AMA: Attentive Director of Product Marketing, Candice Sparks on Stakeholder Management

There are a few things that I believe help PMMs to prioritize and manage expectations across the organization. Creating quarterly and annual plans. These plans should include the top priorities for you and your team, your OKRs, and key projects. Once these plans are set I share them with my key stakeholders (product, marketing, sales, exec) to ensure there's visibility and alignment on what PMM is working on. As new projects or requests come in you can stack rank them against your currently plan ...Read More

One of the key challenges with communicating product marketing achievements is often times there are less concrete KPIs. For example, demand gen is looking at MQLs and sales is looking at quota attainment. For that reason, communicating PMM success can sometimes come off as "fluffy". I believe there are some organic ways to drive transparency and visibility into your team for example presenting at All Hands on recent releases, in sales team meetings on new collateral created or sales plays, and ...Read More

Any client-facing teams I believe should provide feedback on your messaging/positioning. For example, your client strategy/customer success teams get a ton of feedback from your customers who are actually using your product and have a great perspective on what resonates with your prospects and customer base. Secondly, a part of sales, but a key subset of your sales team are sales engineers. Sales engineers have a natural way of telling a great demo story and are boots on the ground hearing direc ...Read More

During the first 90 days of any new role, I like to go on a listening tour. Identify your counterparts you'll be working with across the spectrum of the organization (everyone from finance to product) and ask them the same 3 questions. What you'll start to understand is where the answers differ and where there is an opportunity for alignment. By going on this listening tour you are first understanding where the organization is at, and where there are challenges and opportunities before coming in ...Read More

Getting stakeholder alignment is critical for the success of any project or initiative. I think this skill set is even more important to a PMM as a large part of the job is getting teams aligned on the desired outcome and path to achieving your goals. Step 1: Understand who the proper stakeholders are. This may differ with every project. I like to create a project plan at the beginning that includes the RACI model (a model that identifies roles and responsibilities within your project and stands ...Read More

Different meetings are needed at different stages of a company and products maturity but some meetings that I think are crucial at any stage are the following: Monthly product release meetings: PMM to present upcoming monthly releases to marketing, sales and CS teams. This allows them to ask questions, get a demo, and hear about upcoming releases and how they are being marketed. Bi-weekly product development meetings: Discuss in-flight products being worked on, their timeline and any roadblocks. ...Read More