AMA: Persona Head of Product Marketing, Evelyn Ju on Stakeholder Management

It’s important to set expectations up front in terms of what you are trying to accomplish, why it’s important and how it will be used. It’s easy for messaging related discussions to take a life of its own so aligning your stakeholders to the same goals will help focus the feedback you will receive. While PMMs are the drivers of messaging, it’s important to bring your stakeholders along as you test hypotheses and iterate on your messaging. They will often provide interesting perspectives that can help shape the direction. For smaller projects, take advantage of your 1:1s or informal chats with Product, Sales, and CS to get input early on. For larger initiatives, set expectations early and socialize your plans, including when you plan on meeting with stakeholders to collect feedback and go through iterations before getting final approval. Depending on the nature of your exercise, it’s also helpful to determine who from which team should be the final decision maker vs providing inputs. Lastly, remind the group that messaging should be an iterative process, it’s important to test and refine out in the field.

It’s always difficult to navigate tense relationships. It’s important not to take this all upon yourself. If you are looking to help, I think the first step is to assess the situation and try to understand the underlying cause that’s driving the tension. Is it due to misalignment of expectations and goals? Is it a result of constant miscommunication, which can stem from having different working styles? Is it a broken process that’s fueling confusion between teams? While it can be uncomfortable, it’s helpful to have honest conversations with individuals that are impacted and gather different perspectives. Make sure you focus on listening rather than jumping ahead to come up with a solution at this phase. Once you have a better sense of the root cause, you can start brainstorming different ways to work with the teams to reset the relationship and establish common grounds. Help teams understand each other’s goals, priorities, and challenges. In some cases, it might be more effective to bring on advocates and leaders in your org to help, especially when it comes to executing changes needed to solve the situation. Finally, keep in mind that it’s much easier to break trust than it is to build it, so beyond solving for the root cause, it’s incredibly important to invest in nurturing the relationship.

The key is to first align on the framework for making decisions (e.g. market opportunity, customer retention/expansion goals, revenue impact, etc. and how you prioritize each) and then ensure the teams have the relevant information (e.g. customer research, feedback, metrics, or analysis) to make the actual decision when it comes to customer priorities. In smaller orgs, it’s easier to gather everyone from product, PMM, and customer-facing teams to have frequent meetings to stay aligned. For example, you might host weekly syncs to discuss features requests from customers and review product roadmaps. As teams grow, it’s crucial to have systems in place to organize and disseminate information that’s relevant to the decision framework.

It is one of the most important partnerships. There is a shared goal around enabling sales to sell by telling a consistent narrative and connecting with ideal customers through messaging and assets that will resonate. PMM and Sales Enablement should work together to identify and fill knowledge gaps that are blocking reps from moving deals forward (e.g. talking points against a new competitor or for a new use case) and ensure reps know where to find the right content. Sales Enablement is a great resource for getting distilled feedback that can help PMMs understand what types of content are more effective — and why. It's important the two don't become misaligned, which can create confusion for the reps.

The focus is on product education and differentiation, essentially helping your customers understand why they should continuously choose your product over others throughout the customer lifecycle — from acquisition through retention. Without Sales as a touch point, PMMs need to figure out how to communicate product value through various touch points and ensure messaging stays consistent. You likely will be leveraging a lot of different communication channels (e.g. landing pages, email sequences, in-product communications, content, help center) so it’s crucial both the narrative and experience are consistent across different formats. PMMs should also work more closely with Product to design the self-serve and upgrade experience, making sure you are aligned on your knowledge of the audience and the customers’ product onboarding path, and tailoring the in-product experience to each persona. When your customers get into your product, they need to be able to derive your value proposition through interaction. To get to that, PMMs at a PLG company need to be intimately familiar with the product features.

Like most cross-functional work, the most important thing is to build trust and establish shared goals early on. Instead of delegating work, involve them in your process, provide them with proper context, and agree on timelines where applicable. They will be much more motivated to help if they have the same context and can be part of the journey. When giving feedback, make sure to provide the why and take a step back when necessary to ground your discussions around objectives, guardrails, and who should be the decision maker for what. There are going to be scenarios where you and your counterparts will disagree, but don’t be afraid to elevate the conversation and get different perspectives. Soft influence also requires understanding someone, so take the time to build a relationship that extends beyond a specific project.

