AMA: Braze Vice President & GM, Global SMB, Sunny Manivannan on Stakeholder Management

My top 3 metrics to measure sales enablement success are :1. Reduction in ramp time for new AEs coming into the company - defined as 'how many days does an AE spend at my company before they close their first New Business deal?' 2. Quarterly rep participation rate - defined as 'what % of my ramped sales team closed a deal this quarter?' - this number should increase every quarter if your sales enablement program is effective. If your sales cycles are close to a year long, then perhaps you evalua ...Read More

Personally, I consider these three questions every day:1. How can I help my company win more?2. How can I help my company win bigger?3. How can I help my company win forever?The first is about how PMM can help Sales increase win rate and help Marketing increase pipeline (pipeline x win rate = new customers). Tactics for this include competitive intelligence and competitive positioning, helping Demand Gen by crafting great content and effective landing page copy, not to mention website copy. The ...Read More

Sales reps are busy. Sales managers are even busier. It's not easy to convince these busy folks to take an hour out of their day to sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture. And when your team is global, the odds are that this one hour comes at an inconvenient (EMEA) or impossible (APAC) time for a rep or manager. Some of the things we've done are - (1) region-specific enablement sessions, (2) tapping sales leaders and influential sales reps to lead some sections of enablement sessions, especi ...Read More

In full transparency, I have found it difficult to evaluate the success of a product launch in a metrics-driven way. There's too many variables at play. For example, one could use the metric of "how much of Product X did we sell in the first six months after launch?", but that can be influenced by the product quality, competitors' moves, broader trends, etc. You may have had a great product launch for Product X, but Product Y happens to do better in the market for other reasons. One metric that ...Read More

I'm in favor of what I call the 'State of the Union' report - and doing this every quarter. A 'State of the Union' report is created by a product marketer for their main revenue-generating product(s). It covers (within the quarter):  (i) the number of net-new wins for that product, the overall new revenue, overall win rate, average selling price, and potentially how many customers churned that product. (ii) feedback from 3-5 customer interviews - what do they like about the product, what do they ...Read More

As I wrote in another answer, the market will reward some kinds of tension, especially if there is substantive disagreement between leaders or functions on a critical topic (e.g. pricing and packaging, which I believe is the least understood topic in all of enterprise software). In these cases, lean into the tension, and remind each other all the time that you are doing something really hard but also really important to the company. It is absolutely worth it to have tough conversations in these ...Read More

Startups are unique because (virtually) every employee is also a shareholder. Which means that every internal meeting is also a shareholders' meeting. Now, unlike companies where you are a passive shareholder (Grandma bought you 10 shares of McDonald's, for example) but have no way to influence day-to-day decisions, you get to make a big difference at the company where you work. Every day at a startup is a chance for you to make an impact that will increase the value of your (and your colleagues ...Read More

I think it's crucial to work closely with other teams at the company on projects that really matter to their success. For example: PMM + Demand Gen - website redesign PMM + PM - roadmap planning, product launches, or pricing & packaging PMM + Sales - sales enablement, competitive positioning PMM + Success - customer-facing product roadmap presentation, customer adoption tips and tricks PMM can help all these other functions win, and I think it's absolutely essential to seek out such projects ...Read More

The first time this happens at your company (assuming the MVP is already built), you have to let the product launch and (likely) fail in the market. There's likely too much internal momentum around this MVP and you won't be able to stop the runaway train, no matter how loudly you yell. Now, you should absolutely share the customer research and your perspective on the MVP's dim prospects in a clearly worded email to the Product leadership team (and perhaps the CEO, depending your company size). B ...Read More

Taking the question at face value, there are only two things you can really do: (1) Make the case to your CEO that all of these different functions picking off pieces and working in silos is not the best answer to the company, and present your plan for what it would look like if Product Marketing acted as the central nervous system within the company for all these activities and projects, and clearly list the benefits (product marketing needs to 'product market' itself too sometimes...). Either ...Read More