AMA: G2 VP Product Marketing, Alina Fu on Stakeholder Management

To be successful in a remote working environment, leaders and employees must be willing to think and work differently. Shared context: The most critical component to drive alignment cross-functionally, especially with a remote team, is to provide clear communications and establish shared underst...more

Because a launch has so many different moving parts across very distinct disciplines, it is always handy to be agile as pivots may occur. The best cadence for gathering stakeholder feedback is throughout the launch process - at the beginning, during the middle and definitely at the end. There a...more

This one is challenging because I’ve witnessed year long integrations from newly acquired products into the overall strategy, and even then, it wasn’t “fully” absorbed into the main strategy. First, I would recommend looking at the reasons why this product came under the fold. What was the visio...more

Customer Success or Customer Marketing teams are your secret weapon when thinking about Positioning & Messaging frameworks and GTM strategy. Retention is a key metric for the business, so who better than Customer Success Managers or Customer Marketing leaders to represent the voice of the custome...more

I take a relationship-based approach when I think about stakeholder management. I prefer to tailor my style to the individual, so it doesn’t matter as much which department but what type of personality they have and their communication preferences. For instance, a leader in department X may prefe...more

What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opini...more

I am a big believer that mismatched expectations are most often the root cause of complicated relationships. Some companies delineate Product Marketing as Inbound and Outbound product marketing. What are the expectations from leadership and from Product has for which type of product marketing yo...more

I partner very closely with the VP of Rev Marketing to make sure we have a coordinated funnel strategy. We are in constant communication and alignment for acquisition, conversion and retention. In addition, product marketing measures deals influenced for attribution. Our product marketing team’s ...more

ABM is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, as we just announced 7 new ABM integrations and hosted a webinar about ABM strategies. Data-driven marketing has extended beyond analytics, social, SEO/SEM, and A/B testing into insights and 3rd party data on customers’ wants and needs to tailor ...more

I would recommend first uncovering the root cause of the confusion. Is the confusion causing redundancy, disagreements over roles & responsibilities, are mismatched expectations of results? The best partnership between product marketing and marketing is when there are clear metrics that will mak...more

Salesforce immediately comes to mind. When you think of CRM, what other solutions do you think of? They do a great job explaining the product in digestible sound bites, by gamifying the learning experience and making advanced progression and product enablement fun. When they introduced the Trailb...more

I don’t know if there is a turnkey framework but there are definitely lots of framework options available. You can find one that fits your needs or make your own (like I do). Core to a GTM strategy include these essentials: * Core Bill of Materials (pitch deck, demo, battlecard, FAQ/data sheet...more

Because Product Marketing is at the cross-section between Marketing, Product and Sales, there are times when they are barely treading water to keep up with all the product launches, become a “catch all” function or have multiple conflicting stakeholder priorities. Thus, I think these additional o...more