In general, I would bucket the insights we need into a few different categories: for team planning and priorities, customer insights, and feedback on specific messaging or product features. Planning and priorities: I find it helpful to check in regularly on internal stakeholders’ priorities and challenges they are dealing with. This can help you identify common themes across different functions when it comes to planning and prioritizing initiatives to better support your internal stakeholders like Sales and CS. For example, it’s important to understand blockers in the Sales process and what you can provide to help unblock them. This can lead you to prioritize work to provide Sales with better battle cards, more materials explaining product benefits, or a better understanding of buyer personas. It’s easy to get pulled into different directions, especially if you are on a smaller team. By collecting and synthesizing each team’s challenges it will help you focus your efforts on where help is most needed. Customer insights: Questions that can draw out insights around customer pain points, e.g. why customers are interested in certain products, how they evaluate options, how they make decisions, what type of questions they ask during onboarding, and what they say about the company/product are all really helpful. My personal favorite is to gather information around what actual words customers use to describe us, our products, and the value we provide. While you can get some of that information from Gong calls, it’s helpful to get the customer-facing team’s perspectives and the added context. Messaging/Product feedback: These questions need to be a lot more specific than the other two and centered around the feedback we’re looking for. Questions might involve drilling into specific words and phrases used on the website, narrative for a product, or working closely with PMs to understand what customer pain points a product feature is hoping to address.

If you are at a smaller company with little or no structure, it’s a great opportunity for you to build the foundation from scratch. It can be a daunting task, but inaction will likely create more headaches for you down the line. Here are few things I would consider: 1. Education: Help the teams understand your role and the value of the PMM function. 2. Feedback: Proactively solicit feedback from your key stakeholders. Understand their challenges, needs, and perspectives on what can be improved. Chances are they’ve also given it a lot of thought. 3. Context: Put together notes on areas of opportunity based on your own observations and understanding of business goals. 4. Analysis: Look for drivers and themes to understand what’s leading to efficiencies 5. Backcast: This is a process I learned from a mentor. The idea is to draw out what an ideal PMM process should look like for your company based on all the context you have and work backward to lay out the pieces you need to get there. 6. Planning: Put together a project plan so you know what to tackle first and reprioritize when needed. 7. Buy-in: Socialize and get alignment on your plan and vision with key stakeholders. Communicate the goals and expectations. 8. Check-ins: Make sure you schedule check-ins and get feedback to reassess whether the changes you are making are effective and you are on the path to building a better product marketing process.

PMMs here in general have regular meetings with Product, CS, and Sales to support ongoing product launches, facilitate internal training, and gather customer feedback. However, it’s important to shift what meetings you attend, which teams/individuals you meet with, and the frequency of your meetings based on your and the business’ current priorities. Otherwise, given the nature of PMM’s work, meetings can quickly add up. There are a few questions that can help determine whether it’s important to have certain meetings and what the agenda should be. * What is the goal of the meeting, and what priorities does this help drive? * Are there other ways to accomplish the goal that’ll help reduce the meeting frequency? * What are the deliverables? Keep in mind not all meetings need to have set deliverables, but it’s good practice to think through. * What is my role in this meeting? * Are we discussing similar things in different meetings? Is there a way to consolidate the meetings? * Are there materials we can share ahead of the meeting to make the actual meeting more efficient? It’s also helpful to periodically audit your meetings and make time for new initiatives that might require a different set of meetings with different individuals.

Invest and focus on learning new things — specifically anything that can help you better understand the business/product/customer or pick up new skills, whether it’s related to your specific role or not. Volunteer to work on projects that will expand your knowledge. Ask your Product, CS, and Sales counterparts how you can help, even if the tasks are not directly within the scope of your role. I would also recommend finding a mentor within the org. Someone who can guide you with their own experiences and help you navigate difficult situations.