AMA: Atlassian Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise, Akshay Kerkar on Stakeholder Management

Great question! Demand Gen team tend to be bigger than PMM teams, and also have access to a lot more budget :) Modern PMM teams should consider pipeline (and ultimately revenue) to be their primary success metric. If PMM teams are led based on this approach, it drives perfect alignment with our DG partners since DGF is typically on the hook to generate sufficient pipeline for Sales every quarter. In my experience, the best way to work w/ DG is to consider them to be true partners. PMMs are experts on the “who” (i.e. target personas) and “why” (messaging for these personas) while DG is the expert on the “how” (channels/tactics to reach these personas). If the two teams take a collaborative approach on everything from brainstorming campaign themes to execution and performance tracking, it usually leads to great outcomes and a shared purpose. Imo, the wrong approach is for PMM to play a very tactical content-creation role when it comes to campaigns.

The ability to really engage with our end users - whether through 1:1 conversations or broader campaigns - is critical to the success of any PMM team. If we aren’t able to continuously keep a pulse on our users and what they care about, we won’t really be able to do our jobs effectively. I’m not surprised that this is the problem you are facing though. Some Enterprise organizations tend to be very protective of their end users and allow only certain teams to “own” the conversation with customers. I’ve been in an org myself where I’ve had to deal with this issue. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy solve (or a quick one), but perhaps here’s a couple of suggestions: - I think it’s important to get alignment across leadership (PMM, Marketing, Sales) on the importance of “access”, and without this any effort will likely not last in the long term. What’s the root cause of this restriction of access? How can you address some of these concerns? It’s definitely worth some honest conversations - If you can start small and show immediate value, you will build the case for why broader access is a good idea. So if you can identify a small subset of accounts with more progressive account managers and lay out a plan for how you want to engage (including what’s in it for them), this might be a way to go

I must admit that design disagreements have been rare in my experience. The best way to ensure alignment is to really think of your design partner as a true partner (vs. just a service role), bring them in early and upfront, provide them with context (e.g. maybe even have them be part of planning sessions), and take a collaborative vs. directive approach. While there may always be one-off disagreements on individual efforts, overall a collaborative approach should lead to a much better working relationship and end result since you’ll now be aligned on goals and desired outcomes.

Success should be measured based on impact to the org, and in B2B Marketing that really means pipeline (and ultimately conversion to revenue). PMMs that take this “full stack” approach to our craft will not only maximize their ability to have meaningful impact at their company, but will also put themselves in a position to acquire skills along the way to set themselves up for leadership positions in the future (whether that’s CMO or GM of a business line). The challenging part here is that PMM tends to be defined differently in different organizations, with some companies looking at the role a lot more tactically. So it’s really important to do your due diligence and choose carefully to ensure that both the organization and PMM leadership recognize the value of PMM and encourage individual PMMs to focus on impact.

Messaging is tricky, since everyone and their uncle tends to have an opinion on messaging :) The challenge with not having a clear approval process and roles/responsibilities defined upfront is that the review exercise will then typically lead to a lot of churn and take a long time to boot. So it’s really important to define the process upfront, including who the final approvers are, who needs to be informed, and who can provide feedback (you can use something like the DACI framework here). Ultimately, the PMM is the driver for the process and needs to be thoughtful about the process they follow based on the specifics of the org and the preference of leadership. For example, if you are a self-serve business where Sales plays a more transactional role then Product buy-in tends to be key. On the other hand, if you are an Enterprise-focused business the feedback and buy-in of Sales leadership is pretty important.

Not all launches are created equal, so it’s important to have a t-shirt sizing exercise upfront to determine how large a launch is (and hence what level of effort/mix of activities should be dedicated to launch). Once that’s done, the sooner we can put a launch plan in place, socialize that, and kick-off the launch process, the better. The process can then include checkpoints like getting the messaging finalized, locking the website copy, etc. with each activity having a mini-process to get sign-off (ideally using something like the DACI framework) based on when things need to be ready for the GA date. You just want to avoid surprises and last-minute launches where possible (easier said than done, I know :)).

The structure of the PMM team is usually a function of the size of the company and it’s GTM model. The “typical” SaaS PMM team has a set of Core PMMs that are focused on product, and usually a sister PMM team in the form of Industry/Solutions Marketing that is focused on solutions for specific verticals or segments. At Atlassian, since we have a flywheel model, PMMs have a lot more focus on activities that deal with acquisition (self-serve), cross-sell, and upsell. So while our PMM teams are organized by product (e.g. Jira, Confluence, etc.) individual PMMs on a product team can focus on core product vs. monetization vs. enablement vs. upsell to drive the overall KPIs for the business.

The structure of any team needs to be driven by the success criteria for that team. At Atlassian, we typically look at KPIs like # of paid users and pipeline (MQLs) for PMM. Enterprise-focused PMM teams typically have a couple more things they need to solve for: Sales enablement, and account-based programs (which can vary from events to ABM campaigns to EDR programs). Currently, my team is a mix of core PMM who own the GTM for specific products, as well as “horizontal” PMMs who own programs (like campaigns, enablement, content) that stripe across all products. The structure of the team will evolve over time based on factors like the Sales team structure, new product rollouts, etc.