Pharmaceuticals?”
We changed it fast. But that image is the clearest picture I have of what happens when nobody owns product marketing. It wasn’t that anyone was bad at their job. There simply was no one in the building whose actual responsibility was to connect what the company sold to the problem the buyer had.
And I’ll say plainly that the sea of sameness is real. In a lot of the technology and healthcare categories I’ve worked in, every vendor’s website says roughly the same thing, in roughly the same words, with roughly the same stock photography. We all read each other’s messaging and converge without noticing.
I’ve sat in those rooms. I don’t accept it anymore. It’s now the first thing I look for when I walk into a portfolio company, because in a PE-backed business differentiation is what your multiple is built on, and sameness is the quietest way to lose it. Do not, I repeat DO NOT set your positioning and value proposition by committee. Too often it gets watered down into “safe” sameness.
Why the Function Goes Missing
Here’s what I think is actually going on, and it isn’t neglect.
Product marketing doesn’t always have a natural home on the org chart.
Look at how GTM Partners maps the go-to-market operating system. Pillar 2, the Market Investment Map, covers which products create the highest customer value, revenue modeling, GTM investment decisions, and pricing and packaging. Pillar 3, Brand and Demand, covers your point of view, naming your enemy, category maturity, and messaging and positioning across product, audience, and value.
That’s product marketing, split across two pillars.
GTM Partners also publishes what breaks when each pillar has no owner. Pillar 2 without it: over-investment, misaligned product focus, poor GTM sequencing. Pillar 3 without it: weak differentiation, inefficient demand, sales friction.
Read those two lines and tell me you don’t recognize a portfolio company.
The reason nobody notices is that there’s often no vacant seat to point at. When a portco has no demand gen leader, pipeline stops and everyone sees it. When it has no product marketing, the work just gets distributed. Demand gen writes the launch deck. Enablement makes the one-pager. Product writes the feature list. Sales builds their own decks in the field. Everyone is busy, nothing looks missing, and the value proposition never gets built.
The data backs up how thin this function actually is. The Product Marketing Alliance’s 2026 State of Product Marketing Report found that 29 percent of product marketers are a team of one, and nearly eight in ten work in teams of five people or fewer. Only about one in ten has a team of ten or more.
And where they report is telling. Only 20.2 percent report to the CMO. That’s an all-time high in their data, up from 16.4 percent last year, and it’s still one in five. Something in me, my inner voice tells me it can’t be that low!
Which is interesting, because when I was at SiriusDecisions we were unambiguous on this point. Their research brief on portfolio marketing organizational design says plainly that portfolio marketing should be housed within the marketing function under the CMO, rather than reporting into product. The reasoning is that it keeps the function upstream in the marketing workflow where it can actually inform downstream content and campaigns, and that marketing leadership is what drives the shift from product-centric to audience-centric.
So the recommended structure is the minority practice, by a wide margin.
What You Get Instead: Random Acts of Messaging
I’ve written before about random acts of marketing. This is the sibling problem.
Random acts of messaging is what you get when four functions each write their own version of what the company does. Product writes from features. Demand gen writes from whatever converts this quarter. Enablement writes from what sales asks for. Sales writes from what worked in the last deal they won.
None of them are wrong, exactly. But nobody is writing from the buyer’s problem, and nobody owns the through-line.
You can diagnose it in about ten minutes. Ask four people in the company to describe what you sell and why someone buys it. If you get four different answers, you don’t have a messaging problem, you have a missing function and a GTM problem. And your prospects are getting all four versions.
That’s how you end up on a beach.
The Financial Case, and It’s Bigger Than People Think
Here’s the argument I’d actually make to an operating partner, and it has nothing to do with headcount.
When product marketing works, it sets the right ideal customer profile. When you’re targeting the right ICP, sales wins more often, because you’re competing where you’re genuinely differentiated instead of everywhere. Better win rate. More at-bats. You hold price more easily, because a buyer who has the problem you actually solve doesn’t need to be discounted into a decision. Better pricing power. And you land customers you can keep and grow rather than customers who churn in year two. Better gross retention, better net retention.
Better retention and better pricing power compound into better future profitability and long-term financial returns.
That’s not a marketing argument. That’s a value creation argument, and every link in the chain is a number your sponsor already tracks.
Look at it against the six things I said in edition 75 determine whether pipeline is ever real. Product marketing owns three of them outright: win rate, deal size stability, and pricing power. It heavily influences a fourth, ICP fit. And it feeds at-bats, because being on the buyer’s day one shortlist is a positioning and brand reputation outcome, not a demand gen outcome.
The profession itself has already moved this direction. In the PMA data, win rate as a product marketing KPI rose from 28.1 percent in 2024 to 37 percent in 2026. Up-sell went from 27.4 to 36.5 percent. Cross-sell from 23.8 to 33.6. Sales confidence from 18.8 to 30.3.
Meanwhile increased web traffic as a KPI fell from 22 percent to 16.6, and trial signups dropped to 10 percent.
Product marketers are being measured on exactly the things that determine enterprise value, and away from vanity metrics. The function grew up. Most portfolio companies haven’t noticed.
I’ll be straight about one thing. I can’t point you to a study proving that hiring a product marketer lifts win rate by some specific amount. I don’t think that study exists. What I can tell you is that the causal chain above is the most reliable pattern I’ve seen across twelve CMO roles, seven full-time and five interim, and that the alternative, which is four functions writing their own messaging, produces beach photos.
My Contrarian View: Hire Product Marketing First
Here’s where I’ll probably lose some of you.
