Product marketing has become an increasingly critical role in enterprise technology, as it's become "less about bits, bytes, speeds, and feeds, and more about how much you know about my business and how much of my trust you can earn," one analyst told Business Insider.

Based on disclosure data for permanent and temporary workers filed with the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification in 2020, Business Insider analyzed what a handful of firms pay workers in this role.

For example, Microsoft hired a group product marketing manager in Washington with a salary of $186,000, while Google hired a director of product marketing management in California with a salary of $315,000.

Here's how much Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Dell, and VMWare pay product marketers.

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Pitching tech products to potential clients has become a more critical job with the rise of the cloud.

Enterprise tech product marketing is no longer only about convincing corporations to sign long-term contracts to buy your gear to be installed in their private data centers. Instead, cloud which gives CEOs and CIOs far more — and more flexible — options.

That has turned product marketing into an even more critical role.

"Successful product marketing today is less about bits, bytes, speeds, and feeds, and more about how much you know about my business and how much of my trust you can earn," DortchOnIT.com analyst and former product marketer at ServiceNow and Ivanti, Michael Dortch, told Business Insider.

This often entails providing a broad range of options that could involve multiple vendors, he said: "Cloud-based solutions are gaining greater interoperability features almost weekly, with each other and with incumbent premise-based predecessors. So I don't have to rip anything out — I can just stop growing what I have, and instead 'embrace and extend' it with cloud-based services of my choosing, whether from incumbent or other vendors."

As a result, product marketing now entails a broader and more flexible focus beyond just one product or a set of products, said Div Manickam, a director at Lenovo's data center group and a former product marketer.

"Product marketing has evolved from the focus on a single product or set of products to be a platform, with products, solutions and industries: Hence the shift to portfolio marketing," she told Business Insider.

These changes explain why product marketing roles have become among the top paying jobs in tech.

Many tech giants have even looked overseas for top talent in the field, and Business Insider analyzed the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification's 2020 disclosure data for permanent and temporary foreign workers to find out what five major enterprise-tech giants — Microsoft, Dell, Salesforce, VMware, and Google — pay product managers.

Companies are required to disclose information such as salary ranges when they hire foreign workers under the H-1B visa program, giving insight into what these major companies are willing to shell out for talent. Note that for some positions, the companies involved only gave salary ranges, rather than specific figures.

Here's how much these top enterprise-technology companies paid product managers hired in 2020:

Source: Business Insider

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