Stakeholder Management

On the Consumer side (where I sit) we have Brand Marketers and Product Marketers. Product Marketers need to deeply understand the value prop, positioning and user needs of the product. A big part of the PMM role is Inbound - leveraging research and insights to influence product strategy. When a PMM has Outbound work they need to do, we work very closely with our Brand counterparts to ensure our campaigns are consistent with the overall Brand message, and don’t conflict in terms of timing and channel.

I think there is a ton of value in having these teams work closely but separated into specific pods. As you noted, there are different skillsets here and they can be even more effective when given the space to own their domain expertise. That being said I think when PMM and Brand get too far from each other the end results suffer. I often think of PMM & Brand like a zipper in that they are stronger together and work in tandem. It's essential that brand messaging aligns with the product experience and that launches are appropriately timed and presented in the market. For all of these reasons, I am a fan of having these teams ladder up to the same marketing leader but for they also to be split into separate smaller teams/pods for ownership and skill alignment. 

At my current company, these roles are different and lean on the different skills that you mention! That said, at smaller organizations, or even smaller marketing organizations, you may not have the luxury of having different individuals occupy each role.  If you are in a spot where you aren't able to add dedicated headcount to partner with product or creative separately, I'd suggest having a conversation about priorities with your leadership and using that to guide not only the talent you bring on, but the allocation of time on activities for those individuals. While it may feel like too much to execute on both capabilities simultaneously, it's also exciting and a benefit of being at a small company!

I see those as different skills sets and usually different teams but I don't think there are strict lines in between them. Product Marketers should own the story, the core positioning and messaging, the surrounding context / thought leadership and GTM strategy. Ideally there are counterparts in integrated marketing, campaigns or growth marketing to help make that come to life.  But I think there's also what is ideal on paper and what is practical in real life. More often then not those integrated brand / campaign teams are swamped and not only serving the needs of product marketing. As a result, PMMs will more often then not need to stretch into what it specific assets and content needs to be created - whether that's videos, ebooks, blog posts, etc. And quite frankly, your partners in marketing will thank you if you come to them with ideas and they you can brainstorm the best path forward.  When I am hiring PMMs the core positioning and messaging skills matter the most, but I also want to know that they can stretch to think and how should this be brough to market. 

Yes, great question! As a PMM, I've always worked closely with a separate integrated/brand marketing function. The PMM sits closer to product/eng, is more initimately familiar with the product, owns inbound product marketing (including user insights, strategy, competitive benchmarking, roadmap prioritization etc.). When it comes to outbound marketing, PMM sets GTM strategy and works with a variety of GTM stakeholders, including comms and integrated marketing, to bring a launch or campaign to life. The integrated marketing team usually works with a group of PMMs covering an entire product area, which has the benefit of upleveling how the brand shows up to consumers and ensuring you're telling the right brand narrative, versus a product specific narrative. They also have more specialized skillsets, such as working closely with creative teams (or being creatives themselves), are accountable to brand/campaign goals rather than product goals (e.g. driving Q4 sales vs. driving adoption of X feature) and are great thought partners for how a product will show up to consumers. 

It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at Momentive, but here's how I'd envision this working: Product marketing owns: - Buyer persona research, development, and enablement - Product messaging/positioning - Go-to-market strategy (e.g. by persona, industry) - Product/feature launches - Bottom-of-the-funnel product content/collateral - Competitive intelligence - Analyst relations Customer marketing owns: - Customer advocacy: customer stories, customer participation in thought leadership, review site management, communities, advisory boards - Customer marketing: scaled customer onboarding & engagement programs, cross-sell and up-sell customer campaigns - could include email nurtures, customer webinars, etc. Brand marketing owns: - Brand messaging and narrative, as well as brand guidelines - The visual manifestation of the brand (logo, colors, fonts, imagery/animation style, iconography, etc.) - Content strategy, and Top-of-the-funnel thought leadership content - Creative production for full-funnel campaigns (ads,  - Brand health measurement & tracking Once the company scales to where there is a) a full portfolio of products and/or brands and b) there is significant investment in full-funnel campaigns across those products/brands, then integrated marketing becomes a necessary function. Integrated marketing owns: - Full-funnel marketing strategy & execution management for large-scale campaigns (these could be brand campaigns or Tier 1 launches).

I have seen this done differently in different organizations. There is no right or wrong way. However, I firmly believe that the Product Marketer should own the narrative for their product.  * If it is a customer story - what value prop are we trying to highlight?  * If it is an ad campaign, what audience are we going after and what is the right messaging and CTA? * If it is an email campaign to existing customers, what outcome are we trying to drive, and what messaging are we using? PMM, as the person closest to product and audience knowledge, needs to own these pieces. If that is in place, then whether PMM is directly working on the campaign or simply enabling an integrated marketing team is just a matter of logistics.

At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro” that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample demo from a sales rep. This is just one example, but we typically carry this across departments to ensure messaging stays consistent.

Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products, features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals including product management and other marketers like communications/brand, demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of individual reps and saleas managers) and finally with sales/revenue leadership.   We then roll-out at one of our weekly or bi-weekly all sales meetings and/or share at the team lead meetings for more in depth Q&A and objection handling. Typically, the messaging guide comes with supporting customer facing slides, talk tracks, etc. We re-inforce through an on-line learning tool to make sure folks internalize the messaging.

I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our story. Other marketing teams extend that messaging into demand gen campaigns, and our Sales teams pick up our pitch decks and marketing collateral to present to prospects. Ensuring commercial team alignment is tricky because it's fundamentally about dissemination (Confluence, newsletters, G-Drive, etc), training (both live and on-demand), and repetition (going on sales calls and using it over and over again). Messaging guides are a critical product marketing deliverable - they are foundational -- but a series of hands-on training and reinforcement on a per-deal-level are required to get a larger organization on-board.

