Director - Product Marketing

At Rite-Hite, your work makes an impact. As the global leader in loading dock and door equipment, we design and deliver solutions that keep our customers safe, secure, and productive. Here, you’ll find innovation, stability, and the chance to grow your career as part of a team that’s always looking ahead.  POSITION SUMMARY: Our Director, Product Marketing is responsible for leading all product marketing efforts for our Interior Solutions Group. This includes generating customer and market insights and creating a short and long-term marketing strategy and marketing plan across the business unit’s full product (hardware, software, services, solutions) portfolio. You’ll assist and influence product management and other key stakeholders in developing winning product strategies and roadmaps.  Reporting to our CMO, you’ll partner in developing enterprise-wide strategic plans. Key performance indicators will be orders, price realization, share gain, customer retention, marketing ROI, and utilization of marketing assets. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Customer Focus Creates and executes an annual customer insight plan in partnership with the insights and operational excellence shared marketing services team and leads a regular customer advisory board to discover unmet needs and utilization trends, validate product concepts, test value propositions and inform pricing decisions Leads a regular sales and service advisory board to ensure the voice of teams closest to the customer is incorporated into the marketing strategy, plans and tools Helps to capture insights by actively participating in customer experience center visits Defines and delivers a memorable customer experience across each phase of the customer journey; leads strategic customer experience initiatives to continuously improve customer experience Helps test ideas as part of the standard Rite-Hite innovation process to build a set of high value concepts for product management; actively participates in the innovation process and proactively drives idea generation where there are strategic gaps Market and Business Insights In collaboration with the shared marketing services team and via analysis, research and problem solving identifies and continuously drives insights from key external and internal data and trends (e.g., market and industry growth / headwinds / tailwinds, visibility, win/loss, strategic account performance, Salesforce, sales tool utilization, demand generation activities, marketing ROI) to strengthen business investments and marketing impact as well as inform enterprise strategic planning Extends data analysis and insight generation to longer-term views that support 5–10-year strategic planning Provides clear and thoughtful guidance/coaching on the development of high impact marketing activities, incorporating lessons learned from prior work and internal/external benchmarking Marketing Strategy From insights and aligned with the product management priorities and roadmap, creates the marketing strategy across an operating company to drive profitable growth (demand generation, funnel acceleration, share gain, price realization) In collaboration with the distribution and business development teams and product management, leads the definition of the commercial strategy including commercial risk assessment, target customer segments and sales channels Provides a market-backed pricing view to the product manager to help inform the final pricing decision; in concert with the shared marketing services team conducts external pricing research studies; monitors pricing trends and leads problem solving workstreams to improve price realization; coaches the team on developing an economic, value-based view to support the product manager’s pricing decision Collaborates with product management, distribution, business development and engineering to define new product offerings, pricing, marketing, and sales strategies Connects the marketing strategy across operating companies and with the enterprise strategic plan and overall company brand strategy Product Marketing Aligned with the defined marketing strategy and starting pre-Phase 0 of the new product development process, oversees the development of annual and multi-year marketing plans supporting product launches and lifecycle that include branding, value proposition, product and competitive positioning, messaging platform, evidence generation, sales enablement tools and training and demand generation Owns the development of a relevant, credible and unique value proposition to drive customer delight and profitable growth; leads the testing of value propositions with external and internal advisory boards.  Coaches the cross-functional product team on the development of high impact value propositions. Works with the shared marketing services team and external agencies to develop the messaging platform and positioning; drives a strategic and practical competitive positioning analysis to develop a prescriptive and highly utilized toolset for the commercial team; facilitates internal war-gaming exercises to pressure-test and develop the highest impact commercial story Incorporates competitive analysis from engineering teardowns, war-gaming sessions and product management input. Coaches the team to develop a data and insight-driven launch strategy, working with the shared marketing services team on the optimum marketing mix (awareness, lead generation/nurturing) and activities (digital, website, SEO, PPC, E-mail, media, print, tradeshow, content marketing, etc.) to maximize the business return on investment Develops thought leadership including reference and show sites and industry group partnerships in collaboration with the distribution, business development and product management teams Oversees the development of high quality, consistent and customer-focused marketing assets working closely with the shared marketing services a