AMA: Gusto Head of Product Marketing, Core Product, Leah Brite on Stakeholder Management

In my experience, it depends more on the actual people you work with vs the function. I have had both incredible sales and product partners that understood the big picture, were always down to collaborative and problem solve together, and where we could openly talk about areas of disagreement. These folks came curious to learn other people’s perspectives and kept users' experience at the heart, making it easier to get alignment. I’ve also had experiences where that was not the case. If you are experiencing friction, my advice would be to address it early and often. The more you can get everyone to assume good intent and work towards an improved operational model from the start, the better. This means that small issues don’t have the time to fester and bubble over, making the long-term relationship healthier and more stable.

My advice is to separate the ship and launch functions. In my experience when they are paired together, there is so much unproductive internal thrash when eng encounters delays and all the downstream teams have to re-adjust their plans. Instead, group new products and features into larger campaigns where if something doesn’t get released on time, you still have a compelling story to tell and your campaign doesn’t get derailed. Set expectations that all features must ship by X date to be included in the campaign. This also has the benefit of creating more impactful launch moments where you can tell a bigger, richer story about the value you are delivering to customers through a plethora of new offerings.

One of the most important things that PMM can do to drive cross-functional alignment (whether remote, hybrid, or in-person) is to keep the customer at the center of the conversation. By operating as a customer evangelist, we can bring data-driven, customer-centric stories to the forefront and get folks aligned on who our customer is, the most important problems to solve for them, and how to best serve their needs. Having a shared vision for your target market helps create natural alignment that can reduce friction during strategic and operational planning. Two more things I’d recommend include: 1. Know who the real influencers and decision makers are in your org. There is always the formal RAPID, and oftentimes, less codified paths and people to influence. Build your understanding of that and use it to your advantage when anticipating or experiencing friction. 2. If you are going into a meeting where you hold an opinion that might be contentious or expect to get pushback, pre-sell the idea with key stakeholders in 1:1 settings where you can tailor your delivery to your audience. Sales is going to naturally care about different things than product, so pitch your idea accordingly. This can ensure that when you enter the room, you’ve got some allies on your side that can help tell the story from multiple angles and get broader cross-functional alignment. This can be especially key in remote settings where it is naturally harder to read a room. Giving folks the ability to digest the information and provide input in advance can go a long way in not only building allies, but also up-leveling your thinking and recommendation with a diversity of perspectives.

Here are a few things to think about: 1. Consider how you are briefing in the work to get alignment upfront on the ask and the criteria. 2. Related, bring them along on the insights journey to empower them to design in a way that will hit the mark for your target customers. Link them to your customer personas, usage data or research that highlights what they care about, past interaction data or qualitative input from customers and prospects on what they value in design or information architecture. 3. Do you have an opportunity to get feedback directly from users? Is there a way to AB test a creative in a way that would generate useful insights to guide future design decisions? Or do you have a customer advisory board (whether formal, or just an informal handful of customers you could ask for feedback from) that could help you and the designer understand which is the right design path to pursue from the customer’s perspective? 4. Ultimately, try and persuade the designer using customer stories and data. If that isn’t successful, design likely holds the final decision. Use a disagree and commit framework, and ponder what might drive more alignment in the next project you work on together.

We break down product marketing’s work into four buckets and work with product as follows during each of the phases: 1. Market Strategy, Customer Insights & Product Roadmap. PMM leads market, competitive, and customer/prospect research to uncover key customer problems. We analyze market data, hone competitive intelligence, and draw on prospect and customer insights to illuminate product/market fit. We collaborate with the product team throughout this whole process to identify and prioritize big questions to answer and then share all the intel with them to influence and inform the product strategy and roadmap decisions. Product of course wants to solve customers’ biggest problems, so most find this research invaluable and welcome the thoughtful, data driven influence. 2. Positioning, Messaging, Packaging, & Pricing. PMM develops a customer-facing strategy to uniquely differentiate our offer in the marketplace. Product provides inputs on features, COGs, considerations, etc to help inform pricing and packaging - we generally co-pilot pricing with them. We also have them review drafts and provide input on the positioning and messaging, ensuring we’ve done a good job of highlighting all the ways we provide value and appeal to prospects and users. 3. Go-to-Market Strategy. PMM partners with product on defining the product market readiness criteria. We’ll present our GTM strategy, getting alignment on the level of the launch as well as goals and KPIs. Finally, we’ll make sure we’re aligned on all of the associated launch activities before handing the plan off to marketing and sales teams to help bring the campaign to life and execute against the strategy. 4. Amplification, Feedback & Refinement. Post launch, we’ll work with product to monitor campaign and product adoption metrics as well as check in with xfn stakeholders like CX, marketing, sales, rev ops, and data science to get the fullest picture of launch success. We’ll jointly strategize on how to make improvements, and host a retro so that we can be on a continual path of improvement.

A few things come to mind to try: 1. Create a brief for the sales enablement assets upfront. Succinctly outline what your objectives are in priority order, who the target audience is, and some brief details on what’s important and likely to appeal to them. 2. This brief is also a great place to outline your RACI/DACI/RAPID to create clarity on what each person’s role is in the project. 3. When conflicting opinions arise, try to leverage your brief to realign the stakeholders around what is important. Bring them back to the target audience, what they care about, and the goals of the sales enablement piece. Hopefully, the brief can help guide the decision making. Also, if the feedback is coming from folks that have different roles in the RAPID, that can also create clarity on whose opinion holds the most sway. 4. Finally, get everyone together in the same meeting. Outline that the primary objective is to make a final decision on XYZ, so that you can get the sales enablement asset out into the wild, helping your company serve more customers with your amazing product. Make sure the decision maker is in the room to close out the disagreement with finality if it comes to that. Good luck! Those dynamics can be challenging.

A variety of tools can be helpful in getting stakeholders aligned on the marketing strategy – the key to them all is that they are based on data and customer insights. When you are articulating your strategy, provide links to supporting research, personas, shopper journey’s, etc. These should articulate who your target customers are, what they care most about, how to influence them during the purchase or upsell process, and how they interact with your product. By highlighting the key takeaways and linking to deeper dives, you have handy tools right at your fingertips to resolve differences in perspective and answer key stakeholder questions that emerge during the strategy development process.