AMA: Apollo.io Former Head of Product Marketing, Susan Chaika on Stakeholder Management

Here’s the thing - competing goals/OKRs/incentives across teams is a structural problem that PMM will rarely be able to solve alone. The best you can do is to make the tradeoffs explicit and push for a metric that can be shared across teams, but the ultimate decision may be outside your scope of authority. Name the problem: First step is to explicitly name the problem that different teams are working towards different goals. E.g. Product built this feature to increase ACV by selling into new per ...Read More

Yes, product releases are happening more quickly because of AI, and that’s essentially pushed customer-facing teams into an always-on launch motion. But let’s not forget that we’re marketing to other people, and no matter how fast the product is changing, there's a limit to how much change and information our customers can absorb. So while I do find myself making adjustments to accommodate more always-on GTM, I am also balancing that with tried-and-true fundamentals.  Not every release is a laun ...Read More

Just as no plan survives contact with the enemy, no messaging survives contact with Sales - nor should it. Messaging shouldn’t be developed in an ivory tower; if you’re a sales-led company, your messaging needs to take into account your sales teams’ needs and feedback. To get there, you’ll want to involve them early and often. Development: Interview salespeople or listen to sales calls to get the (literal) voice of your customer and your sales team in your ear as you’re developing messaging. Not ...Read More

There are so many ways to go about this. Here are the principles and strategies that I find myself falling back on time and time again: Identify shared goals: Start off by identifying shared goals and reaffirming what we already agree on - that we all want this project to be successful, that we want to minimize churn, that we want our customers to have a great experience, etc. It sounds basic, but explicitly stating this resets the conversation from “my goals vs yours” to “how do we win together ...Read More

I’m assuming this question is focused on what happens AFTER the new pricing or packaging is already decided on, and now you need to roll it out to customers. P&P changes are hard - there are so many operational things to juggle that I find having some sort of visualized “map” and timeline useful to keep all the internal stakeholders on the same page as to what is happening, and when it is happening. However, don't let all the operational stuff distract you from the fact that you are working ...Read More

Short answer - just do it.  Long answer - having customer and market evidence is gold because it takes you out of the realm of opinions and into the closest thing you can get to fact. Or as the Pragmatic Institute is fond of saying, “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.”  This approach reminds us to leave our ivory towers, listen to our customers, and actually respond to them. If I have it, I like using a mixture of both large-scale quantitative data and smaller-scale qualitative d ...Read More

Difficult stakeholders are usually a symptom of misaligned goals or missing context, not personality issues*. I focus on trying to understand their motivations and identifying shared goals.  Understand motivations: What does success look like for their team? What constraints are they working under? How do they like to work? PMMs are trained to ask these questions to build out customer personas - apply this thinking to internal stakeholders as well. The more you understand their context, the easi ...Read More