AMA: Shopify Director (Head of) Global GTM & Demand Generation, Tamara Niesen on Influencing without Authority

Escalate. Do not hesitate to escalate. I know this can be uncomfortable, and you don’t want to throw any team members under the bus. Something I learned from one of my leaders is “clean escalation”. You identify the problem, document the problem statement and possible paths forward with all the respective tradeoffs. It’s crucial that this is data driven, supported by proof points and is 100% objective. If it’s objective, it’s less awkward, and the most important step before you escalate: write the document, share it with your conflicting team member(s) first and allow them to provide feedback first. And when you do send or share the document for escalation, ensure all the conflicting parties are included in the same email, slack message, meeting etc. when it’s presented to the decision makers. No backchanneling. If I am the leader who is being escalated to, I would ask the impacted parties to complete this process so I can make an informed, objective decision that covers all angles and tradeoffs.

See response re: becoming more influential for more details. In addition to those hard skills and tactics, I would say the soft skill side of this is crucial: I establish trust by being authentic, real, vulnerable, delivering on my word, being transparent and taking stakeholders along for the process or journey, sharing my work/team’s work early for feedback, knowing the impact of my team’s work and above all, ensuring our customers are at the forefront of every decision.

1. Build relationships and build trust- get to know the people you want to influence- we are all human and want to do great work with people we know, like and trust- invest in this. 2. Listen- you may not agree with your stakeholders, but understand their perspectives, what drives them- incentives, how they are compensated, goals, career aspirations, super powers. 3. Communicate- clearly, often and transparently. Oh, and don’t use fancy language, $1000 words or tech jargon (sorry if any of my responses do this, I might not even notice when I do sometimes, but always ask to be called out on it). 4. Back everything with data and/or proof points. Math doesn’t lie (quoting my data science partner). 5. Persistence Pays- sometimes you have to be able to sell internally- winning hearts and minds takes time and effort.

Last year I led a mission that was outside of my discipline. The greatest challenge of leading without authority in my career: * I was successful because we had alignment at the exec level that ‘it’ was [one of] the most important things we needed to accomplish. * When we asked leaders and individual contributors from across the organization to join and contribute to the mission, we ensured the goals, expectations, timelines, deliverables were clear. * If the individuals had conflicting priorities, we got buy-in and worked with their leaders to delegate those conflicting priorities so they could focus only on the mission for a defined time period. * When we were successful in the mission, we celebrated, reflected by getting feedback from everyone involved- we encouraged every member to have a voice throughout. The key here to leading outside of reporting lines was certainly leading with confidence, but more importantly, with empathy (and there were times where I messed this up). I had buy-in and a sense of authority from the powers above, but you cannot be successful with authority alone…you need more. You need to establish trust with those you are working with- people don’t do their best work because they are told to, they do it when they are aligned to a common goal, are excited about the work, and motivated by the people around them to deliver. So on that note, make sure you are having fun, too.

There are more of them! Identified stakeholders, approvers, owners need to be clear, and having a consistent framework to work allows for better documentation, tracking, alignment which in turn would ideally ensure projects are aligned to greater company goals and priorities. Identifying who should be involved right at the ideation stage makes this a lot easier. I.e. if it’s a product launch, product teams should be identified and brought in early to the project. Sometimes you learn this by making mistakes- iterating on your launch, campaign or go to market framework in process comes with time (and more data points).

