AMA: Snowflake Head of Enterprise Marketing, India, Kanchan Belavadi on Stakeholder Management

Absolutely! Not only the team, but also the individual. Every team has its own goals and challenges and to work effectively with them, you need to first understand their needs and align accordingly. For example, if you have to work with the product team to build assets, it is important to know their calendar – when is the next product launch coming up – because that will take precedence over everything else, unless you are creating something for a customer for an identified opportunity. Working with developers is very different from working with sales. Their needs are different, so are their asks. The better you know them, the sooner you can create value for them. When you begin working with them, do not go with an ask. Instead check, what you can do for them. Build that trust by showing value.

With respect. That means, giving them full visibility into the project that you want to collaborate with them. Ensure they are part of the communication – email/slack, etc. (if not actual meetings to optimize time and effort) with the larger team. Once they understand the complete scope of the project, they know what is at stake and will prioritize it on their own. When it comes to giving feedback, it is always best to give data-driven, iterative and actionable feedback. An open communication channel ensures, there are no last-minute surprises. So, it is important to have regular check points and share feedback promptly. This ensures respect on both ends and results in growth for the individuals too.

The cadence is a function of multiple factors – launch schedule, preparedness, stage of the launch, etc. If you are launching something in a short time with a new set of stakeholders, its best to communicate more frequently. However, if it is a long term planned launch, then you can have longer gaps between the cadences. What is sacrosanct is a project plan – a detailed activity plan, with timelines and owners assigned. Work backwards from the due date for each activity. E.g., Going live with a new microsite in your website is due on XYZ date. You know how many days/weeks you have in hand. That is your target to work towards and assign responsibilities with due dates accordingly to different team members and stakeholders.

* Understand your stakeholders. * Understand their goals, needs and priorities. * Understand their expectations from you/your team/function. * Figure out how the above aligns with your goals, needs and priorities. * Communicate very clearly and consistently on how you can help them meet their goals or overcome their challenges. * Start small and build from there.

I find these 3 areas as critical towards building a demand gen team: * Content * Search * Design Depending on the rest of the marketing team structure, * Marketing Operations * Inside Sales and * ABM Can be a part of Demand gen or can sit outside this structure. The size of the team depends on various factors like size of the business and stage of the company’s growth. A large organization will obviously have multiple folks within each of these functions. A small startup in its growth stage can also have multiple folks within each function. It is important to set KPIs to measure success and they must be aligned to clear business outcomes. A content strategist cannot be goaled merely on building assets. They need to be responsible to creating “engaging” assets, essentially assets that customers interact with and find useful and lead to expansion or retention.

One of the best examples is of a time when I learned from the sales team about particular challenge the customer faced during the payment process when using the self-serve model. This helped us identify a serious issue when customers tried to pay using credit card from a particular country. We were able to solve that problem and improve our conversion rates online. Communicating with field teams – sales as well as presales, always leads to better customer insights and helps improve the customer experience. Another example is when speaking with the product team, the insights into the functionality of the product – apart from the feature list – become very clear. This improves the way you take the message to the market.