In a PE-backed company under EBITDA pressure, if you can only make one marketing add, I’d make it a product marketer. Not another demand generation person.
The logic is simple. Demand gen buys you more pipeline. Product marketing improves what happens to the pipeline you already have, and it makes every subsequent dollar of demand spend, and sales headcount spend, work harder.
More than that, you need product marketing to know whether you have product-market fit at all. You need to know who you’re for, what your value proposition actually is, how you’re genuinely different, and how to say it starting from the customer’s pain rather than from your feature list.
Bob Wright , who founded Firebrick, Inc. and has spent decades on B2B positioning, puts it about as simply as it can be put:
Sell the problem, not the product.
His framing is that winning positioning shifts the conversation from how the product works to why it matters, and that it has to answer three questions. Why now. How are you different. Why does it matter to the customer.
I’d add that in a PE-backed company those aren’t just positioning questions. They’re the same three questions a buyer’s diligence team will ask about the business itself.
If you can’t answer them, demand generation just gets you to the wrong meetings faster, and at greater expense.
Where does this stop being true? I’d say when you have genuine positioning clarity that survives contact with the market, a repeatable motion, and the constraint is honestly volume rather than conversion. At that point, fund demand. Some product-led and high-velocity SMB businesses may flip the order earlier. But in the mid-market and enterprise B2B companies most PE portfolios hold, I’d start with positioning nearly every time.
Tell me where I’m wrong on this. I hold it fairly strongly and I’d like to be argued with.
The Part Nobody Talks About: Product Marketing Is an Exit Asset
This is the argument I almost never hear made, and I think it may be the most important one for this audience.
When a company goes to market, someone has to write the story. Why this company wins. What the product portfolio actually is and how it fits together. Which segments it owns and why. What the differentiation is, in language a buyer’s diligence team will accept.
In many portfolio companies that work either doesn’t happen, or it happens six weeks before the process starts, done by an investment banker who learned the business last month.
That’s product marketing work. It’s the same discipline as positioning, portfolio architecture, and competitive differentiation, just pointed at an acquirer instead of a customer. A company that has been doing it continuously for three years walks into diligence with a coherent story and evidence behind it. A company that hasn’t walks in with a deck assembled under deadline.
I’d argue that gap shows up in the multiple. I can’t prove it with a study. But I’ve watched enough processes to believe it.
The Practical Part
How much should you have? The old SiriusDecisions and Forrester benchmark was roughly 15 percent of marketing headcount and 9 percent of program budget allocated to portfolio marketing. That number is a few years old now and I don’t know of a better one published since. Use it as a directional check rather than a target. If you’re at zero, you know enough.
The first hire at $30 to $150 million ARR. Hire a generalist, not a specialist, and hire someone senior enough to argue with the CEO about positioning. The PMA data is sobering here: 47.8 percent of product marketers have five years of experience or less, and 83 percent have ten or fewer. This is a young profession. The odds of finding someone who has actually built the function from nothing are lower than you’d like, so screen hard for it.
Where they should sit. Under the CMO, per the SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) guidance. Not under product. Product marketing under product management tends to become documentation. Under marketing, it becomes positioning.
How to structure it as you grow. SiriusDecisions described three models. Centralized, with the whole function under one leader reporting to the CMO, which is what you want when establishing the function. Decentralized, with portfolio marketers reporting into business unit P&Ls, which suits large multi-BU companies. And hybrid, a mix of both, which they specifically flag as appropriate for companies that have recently been through a merger or acquisition.
That last one matters for buy-and-build portfolios. If you’re acquiring, you have a portfolio marketing structure question whether or not you’ve asked it, and the moment to answer it is before integration, not during.
They also give useful guidance for small teams. In groups of six or fewer, assign each person designated ownership of one area, personas or messaging or launch or enablement, so somebody is driving improvement in each even though everyone is a generalist day to day.
Outsource or hire? Outsource the project work: a positioning sprint, a competitive teardown, a launch. Hire the ownership. A consultant can build you a value proposition. Only an employee can defend it in the room every week for two years, and that’s the part that actually holds.
The Bottom Line
The sea of sameness isn’t a creative problem. It’s an org design problem. When nobody owns the value proposition, four functions may write four versions, and the market hears none of them.
Product marketing goes missing because it often has no seat. It spans two pillars of the go-to-market system, only one in five report to the CMO, and 29 percent of them are a team of one. There’s no vacancy to point at, so nobody notices.
But it owns win rate, deal size, and pricing power, which are three of the six things that determine whether your pipeline was ever real. It sets the ICP that determines whether the customers you land are ones you can keep. And it writes the story a buyer eventually reads.
If you’re building a marketing function in a portfolio company, I’d ensure you have a strong product marketing competency first. Before demand gen. Before campaigns. Before anything.
Because you can’t generate demand for a value proposition nobody has written yet.
Outcomes over activities. Every time.
Sangram Vajre Bryan Brown Drew Neisser Matt Heinz GTM Partners CMO Huddles
Sources
Product Marketing Alliance, State of Product Marketing Report 2026, on team size, reporting lines, KPIs, and experience levels.
SiriusDecisions, Portfolio Marketing: Organizational Design Considerations, on centralized, decentralized, and hybrid structures and reporting lines, plus the SiriusDecisions Portfolio Marketing Range of Responsibilities model.
SiriusDecisions and Forrester headcount and program budget benchmarks for portfolio marketing.
GTM Partners , the Go-to-Market Operating System, Pillars 2 and 3.
Bob Wright , Firebrick, Inc. , on positioning.