Context: I work in a relatively matrixed organization and see a lot of stakeholders across the organization come together to deliver on a shared goal, mission, or solve a problem. See below for my lengthy, tactical response. In short- the key to successfully navigating the pivot from collaboration and ideation to execution and accountability is to establish and align on clear goals and priorities, identify a SINGLE champion, break the project down into manageable tasks for workstream leads, and provide support and direction to team members in a structured cadence of status updates, roadblock sharing and mitigation, and where required, escalations to pre-identified decision makers: If you don’t already have a framework in place, I highly recommend investing time in developing a common framework on how multiple groups come together to work on a project, develop and launch a product, campaign, etc; a process with various tasks, identified owners at a discipline level, checkpoints, and approvers. Now, let’s be real, even if you have this, we all know that process doesn’t always perfectly apply! Regardless of where you are at in your collaboration effort, I recommend getting the idea into a brief or proposal template, even if it’s a v1 draft/outline: * Problem to be solved * Why it's worth solving * What will it accomplish * What does success look like * Resources required Once the group is aligned on the idea proposal, approvals are in place (if required), you move to execution (again, I cannot stress this enough- if a brief or proposal is not created, create one. You cannot execute if you aren’t on the same page on what you are trying to accomplish). Intentionally shift the discussion from ideation to execution, hold a conversation and title it “Execution Phase, Build Sync”, something that makes it clear what you are aligning on (this can be done async or in a meeting). Reiterate problem statement and success criteria that the group has aligned on, and then pivot to key priorities, deliverables, and respective work back schedules. From here, apply the RACI or RASCI model (or a similar model): * Assign a project sponsor or accountable owner. * Assign a single champion for the overall project and breakdown the project into smaller projects, or workstreams. This creates one champion for the overall project, and multiple workstream owners responsible for smaller aspects of the project- making it more manageable to work in parallel and move faster. * The project champion: this individual is responsible for keeping the team on track and hosting the project rituals; this person represents the workstream owner’s progress, escalates roadblocks and communicates overall progress to the relevant stakeholders. * Note: I recognize this could be awkward….i.e. if a group of peers is coming together to decide this, you should be comfortable in nominating and aligning on the most suitable champion. If you cannot do this (and there could be many factors at play), you may need to bring in more senior decision makers to help make this decision and that’s okay. In group work, transparent escalation can be a powerful tool (more on that in a later response). * Once you have done this a few times, process, templates, tools, can help reduce the awkwardness. * Workstream leads: assign workstream owners with their deliverables and workback schedules (i.e. if for a campaign, you might have a content workstream owner, a channel workstream owner, creative design owner). * Regular status updates, approval points are key to ensuring timelines are met - if the timeline is tight, consider short daily standups with mid week deep dives, and if it’s overly complex, each workstream might have their own set of rituals too (ideally avoid this- too many silos can create duplication of work, miscommunication). Clear goals, priorities, a single threaded champion, dedicated workstreams with workstream leaders, regular syncs and checkpoints are essential to ensuring everyone is working towards the same objectives, and can help to keep the team focused and motivated as the deadline approaches.

Empathy, humility, data that supports greater business goals: * Empathy: Giving feedback, especially to those who don’t report to you should be done objectively, but with tact and respect, make suggestions, use clear, simple language, data and insights where possible. * Humility: Help all boats rise, if you don’t know the answer to something you are providing feedback on, collaborate with the individual to work towards a solution, or bring in others to help. Be a teammate. Jumping in and critiquing someone’s work, especially without recommended solutions will erode trust. And makes you a jerk. * Data that supports greater business goals: If you are seeking buy-in and asking for prioritization, or perhaps scarce resources, you need to demonstrate the opportunity size and how it can help drive business goals or targets forward.

