I just got one of the most interesting questions that I think I can honestly say I have had in over six years with VMware. It started as a FaceBook message exchange that in the end made me realize that if one person is asking….there must be others. So in true blog form, if one person does not know, blog it so others can learn something. Here’s just a quick view of the exchange that started me thinking about how to explain this better.
| “What is it you do for vCloud Air” | |
| “I’m Technical Marketing part of the BU” | |
| “I get that, but you don’t add any value to closing the sale hence you are an overhead??? | |
| “My job is to enable the field and the customers on the technical things they can do with vCloud Air…..I also spend a lot of time at VMUG’s and customer facing events. Technical Marketing creates much of the demos, field facing collateral and Use Case Solution Briefs” | |
| “Really, X, Y, and Z do that?” |
I might admit, at first I was a little offended. I will also point out the person I had this exchange with was actually trying to explain it to other people who were asking him about me personally. I was not upset that people did not know what I have been doing for the last six months, but more along the lines of the simple missing communication overall about various roles and responsibilities. Call it a missing job description or something else, but typically in any organization you see multiple people doing the same tasks. Not because it’s their jobs, but because they all feel they can do it faster, better, or with more detail.
At the end of the day I will take a stab at explaining what my role personally is in Technical Marketing for vCloud Air. This is just my view of the world, not something official, but based on my last few months and the things I have been working on and asked to work on going forward. Specifically the vCloud Air components I cover are:
- Compute
- Networking
- Availability Services
- DRaas DR2C
The following areas are the things I am responsible for working on as they relate to those components above:
- Enterprise IT Customer Persona
- Enablement Activities
- VMworld Session development, review and presentation
- PEX Session development, review and presentation
- Partner Trainings (VMLive)
- Recorded sessions via On24
- Use case and solution brief development
- Product launch collateral based on agreed upon BOM’s
- Blog posts
- Use cases
- Videos
- How To’s
- Community Facing Activities
- VMUG
- VTUG
- Brown Bags
- Social Media
- Sales Support
- Escalation point as needed
- Customer Calls as needed
I think that about covers what my personal areas of coverage are. Granted there are some that may read this and say, “That’s also what I do.” That’s fine with me, all I know is the above is what I was hired and brought into the Business Unit to handle. The other three Technical Marketing Managers have similar tasks, but varying components of the service they cover. We each have specific views of the world as well for writing this content.
Now, that I have that documented, I need to get back to these three PEX sessions that need to be completed by the end of the week.