AMA: Unity Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Influencing the C-Suite

Product marketers most often come up short in influencing the C-Suite by showing up at the wrong altitude, with the wrong information and the wrong disposition. The most common mistake I've seen is a PMM showing up with far too much detail and data without a clear "here's the goal, here's what we know/learned, and here's the 'so what' of if all." No one in e-staff is going to read your 15 page messaging brief or detailed launch plan or expansive customer usage report. You have to synthesize all of these things into "Big Animal Pictures" (a great term I learned early in my career) to effectively communicate cross functionality at the highest levels of the company. You need to present something with a "so what" and a point of view that will make as much sense to the CFO and head of Legal as it does to your CMO. If your C-Suite is following the Amazon 5 page brief model, write a water-tight 5 page brief. If you show up with slides, be ready to present 2-3 slides at the most with the additional information on hand in an appendix. These are insanely busy people with massively complex problems on their plates at all times, so you have to be clear, be brief, be good and then be gone. That's hard to dial in and takes a lot of practice, so ask for help and feedback when you get those opportunities. On the flip side, you also don't want to show up with e-staff with a blank canvas of open-ended questions, problems without proposed solutions or the intention to "brainstorm" on your topic. I've both seen and lived that before and it doesn't end well, trust me. To build confidence in your work and, really, yourself, show up with a tight synthesis of the topic at hand including your recommendation for the path forward that demonstrates your understanding of the details without asking everyone in the meeting to delve into the nitty gritty. Finally, don't make it a performative display of how smart or experienced or valuable you are. Execs can usually see through the Project: "Look at Me" nature of those displays and it will do exactly the opposite of what you'd hoped. Make the work awesome and it will accrue back to you.

The best way to influence the c-suite to get more resources is to quantify the impact of your current resources and identify areas of the business that could benefit from similar impact with more investment. For PMM this can be tough, as we're at the hub of most GTM activities but hard measurement can be diffuse and vague if we're not careful. When pursuing more resources, pick one or two major business objectives (like increasing marketing-driven pipeline coverage or driving up product usage/activation for Product Led Growth (PLG) motions or reducing time-to-close for managed sales motions) and map out all the steps needed from idea to measurement to turn those resources into results. For example, if the business needs more marketing-driven pipeline coverage, map out how N PMMs can generate X content at every stage of the funnel to drive Y marketing-driven pipeline. Try to get precise about throughput and productivity for the team, along the lines of "one senior PMM can manage/produce XYZ campaign strategy and content" so you can benchmark and quantify incremental headcount or resources. The less you know about your team's productivity or throughput, the harder it is for your team to justify new investment. Don't boil the ocean or promise the world, just show how X incremental dollars invested in PMM (either headcount or program spend) yields Y returns for critical business goals. Make it easy for them to say "yes."

The best way a junior or newer PMM can get exposure to the C-suite is through their work on a specific project or initiative that rises to their attention. A lot of the work we do as PMMs doesn't (and generally shouldn't) get C-suite attention unless things aren't working. Sales enablement decks, launch BoMs, event booth staffing schedules and copy on product web pages generally doesn't warrant C-suite attention, but some things do. Notably, if you're a PMM working with a customer on an awesome story that shows up in a session or webinar then graduates to being a lighthouse customer story for prospects and investors, you could get C-suite exposure as the subject matter expert (SME). Other work that could get you an audience with senior folks would be pricing or packaging work if you conducted research or had an insight that unlocked something critical as well as any new insights you might have gleaned looking at customer usage data. Think about any insight that comes out of your work that could drive a major state change for the business - from target customers to what our offering should look like. One last way junior and new PMMs can get greater exposure to the C-suire is through delivering presentations, either internally or externally, in-person or virtually. You never know who's checking in on a webinar or breakout session that could be impressed by your knowledge, delivery and likeability. At the end of the day, PMMs are marketers and, as marketers, we're all in the communications business.

