How can I help?
Hi team, I’m excited to start a conversation with the teams at Social Pinpoint and explore potential opportunities between us.
My name is Zane Taylor and I’ve worked as a product marketer for community engagement platforms over the last four years. I’m passionate about supporting local governments and am proud to have worked for Bang the Table and Konveio.
I’m hoping to leverage my background and experience to address challenges and seize opportunities for growth in this market category.
I sincerely look forward to sharing an open and exploratory conversation. To prime us for a productive conversation, I’ve compiled some initial thoughts and a portfolio of prior work. Thank you.
zane.w.taylor@gmail.com | 1.405.205.5417 | Boulder, CO, USA
Bang the Table’s 2020 Company Retreat
Smart Cities Connect 2023 with Konveio Team
Benefits of contracting a fractional Product Marketing consultant with community engagement industry experience.
Why wait quarters or years to hire a product marketer when we can start an inflection point now? Compared to a new hire, there’s less red tape and HR burden, more flexibility, an immediate start date, and only a week-long onboarding process before I start creating value (versus 90+ days).
Key Results
Rapidly support sales staff and produce enablement resources
Lay the groundwork for the product marketing function at Social Pinpoint
See below
Persona and feature-based web pages and sales resources
Product and feature adoption - boosting the impact your product specialist can have
Fill in the blank! Let’s get creative.
The Ask
Access to internal tools, recorded sales calls, product roadmap, and likely your CRM.
Sit in on certain meetings and shadow onboarding/sales calls.
Willingness to interview your happy clients.
Minimum of a three-month engagement.
Two ways to view me
1: A community engagement professional dedicated to the art and science of product marketing
4 years of product marketing experience for community engagement platforms (Bang the Table + Konveio).
Praised by former sales team members at Bang the Table for sales enablement content and team mindset.
Capable of attending trade shows and events in short order.
Will study your problems through the lens of product marketing frameworks and best practices.
Jobs to be done exercises (to generate clarity for positioning, segmentation, campaigns, and sales efforts.)
Persona research and development (by territory)
Research ideal customer profile (by territory)
Sales enablement
Prepare GTM plans and messaging
One-off feature launches or fundamental positioning and messaging rework on primary value themes after various features were added over time.
2: A Highly Versatile Marketer
Rapidly iterate sales enablement content and resources
Broadly helpful across digital marketing efforts.
Highly experienced in video production and web development on Webflow (I built Konveio’s website by myself.)
Contribute momentum to your successful rebrand with a fresh perspective and strategies.
Team player experienced with working on global teams.
Product Marketing
Websites
Konveio’s new website was conceptualized and designed by yours truly. You can explore a wide variety of content I’ve written and produced by exploring a few pages.
Writing Sample
The inspiration to write about text analysis stemmed from an onboarding call that I sat in on. While each feature is rather complex and dry on its own, I was asked to chime in during the call to explain how valuable and approachable they are.
While we drafted communications for each individual release, nothing tied it all together and adoption was lagging. The intent of the article was to draft an easy-to-digest narrative with enough relatable detail that readers would understand what the feature is and envision how to put it to use in their organization.
To generate the likely scenarios, I leaned on experiences sitting in on other calls. The focus of the piece leaned more toward account managers and feature adoption, yet on Slack it brought cheers from both account managers and the sales team. Most of whom promptly shared it on LinkedIn.
Marketing Videos
Please view in full screen
Bang the Table’s four minute platform demo video serves as their most important online sales asset. Reinventing it was the biggest project of my second month in the role. While in retrospect I’d do it much differently, the prescribed purpose was to cover a ton of ground.
Prepare to drink from a firehose and learn a lot about the platform. Nowadays, my mission is to bring story design into all of my productions and this misses that mark. However, it yielded a positive impact on sales and received praise from my colleagues across all departments.
Sales enablement campaign
This was produced on a short turnaround to spark sales by end of year. My focus was on delivering a compelling script and getting the video to a deliverable state as soon as possible.
French Platform Demonstration video
Creating a French video required taking a step back at the processes I use to create a video. It was a big effort, but my plan made it quite manageable.
Remote video productions
This video was a collaborative effort with a colleague on the sales team, Michelle Stevens. Over Google Meet, we worked together every step of the way to create a coherent message that would drive traffic to our new demo site and then register for her upcoming webinar. Ultimately, the webinar received so many registrations that we upgraded our Zoom membership to allow for more participants.
Simplifying complex feature releases
During my fifth week on the job I wrote and narrated a video for the first time. My intention was to deliver a dead simple explanation of an otherwise complicated new feature.
Appearance Editor was critical to securing some renewals in the Australian market, and it was imperative to use an Australian accent. This video was created in collaboration with a colleague in Australia. I pitched the project, wrote a script, and rehearsed/recorded the audio in a live format through video conferencing. Once I had the audio, I was able to quickly round it out for use in an email campaign.
Efficient use of thought leadership
Not everyone can watch an hour-long webinar. Even if a segment addresses something that a prospect might search for on Google, there is no way they’ll discover it inside of a gated webinar on wistia. I began posting highlights of our best webinars, allowing us to get the most value from the work they were already doing. The strategy delivered easy wins on social media, grew our YouTube channel, and helped fuel engaging webinar recap articles on our blog.
In Product Communications using Appcues
This Appcues project was to designed support existing administrators in transitioning over to our newly overhauled website editing interface. My approach was slightly unconventional. What isn’t shown here is that there was a welcome video upon the first load of the new feature’s URL, which explained that this checklist is to serve as a guide that they can always refer. In the context of this feature, there was palpable apprehension amongst organizations around adopting the incredible new interface. After all, it involves setting up a new website design. The checklist was designed to make them feel supported and comfortable enough to experiment.
2017-2019
Why I’m a Product Marketer: Customer discovery, acquisitions, and product launches (Oh My!)
This was the period when my vision to become a product marketer became clear. Getting first-hand experience working alongside extraordinarily talented engineers and product leaders at Sphero was the cherry on top that led to an epiphany: the entrepreneurial mindset and the academic side of product marketing are almost a perfect match.
Customer discovery was the first tangible crossover between the entrepreneurship and product marketing world. And I truly love customer discovery. Here’s how I turned a few peculiar orders into a thriving customer segment that led to our acquisition by Sphero 9 months later (and our product landing on display at every Apple store in the US.)
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