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

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 ...Read More

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 al ...Read More

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 - ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 an ...Read More

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 an ...Read More