Getting the C-suite to buy into a new pitch deck depends on whether or not execs feel like a new pitch deck is needed. If Execs feel like the company needs a new pitch and puts you/PMM in charge of that project, you're in good shape because you'll get the attention and cooperation you need to gather requirements, talk with customers, test with account teams and all the other cross-functional work needed to get to an excellent, brief (think the 10-12 slides that Salesforce trains everyone at the company on) pitch deck or first call deck (FCD). April Dunford's book, Sales Pitch, is an awesome guide through the process - my team used it recently to get to a new FCD for our core customer group. If your company execs don't feel like a new pitch deck is needed, but you/PMM does, then you'll have to take a more bottoms-up, grass roots approach. Identify a few champions on the sales team who want and need a refreshed pitch deck and work super closely with them to meet with prospects and customers to build something that they buy into. And, just like empowering an internal champion in an enterprise sales cycle, partner with those sales reps to spread the word to other reps and account teams until, over time, this new deck becomes the de facto canonical deck. Once sales is bought in and using the new deck (and can hopefully point to success in terms of closed-won opportunities), then you can present the deck as something that's proven and battle-tested, removing the risk of distraction that might be keeping your exec team from kicking off what they might feel is a laborious, risky project. De-risk it for the c-suite through sales usage and bring it to them ready for official sign-off.

The best way to drive alignment on messaging across the exec team is to be super clear about the process and milestones without going into too much detail (which a great rule of thumb for all things working with execs). The process needs to build off a set of hypotheses about messaging (basically a reasonable draft as a starting place), then offer opportunities to provide feedback, and solicit ideas at regular intervals leading to a refined version that you and your team is driving. That's key - while it's critical that you solicit feedback from customers, sales, product, industry analysts/influencers, as well as the exec team, PMM has to hold the pen and do the synthesis. Don't be a pass-through, be an expert. Show your work in terms of capturing the conversations and the ways in which the initial set of hypotheses about messaging were challenged and refined, but be super crisp about what you present in the exec meetings. Messaging briefs are awesome to align the rest of marketing but, in my experience, they've always been confusing in cross-functional messaging reviews. It's much better, once the messaging comes together, to show up in a review with a draft blog post, draft web copy (ideally on staging so it looks real), and draft customer-facing slides that incorporate the new messaging.

In order to narrow down what PMM works on as to not be pulled in a million directions and get stuck being short order cooks for every random initiative, you need to invest heavily in understanding and internalizing the company's priorities and goals, as communicated via OKRs, KPIs or however your company manages these things. Chances are there's a list of things, in priority order, that sit at the CEO level that your work needs to ladder up to. Once you REALLY understand where the company is trying to go (expand product offerings? reach new audiences? shift pricing or packaging? scale back the portfolio for focus? gain more operational efficiency?), then you need to develop PMM's top goals that align work to the most important stuff for the company, put those goals in priority order and make that list a regular topic for alignment and review with your most important stakeholders (CMO, head of sales, head of product, etc). As the PMM leader, I make this a regular topic in my 1:1's with my most important stakeholders to make sure my big rocks are the right big rocks. This allows my team to set expectations across orgs that these 3-4 things are most important to the business and will thus be getting the most resources and attention. Having these big rocks flips the dynamics so you're not constantly fielding and assessing inbound requests from all over the place in a vacuum (so you're not saying "no" to this PM or that events team or that partner team, you're reaffirming your "yes" to your company's most important priorities). Stay focused by mapping all PMM work to the most important goals for the company. If you can't map an inbound request to a big rock, you're empowered to pass. Inquiries and demands are always going to come in and, if you don't have a strong perspective, you leave yourself open to what every other team thinks you should be doing. That's being a short order cook and, trust me, that's no way to live or work as a PMM.

Rather than by product line or aligned to how the product team is organized, I structure product marketing teams by customer groupings (or buying centers). So if your company has distinct customer groups (either by vertical industry, like Financial Services or Gaming, or horizontal role type, like CIO/IT, CISO/Security or CTO/Development), I set up teams that closely align with each group that pull through relevant products and services, irrespective of how the product team is organized. A few times I've created a more horizontal Platform PMM team to drive core work like messaging, positioning, launches and demos for products that span customer groups. Invariably, this type of structure ends up aligning closely with sales, which offers the teams a leg up in terms of enablement, customer stories and a better sense of what's happening in market vs. what's happening inside the company. That's the key - take an "outside-in" or buyer-back view to everything vs. an "inside-out" or product-forward perspective. “Inside out” thinking is deadly, but decidedly easy to fall into. We can convince ourselves of all sorts of things if we think we have the answers, which we don’t. The answers live with customers.