AMA: Mixpanel Former Head of Product & Content Marketing, Jeff Beckham on Stakeholder Management

Every enterprise sales rep wants to sell more, faster. The most valuable PMMs I’ve worked with are experts on their product, market, customers, and competition. Individual sales reps don’t have time to track these things at the level of detail PMMs do, but require smart talking points to be successful. On top of expertise, PMMs bring a macro view and can surface best practices from across the sales org. Ideally, you’re joining calls, talking to reps in different regions and segments, and even pa ...Read More

I’m glad you asked, because I love building presentations! I realize I’m a total slide nerd, but here’s my process: Align on the outcome you want from the presentation. Who are you trying to convince, and about what? Whether the audience is the sales team at SKO or execs at a business review, if all stakeholders aren’t on the same page there, creating the content will be a mess. Build an outline in a doc before creating any slides (GDocs, Notion, or any doc that supports group editing). If you d ...Read More

The setup at my previous company, Mixpanel, is one that I’ve seen be more and more common at businesses scaling up. We have two arms of marketing: product / content and growth (the “campaign team”).When the head of growth and I need to explain who does what, we like to simplify things to: PMM builds messaging and content, and growth distributes those things everywhere in the world through ads, email, etc. I’ve personally found this setup to be much more efficient than more siloed organizations, ...Read More

I’ve found that most companies want the most capable people doing the most important work. If you prove your value as a PMM by making the team and company successful, bigger and better projects will naturally come your way.When it comes to positioning the PMM team within marketing, it ultimately comes down to influencing the head of marketing. They want nothing more than for the marketing team to produce great work and achieve its goals. Whether marketing metrics are tied to pipeline, LTV, brand ...Read More

It’s a good question, but also a loaded one! Product management needs to prove their value to the company too, right?The dynamic you’re describing is common though, unfortunately. I’ve lived it many times. The best working relationship comes when both sides have shared goals. If that’s not reality, one thing I’ve advised PMMs on my team to do is figure out what the PMs they work with care about and are goaled on. What are their OKRs or objectives? Assuming it’s not something crazy and counterpro ...Read More

Product and Sales are always the biggest, at least at B2B companies. The one that matters more depends on whether you’re in a product-led or sales-led organization. There’s no circumstance in which you can neglect one of the two, but when you need to make hard tradeoffs about where to spend time, I recommend optimizing for how your company operates.Those are obvious, so I’ll give you two that have really helped me, but may be more unconventional. Design. A product marketer is only half what they ...Read More

Whenever I join a new team, my first objective is to earn trust – both within my department and with cross-functional partners. Without trust, advice from “the new guy” about how things should be done is usually unwelcome. To do that, start by identifying problems you can solve to make everyone’s life easier. Not things you observe that are suboptimal compared to your last job, but things that are driving people at your new company crazy already. There’s always something, and if you can solve th ...Read More

In these types of situations, I’ve found that data can be a useful persuasion tool, because it’s objective. Have you considered surfacing win rate numbers? Or an even more granular metric in the sales funnel, like a lack of deal progression from early to mid/late stages? If execs are expected to take you at your word that the pitch isn’t working, based on anecdotal evidence, that can be a tough sell. Their thought process is likely, “how bad could it be? We’re doing well enough to merit an IPO.” ...Read More