AMA: Pomerium Head of Marketing, Nikhil Balaraman on Influencing without Authority

I prioritize understanding each stakeholder’s challenges, and most importantly, aligning on goals. For instance, when collaborating with the sales team a new campaign or pipeline generation plan, we meet to make sure they feel like they have the ability to influence and direct the plan. But most importantly, we align on the outcome/goals we want and then work backwards from their to jointly craft the activities necessary to hit those goals. This collaborative approach not only builds trust but a ...Read More

Meetings and communication! Obviously you want your ideas to make sense to people without much explanation, however, you always have to position your vision/ideas in terms of what the benefit is for the audience your talking to...it's product marketing but for internal stakeholders! So for something like building a customer engagement/re-enagement campaign, I highlight how it supports the product team’s objectives by increasing user adoption of a new feature or overall retention. Obviously it he ...Read More

My philosophy is pretty simple. Go, try, learn, and if you get in trouble or are worried about failing then that's when I can be helpful. I'm not going to tell you what to do or how to do it. I'm there as a sounding board at all times, and happy to give my opinion, but PMMs especially need to feel ownership and authority over their work so that they can make decisions and earn the confidence of their xfn peers. I have had the pleasure of having great people on my team that I'm sure I will work f ...Read More

Don't hide from failure, and don't expect every project to be a success. For example, no product launch is perfect. Even the ones that might look perfect from the outside are built on top of a mountain of moments of panic and despair on the inside. Make time (it's hard) to reflect/run retros on these launches and do an honest assessment of how to do better next time. Use that to adjust your product plan template or build in more time/clearer timelines with stakeholders. But know that even with a ...Read More

A common theme in influencing without authority is making others feel ownership. Doing that through inclusion early in the process and with transparent communication is key. For example, are you going to go through a full re-positioning of your website, external facing collateral, sales assets, etc. Well you better organize a kickoff with product, sales, CS, and potentially even the exec team to introduce the project, get their buy-in and let them provide input early and often. From there you ca ...Read More

Some techniques that I would say work best in my experiences: Build Relationships: It's easy to get sucked into a world of transactional requests especially as a PMM. People want things, and we could fill up our plate with just burn down items. But really getting to know your xfn peers, understanding their true needs and earning their trust so they come to you for your input before decisions are made. Transparent/Open Communication: At Pomerium we default to "build in the open" mode because we'r ...Read More

Every product marketer has probably had to go through this in any form of launch (product, website, pitch deck, etc) -- I know I have more than once. My main advice on this is know when to fight and when to accept (aka disagree and commit). Spending the political capital on pushing back on poor brand/product naming hierarchy for example versus fighting for your desired copy on a landing page is one area where having the reserves of good will/political capital may help you win the bigger fight. I ...Read More

I think the thing I'm most proud of was what we did at Uber Freight in 2020. In 2019 we had grown our owned event from ~25 to ~200 attendees and were planning to double it in 2020 -- planned date Sept 2020. We had a skeleton crew of me, an amazing PMM on my team, and our agency partners (PR and events who are also the best I've ever worked with) -- and no other full time marketing support. By the end of April we made the decision to flip the entire event to virtual which seems like 4 months is e ...Read More