AMA: Observable Head of Growth Marketing, Erika Barbosa on Stakeholder Management

Managing stakeholders is a critical and necessary skill, and clear communication plays a significant role in achieving this. What may seem obvious or clear to one person might not be the same for others. Therefore, it's important to prioritize over-communicating to ensure understanding. An essential aspect of clear communication is simply asking questions. It is an art to ask questions in a manner that aligns with the communication style of the individual you are speaking to. It's crucial to be mindful of your own communication style and adapt it to the person you are conversing with.

The best cadence for gathering stakeholder feedback in preparation for a launch is specific to the timeline of the launch. I recommend getting ahead of this and collecting feedback with ample time to map out additional touchpoints for feedback such as at set milestones. Ask yourself, how long do you need to document the feedback, define action items and incorporate the feedback accordingly? For example, this is a general framework for collecting feedback at milestones: * Pre-launch. Who do you need to collect feedback from ahead of testing and the launch? * Testing. What type of QA process do you have in place and when do you need to collect this feedback ahead of the launch? * Post-launch landing review. A good rule of thumb is to have a landing review after ~30 days. This of course will vary depending on the launch, but this is a general guideline you can use. The key here is to tailor the cadence based on the needs of the launch (e.g., complexity, duration, impact, etc.). I also recommend keeping your stakeholders to a minimum to avoid groupthink. It’s a delicate balance of ensuring the right stakeholders are included, but also that the launch doesn’t meet friction with too many opinions.

Aligning internal stakeholders can be challenging, but also rewarding and necessary. When you think about career growth, this is one skill that will level you up. Why? It’s human nature to have opinions and perspectives that we hold strongly. Sometimes these opinions may not be the project driver or the subject matter expert. To meet business objectives, you’ll need to gain buy-in, alignment and ultimately respect from your stakeholders. How do you start building this alignment? It all starts with communication, transparency and micro-moments of trust. You need to build relationships to help align stakeholders. You need to strike a balance between collaboration and teamwork while having clear ownership and accountability. Oftentimes you’ll also find alignment comes from an ongoing cadence of performance readouts. You’ll meet less friction when you can get ahead of questions. For example, can you automate a report sent on X sequence to keep stakeholders informed? It’s important to maintain a healthy ongoing dialog to keep alignment as this is not a static exercise; it will have to be adaptable.

It’s challenging to improve a historically tense relationship. It takes time and mutual respect. The key is to create an environment that is a safe space. Model and foster an environment of communication, transparency and empathy. Know that you will need patience as you work to create a more collaborative relationship. It’s important to meet people where they are at. Why has there been a tense relationship? What’s within your control that you can do to help improve the situation? How do you help support others to improve the relationship? Think deeply about the answers to these types of questions.

Stakeholder management should absolutely be approached differently based on the team you’re speaking with. The reason for this is that each stakeholder is going to have a different need or interest. Just like you would speak with individuals based on the relationship you have established, the same applies to stakeholders. How do you do this? Customize your approach based on what impacts the stakeholder. You’ll need to be adaptable and flexible. Because everyone has different needs and concerns, clear communication and transparency are required. To build successful partnerships, you’ll also need to build trust. Relationships are not static. Keep the following question top of mind when managing stakeholders: Why should they care about this project or initiative? When you are communicating impact and outcomes, frame it with the answer to this question so that you are demonstrating value.

This is tough to navigate but doable. I recommend that you actively listen to both sides. Try to meet them where they are at. To do so, you’ll need to empathetically listen to their perspectives. Identify a common ground for the executive stakeholders backed by data. It’s harder to argue against facts. Let the data help navigate the discussion and bring you to a compromise. I also recommend that you assume good intentions. Keep stakeholders focused on the bigger picture and its associated business goals. This will only be possible with clear communication and healthy debate.

This is a difficult task that needs to be managed with care. Before conflict even begins, from day one as a leader, you should foster a safe space. This way, when conflict arises, team members feel it is safe to discuss their perspectives. Brené Brown refers to this as a rumble and I highly recommend you read her work in Dare to Lead. It’s critical to listen with an empathetic ear. Be sure to offer validation of feelings and perspectives. Approach the conflict with open communication, respect, clarity and transparency. As a leader who hopefully has been modeling this behavior, it will be familiar to team members. Try to cultivate common ground and compromise. Get down to the root of the conflict. Was it a misunderstanding? A piece of information that was not clear? Tough conversations have the opportunity to end in an enlightening place. Please note: If the conflict is of a nature that you are not comfortable managing or should not manage, please feel empowered to escalate the discussion to an HR professional to handle it according to company protocol.

