I joined a B2B SaaS startup during a pandemic, in a distributed team, with no PMM foundation, a market that didn't fully understand what the product did, and sales teams that needed to be ready to compete fast. There was no playbook. There was barely a starting point. What follows is what I built, in what order, and what I'd tell anyone walking into the same situation.
March 2020 changed everything for most businesses. For this startup, a platform built to help enterprises coordinate complex, high-stakes operational changes across distributed teams, it was unexpectedly relevant. The world had just discovered what it meant to run critical processes across distributed teams under pressure. That was the product's entire value proposition.
But the market didn't know it yet. And neither did our own sales team, fully.
When I joined, the marketing team had a Director of Product Marketing, a growth marketer, and a content marketer. What it didn't have was structure. No CI programme. No sales enablement foundation. No consistent messaging that sales could pick up and use in a call. The product was strong. The story around it was still being written.
The first thing I did wasn't build a battlecard.
It was listen.
I spoke to sales teams directly. I spoke to customers. I read hundreds of reviews across third-party review platforms. Not skimming, reading. This was before AI tools or conversation intelligence platforms were surfacing insights automatically. Everything was manual, everything was deliberate, and everything had to move quickly.
From those conversations and that research, I built v1 of the competitive landscape: who the incumbents were, who the new entrants were, where we sat, and how we could reposition against the field. Not a polished deck. A working document that gave sales something real to hold onto.
That became the foundation for the CI programme. The first round of battlecards followed: bite-sized, specific, built around the questions sales were actually being asked on calls. Not comprehensive. Usable.
Sales didn't push back. They asked for more.
The turning point nobody talks about.
At some point, the battlecards kept multiplying. New competitors entering the market. Incumbents repositioning. Sales asking for more and more.
Turned out we weren't just building CI. We were operating in a space that needed a category defined.
This wasn't just another tool in the IT operations stack. It was a new way of thinking about how enterprises coordinate and execute high-stakes operational changes. But nobody was saying that clearly yet. Not to the market, not internally. The CI work had surfaced the gap. The positioning work had to close it.
That was the shift. From reactive competitive intelligence to proactive category definition. Two different jobs. Both critical.
The adoption problem.
The battlecard adoption problem is one of the oldest in PMM. You build them. Sales ignores them. They live in a folder nobody opens.
I'd seen it happen elsewhere. I wasn't going to let it happen here.
I built the business case for onboarding a dedicated CI platform. Evaluated the leading tools in the market. Negotiated the commercial terms. Led the full onboarding: trainings, platform showcases, stakeholder buy-in across the business.
The winning tool had one thing above everything else: sales would actually use it. It embedded directly into the CRM, surfacing the right battlecard at the exact moment of a prospect call. Not a separate tab. Not a folder. Right there, in the workflow.
We trained over 100 people across the business. I led that onboarding.
The result: reduced sales cycles. Better informed conversations. And for the first time, battlecards being used in the moment they were built for.
The culture that made it possible.
I've worked in a lot of companies. This startup had one of the best cultures I've seen.
Early on, a key leader pulled me aside one-on-one. He said: "Everything here is a safe space. Keep positive intent and just be open. What are the challenges, what are the objections, how can we make this better?"
That wasn't a policy. It was how the place actually ran. It came from the CEO down. And it's the reason that when I presented the first CI programme, there was no scepticism. Only people asking how to make it work better. Cross-functional collaboration wasn't a value on a wall. It was the operating system.
Within six months, the company raised its Series B.
The part I don't tell often.
Towards the end of my time there, the role started drifting. Content production. Social media. The strategic PMM work that had defined the first six months was gradually being replaced by execution.
When my Director of PMM left, the clarity went with them. And instead of stepping into that vacuum, going to leadership, making the case for what PMM could still build, presenting a forward roadmap, I kept executing against what had been scoped.
That was the mistake.
There was another one, earlier. I'm a perfectionist by nature. At a Series A startup, that's not always useful. The only goal at that stage is customers, revenue, and product-market fit. In that order. Speed matters more than polish. A good-enough battlecard in a sales rep's hands today beats a perfect one in a Google Doc next month.
What I'd do differently: unlearn faster. Being scrappy isn't a compromise. At a Series A it's the right way to work. I had to figure that out the hard way.
On the seat at the table: PMM doesn't get it by default. You earn it with data points. You make the case with impact. When the structure around you disappears, you either define what comes next or someone else defines it for you. I learned that the hard way too.
The framework: Building PMM from scratch in a distributed team
There's no universal playbook. Real PMM is haphazard. The job is bringing structure to the madness. Here's the sequence that worked:
Step 1: Listen before you build. Speak to sales. Speak to customers. Read the reviews. Understand the competitive conversations that are actually happening before you create a single asset.
Step 2: Build the intelligence layer first. Market landscape, competitor positioning, where you win and where you lose. This is the foundation everything else sits on. Without it, your battlecards are guesswork.
Step 3: Make the first deliverables bite-sized and battle-ready. Not comprehensive. Usable. Sales needs something they can pick up today, not a 40-slide deck they'll never open.
Step 4: Solve for adoption, not creation. A battlecard nobody uses is a wasted week. Embed it in the workflow, in the CRM, in the tools sales already lives in. If they have to go somewhere new to find it, they won't.
Step 5: Build the business case for the CI programme. Manual CI gets you started. A dedicated platform scales it. Run the vendor analysis properly: score against the criterion that matters most, which is whether sales will actually use it.
Step 6: Claim your seat. Document the impact. Build the forward roadmap. Make the case for what PMM does next. Nobody will do this for you. And if you don't, the role will be redefined around you.
Next issue: the fintech buyer. Why the standard SaaS PMM playbook breaks in regulated markets. And what I had to unlearn.
Hit reply if this resonates. I read every one.
Sneha
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