AMA: Gong Director, EMEA Marketing, Kathy O'Donnell on Stakeholder Management

Communication! Shared Slack channels, meet regularly and ask your sales team for input so they feel engaged and involved in decisions. Be transparent about how the marketing budget is spent and what is working and what isn't. Shared KPIs. The biggest mistake is disconnected goals. Having a marketing goal of driving leads and a sales goal of driving revenue rarely works out, in my experience. At a minimum, Demand Gen/Marketing needs a sales-qualified pipeline target to fill the top of the funnel. ...Read More

Honing your craft and being able to share insights and recommendations (based on data) is a great start. Managers often don't have time to get into the weeds, but if they get insights they don't know or recommendations on how to do something differently, this is a good first step in becoming influential. Being concise in your delivery is also important. If you're putting together a written proposal, it's always recommended to start with a brief summary of the expected outcomes/key findings at th ...Read More

As an EMEA-based marketer working for a US-based company, building successful partnerships across the wider marketing org has always been critical to my success and that of my team. Whether that be partnering with the centralised paid search team to drive successful search campaigns, influencing content creation to ensure it resonates in our region or partnering with the social team to post EMEA-relevant content on our corporate social channels.  Here are a few of my tips for building those part ...Read More

From my perspective, there are four absolutely crucial things to establishing credibility and trust;  Act with integrity at all times. This means keeping your word, and doing what you say you will. You must consider fully what it will take to keep that word because if you don't, you end up providing reasons and not results.   Open communication and transparency are key to building trust. The best leaders I've ever worked with demonstrate this trait. Thirdly, if you own a project, take ownership! ...Read More

Thinking of this through a project lens, I have seen DACI or RAPID frameworks help by assigning clearer roles and decision-making responsibilities. The project owner then knows who they need to involve to gather input from, who they need to keep informed, who can contribute to the decision, and who can block it. I've seen this approach work well with a product launch, for example, which is a huge cross-functional effort. It allows demand gen teams, product marketers, content teams, PR and others ...Read More