The [long] answer to this is part art, part science. Whether you are in a product led growth role, or creating demand for a sales led go to market organization, knowing your customer (KYC), developing compelling narratives and messaging, and leading with data are essential. But HOW you lead with these is equally important. It’s easier to do the KYC and data piece, the HOW is an art that takes time and credibility. General rule of thumb is to build trust through genuine curiosity and understanding your first teams, multifectas, or stakeholder’s world. To share an example, let’s say you are responsible for campaigns and you work with sales: * You should develop a solid understanding of the sales team’s territory, segment of customers, buying groups/decision makers, verticals, where they win, lose and how demand gen can help. * You can listen to sales recorded calls, talk to prospects, share insights and demonstrate that you are invested in their business and goals. * When proposing new ideas, like a campaign, seek feedback from them, give the team an opportunity to influence and have a stake in your work. * When you launch a new campaign, enable the sales with the assets/tools, create excitement and where possible, bring in advocates to voice their support. * During the campaign, provide progress updates and encourage feedback. * Once the campaign is complete, host a retro and be transparent in wins, fails, key learnings, and next steps. KYC is key to influencing internal and external stakeholders- whether it's a proposal for budget, headcount, programming, experiments, etc. In this context. knowing your customer can include: * Target audience, ideal customer profile, buyer group personas, pain points, industry/vertical, customer buying journey, respective total addressable markets (TAM) and total Sellable Addressable Market (SAM), user pain points, user profiles, product personas. * Compelling value props: product and platform positioning and what messaging should be in the context of the market you are targeting (ie. is it a buying group, or a user?). * Where does your target audience consume content or conduct research? * Existing funnel and understanding of where there are opportunities to increase volume, conversion rates, velocity, efficiency. * Having a solid understanding of why you win, why you lose, what is resonating with prospects in the sales cycle. When you present your ideas, or you are problem solving with your stakeholders, or perhaps you are new to an organization and are establishing trust with sales and or product teams, lead with data: * What trends are you seeing in the market, with prospects, customers, product. * What is the opportunity size. * What investments are required. * How will you measure success, what are you benchmarking targets or goals against. * How will you track performance. * What channels will perform based on your target audience and where they are at in the customer journey, what historical data can you share to validate. * If running an experiment, what are the control variables. * What insights can you share to validate your idea or proposal.

This is a bit tricky, especially if the feedback provider is an exec. One of the tactics that has helped me in the past is to outline what is in scope versus what is not. Be clear on this and have your approvers align to it. When suggestions that are out of scope and could impact your timelines, reference that initial proposal/project brief, “great suggestion, we would love to incorporate that in the next phase, edition, general availability, etc. but it is not in scope for this phase of the project”.

Understand how each of you are wired. Personality tests are helpful here, especially as it relates to how someone makes decisions, and how they like to receive or give feedback. And then, I prefer to rip off the bandaid, meet face to face (screens are okay too) and share objective feedback. If you need to work together to be successful, it’s worth the time and effort to understand the situation, behavior and impact each of you has had on each other. Both parties need to accept the feedback, even if it’s brutally hard to hear/accept. Once you have shared the feedback, take the time to digest, have a follow up conversation and align on a path forward, what needs to happen in order to build trust and commit. If you aren’t committed or genuine, this won’t work. High degree of care and candor is essential.

I am focused on B2B marketing to create, drive and capture demand with the end goal of creating a pipeline for sales teams (well, ultimately to acquire customers!). From my perspective, the pillars that feed into the strategy for driving pipeline include: * Knowing our target audience * Creating compelling narratives, value propositions, and messaging * Developing best in class point of view content to educate the market while establishing our brand as trusted thought leader in the space * Integrated campaigns and multi-channel strategy: getting our message to the right audience at the right time, in the right place (buying journey is complex and requires multiple messages, solutions, tailored to multiple personas at different stages, at any given time, via multiple channels- from digital, to in person events, to social and more) Aligning stakeholders in these processes is typically done by following an established framework I mentioned in a previous question. In summary- a single project or campaign champion would create a proposal for the project/campaign in the form of a brief that is circulated amongst stakeholders. Alignment and approvals take place with the right decision makers, from there, workstream owners or channel owners are identified and brought into a project/campaign kick off. Shared goals, metrics, targets are established, timelines and workback schedules created, and regular check ins/status updates to ensure we are on track, or to remove roadblocks. Once the project/campaign is complete, a retro is conducted with all stakeholders- this can help ensure best practices are identified, key learnings are addressed, or failed initiatives are deprecated ;)