To influence people across different functions and teams you need to focus on our common denominator of being human with our individual perspectives. Here are my five tips to accomplish this: 1. Lead by example. Embody the type of person that people respect even if they do not agree with you. Show up in the way that you would like others to show up for you. 2. Empathy. Put yourself in their shoes and approach interactions from this lens. It’s important to be respectful even if you have to agree to disagree. 3. Clear communication. It’s important not to only communicate, but to ensure it is transparent, clear and ongoing. Clear communication should be the norm. 4. Data-informed. Ensure your information is backed up by data. While perspectives are important, influence is better driven when it’s not just an opinion. 5. Adaptable. When trying to influence stakeholders, it’s critical to be adaptable and flexible. This will help you build rapport.

I believe the key to this is to set clear expectations from the beginning. Communicate the project framework in your kickoff or initial call. If this foundation is laid from the beginning, it won’t be interpreted as a pivot. It will be interpreted as carrying through what you initially outlined. There needs to be a clear owner of the project, collaborators and identified individuals who need to be informed (or a similar framework). Proactively keep the team informed. Celebrate successes along the way. Provide performance readouts on an ongoing cadence. Lastly, I view this question from the perspective of clearly communicating and continuously getting ahead of questions. I believe laying the infrastructure or foundation in this way gets ahead of many concerns that could surface.

My advice can apply even outside of Sales - try to frame your interactions around the question - how can I help? Even more so lately, people feel overwhelmed with a constant shortage of time. Time is money for Sales and when possible, you want to establish this relationship from a lens of empathy and partnership. Here are three of my top strategies to drive alignment with Sales: * Share insights. What better way to drive alignment and nurture a relationship than with ongoing information sharing? What knowledge, data or reporting do you have that Sales could use to better serve customers? What nuggets of information could you share that could open up a new door for them? * Ongoing communication. You won’t be able to forge a relationship with Sales via one-off conversations. Try to establish ongoing communication in some medium (e.g., 1:1s) and make the discussion useful for both sides. Could you help them with better tracking and reporting? Could you assist with message amplification via a tactic such as ABM? * Anchor on your shared goals. Ultimately you share a common ground of wanting your efforts to ladder up to revenue. This is only possible with customers who experience value. How can you approach this goal from your two different perspectives? You’ll be able to reach your goals faster as a team even if you sit in different departments.

My current role has a focus on growth marketing and is all about influencing others without authority because of the cross-functional nature of the role. Depending on the org structure, you’ll need to work with product marketing, customer success, sales, engineering, design and many other departments. I do not have authority across all of these departments. Yet the cross-functional nature is imperative to reach our united business objectives. I recommend you lead by example. This makes it much easier when you need buy-in on other projects. Be respectful and proactively communicate. This ultimately comes down to building relationships. A big part of demand generation is collaboration. Perhaps if you reframe this and see it as building trust throughout many micro-moments, the getting buy-in part comes much more naturally.

The key stakeholders from other departments change due to the needs of the business changing. The swimlanes for demand generation typically become more defined. There are more processes and procedures in place based on what you manage. You’ll probably find that you go from wearing many hats with less clarity on your stakeholders to a more narrow focus with clearly defined stakeholders. Fast forward from a startup environment to an SMB or enterprise and the only constant is change. You may go from working directly with the CEO as a stakeholder to working with procurement and finance teams. You may find that a performance readout happens in a weekly standup to a QBR with various teams from around the world participating. With growth comes complexity, new markets and challenges with data. All of this may need to be navigated with new team structures. And with all of these shifts come new stakeholders or people who you’ll need to collaborate with and inform.

From the beginning of a project, set clearly defined objectives and goals. I believe the key to managing stakeholder input is to lay the foundation from the beginning. It’s much harder to manage stakeholders and their feedback if the structure is not set from day 1. If each interaction anchors to this then your stakeholders won’t experience surprises. Clear communication is going to be necessary as well. My preference is to get ahead of the questions. Define how you are going to communicate progress and measure performance. You’ll find it is much easier to manage timelines if your stakeholders have an expected cadence for communication. This also helps manage the opinions that are received from multiple channels at multiple times (which makes project management difficult). Lastly, documentation is important. Will everyone read it? No, but it serves as a point of reference for stakeholder management. As input is gathered and documented, you should also define if it is in scope or part of a future phase. Acknowledge the input and show it as captured and not forgotten, but also reinforce what will be incorporated now versus what will be part of the backlog for prioritization.

The approach for managing people who don’t report to you will be different from your direct reports. This can equally apply to feedback on a piece of work and prioritizing your project. However, it all starts with building relationships. A few of the key ingredients to a successful relationship include: * Validation of the work being completed * Acknowledgment of the effort and attention that is involved * Communication that is clear, transparent and informative It’s critical to be thoughtful in your approach. From my experience, I’ve been able to successfully manage these relationships by approaching them from an empathic and respectful perspective with data and facts to supplement the request.