AMA: Salesforce Senior Director of Product Marketing, Sales Cloud, Chandra Patel on Product Marketing Productivity Hacks

I'm a big fan of thinking about stakeholders side by side with programs and projects. Managing expectations is dependent on strong alignment. I use multiple tools and techniques to help navigate the web of stakeholders: * I hold a regular cadence of 1:1 syncs (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly) with my most critical stakeholders. * The frequency depends on the scope and nature of our relationship) to ensure we have a strong partnership and open-door policy for open conversation and overall alignment * I rely on weekly project comms (sometimes daily if urgency is needed) to provide context on updates and use a walking deck to serve as an single source of truth of key deliverables and information (in slide format) * I begin live checkpoints with a TLDR summary and my perspective on whether the initiative is Red, Yellow or Green. That ensures we focus conversations that are tied to the overall business goal

Okay - I will say that I hardly use email at all anymore. My current firm is Slack first so we rely on that almost solely at this point. But that can quickly get overwhelming so here are my Slack best practices: * Use sections to group channels. Examples are top projects, teams, announcements, resources * Star DMs with most critical leadership so that is always on top and being read. Keep this list limited to a small number b/c not everything is super important * Search function in Slack is AMAZING. I rely on it rather heavily * I do a little Slack clean up for 10 minutes on Fridays. This doesn't mean everything is read. It means that I'm ready to go at the beginning of next week. It includes things like making sure channels are sorted, reminders have been set/scheduled for the following week * Use channels and not DMs where possible. Channels don't have to live in perpetuity - there is nothing like a temp- channel for short term initiatives and sprints. Then it can be archived! * That being said - use threads and archive channels. That's being nice to your colleagues!

Market research doesn't have to be formal or expensive. Some hacks for quick insights: * Establish your personal PMM advisory board of sellers in your company. Use them for quick feedback on timely topics * Listen to customer calls - either live or through meeting recordings * Canvas your network on LinkedIn. I once did CFO personal research but posting a "Calling all friends/friends of friends" request. I managed to get 8 senior finance interviews which directionally helped our product development and messaging * Use your website and A/B test market response messages, creative, etc. It's a great way to see what resonates

There are so many project management tools so this hard. I'm currently relying heavily on Slack and Canvas so all the stakeholders are in their respective channels. That being said, it's important to have an overall perspective of all your launches so the cumulative effect of your efforts is greater than each individually. To do that, I rely on an annual "launch calendar" aligned to product roadmap and then t-shirt sizing each launch relative to market impact (for demand gen, sales enablement and customer comms). This helps us plan getting key product in market (along with messages and seller activity) most effectively.

I break down priority tasks on a quarterly, weekly and daily basis. * Quarterly goals set the foundation for top projects and initiatives * Weekly priorities map to those goals but are also broken down by urgency and importance * Daily priorities map to the weekly goals but are broken down by the type of task (ex. messaging work vs. exec reviews) so to ensure calendar blocks for deep thinking, focus work, meetings I manage closely to the calendar and reserve "blocks" to work through specific tasks. By assigning what will be accomplished during that time block, I'm able to map the time available to the task at hand

I invest time to practice demos and presentations with net new content where I haven't yet honed my talk track and narrative. It will require more upfront time but I've found that once I've documented an outlined talk track, future prep goes much more quickly. This includes updating content as a narrative evolves

* Quarterly feedback forums are very useful (more frequent maybe appropriate in an earlier stage organization) * Alternate with sales and customer success so you are meeting with both 2x/year * Keep the forum limited to 3-4 brief topics so the feedback is focused * Share out the questions and materials in advance so there is less time presenting and more time talking * Identify participants and have them serve as a potential "collective" on the topic * Refresh the participants in the collective every year - keeps the conversation fresh and serves as a prestige/extra activity

I "templatize" key content deliverables which effectively builds in guardrails and best practices for new content being created. This can be done across just about any type of content! I look at a strong performing piece of content and then use that as framework. This can include elements such as: * Top performing sections * Ideal product assets to include * Recommended character counts * Standardized CTAs

I track product marketing success on a few key metrics across activation efforts. All are a signal of how/whether messages are being received in the market. Some of these metrics are: * Ownership of top keywords * Progression/time on page for web traffic * Content quality/engagement * Marketing driven pipe * Seller activation touchpoints