My org tried this, but being in financial services no one thought through this problem - our customers are much better paid than any PM we could hire.

That is to say, the only customer we could convert to a PM was one who was fundamentally bad enough at his existing client side job that he was OK capping his income at 25-50% of his potential.

Doesn't it go in the other direction too? Any PM you can hire can probably make more in finance?

Well yes but that's why I think "we'll just hire a typical user as a PM" isn't really a solution.

It also doesn't give them any training in how to PM.

They should just be someone technical enough with enough people skills and familiarity with user use cases to bridge the gap.

Just so I understand, the best way to hire a product manager in B2B is to poach the employees of your customers?

A more charitable interpretation is poaching ONE such employee out of all your customers. It's not a criminal act, IMHO.

Managers of any company that think they can't afford to lose a single employee are doing something wrong and should google "key man risk"