In my view, the whole point of messaging guides is that they are shared as widely and as openly in your organization as possible. We actually keep a "launch tracker" document (google sheets file) that has the latest on every launch we're planning. This document is publicly available and very widely distributed. We link to the positioning guide for the new product or set of features there. In addition, we've built really strong relationships with counterparts in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, so we are regularly communicating across a wide number of forums (team trainings, slack channels, in person meetings with leadership, etc) and share or point to key documents like messaging guides in these meetings. Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no 'silver bullet' to communicating to large audiences - having lots of channels and repetition is really key.  I think the other thing to keep in mind is having your messaging guide be a format that is really easily digestible. We use a format that actually summarizes the goal of the campaign or launch really nicely upfront, then gets into the messaging, and towards the bottom goes into more of the nitty gritty research on the market, trends, competition, etc. We've gotten good feedback that the format is pretty easy to consume, and I think that goes a long way in getting the message out there. 

One thing I try not to do is share content or messaging without walking the person I want to get feedback from through the context and purpose live on a call/zoom. Sending something over for feedback without the right context can be disastrous...especially if they share with others and expand any confusion/dissent to others.  I will typically walk them through a google slide or doc with what we're trying to move towards and then offer them the opportunity to provide feedback live or in the doc once they've had some time to think about it.  Always try to prove why the messaging you're recommending is the right approach with proof points...these can be based on surveys, customer/analyst feedback, A/B or some testing framework, market movement, etc.  If your internal teams see the context for why you're moving in a specific direction and the proof points that support what you're trying to do then it will go a long way in getting their support/alignment. 

What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opinions works well. If you are adding value to something that already exists, have 1:few meetings to get specific feedback on voice, tone, choice of words, etc. Then, share it more broadly at a team meeting. Then share it with all leaders in Rev org. Then share it with C-level, backing up how much consensus you’ve already built and the alignment that’s been established.

We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding material. We have a system to ensure everyone consumes the content.

There are many stakeholders when it comes to competitive intelligence and aligning messaging and product strategy with competitive differentiation. I have found an effective model where PMM is the the driver, although any of the contributors could also drive. Regardless, it is a joint effort across at least PMM, PM, Presales and Sales Enablement (some larger enterprises like IBM have dedicated, centralized competitive program offices). As the driver, PMM can focus on arming the sales team with up-to-date tools (e.g. battle cards) to win, ensuring marketing can land us in competitive evaluations, and ensuring the roadmap continues to reinforce our competitive differention.

Ideally, your brand positioning pillars are unique enough individually or in combination with each other that competitive positioning is baked in. Effectively enabling sales is about educating them on the landscape and competitive buckets (read answer above re: putting all your competitors into distinct categories you can more generically position against). Then when it comes to your Tier 1 competitors, it's all about training the sales team and making battlecard content super easy to find. Bring the energy, show them a side-by-side demo if you can to give them confidence, and personalize your competitive differentiation for each sales role (e.g. SDRs need a one-liner, Senior AEs may need you to explain product differentiators). That, combined with compelling assets, is a winning strategy. You can measure effectiveness of competitive positioning at different stages of the funnel. For example, if you have competitive landing pages you could A/B test messaging changes to see if there's a lift in conversion. Further down-funnel (this takes more time), you can do before-and-after analysis of competitive win/loss rates.

I believe competitive research should always be part of the process when you develop your core messaging, but it’s important to not get too hung up on your competitors, you can easily lose sight of what your own customers care about. (Also, who is to say that their messaging is better than others?) I usually build a competitive positioning matrix where I will have at least 2 rows for each competitor: “We help you”, and “so you can” (But use what version works best for you)--- and then go through competitor websites/content/materials to gather what statements they use to answer each of those. This helps to look at your competitors’ positioning in a more uniform way. Then add a column for your company and your own statements - and in the simplest, easiest way this should give you an idea of how you differentiate at a high level. Enabling sales on competitive intel is a whole topic on its own, but here are a few tips on how to do it effectively: * Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point people to. * Share the links, and share it again, and again over time. * Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into something more specific). This can be in the form of battle cards or simple FAQs that you can publish internally * There are certain tools that allow you to publish information like this within platforms like SFDC or slack - where people already look for information * Create short videos and see if people find it easier to listen than read * It’s not always enough to just create these materials. It often helps to do regular competitive readouts with the sales team so you can have a more interactive conversation and help answer specific questions. And here are few tips on how to test if it's resonating with your buyers * Run test campaigns against your control messaging across different marketing channels to see how it performs (Paid, Social, Email, website A/B tests, Sales pitches, etc.) * Talk to your sales team, run pilots, listen to gong calls, sit in on sales calls, etc. * Test in-product messaging * Run quantitative studies, interviews, focus groups, etc * Test it with analysts.

Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research, analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and really hone in on determining 1) What pain points are you solving for your buyers and 2) What makes you the "only" one? (see onlyness test here ) A couple ways to know if your messaging and value proposition is landing with your buyers 1. Market research messaging testing  2. A/B Test is through marketing channels (paid, email, website)  3. A/B Test it with SDRS in their outreach sequences 4. Present it to your customer advisory board (or similar) to see if it resonates 5. Test it with Analysts 

Competitive differentiation is what forms your positioning and what you build your messaging around. With how crowded every market category is now its essential to nail your differentiation and then communicate it through your messaging and the rest of the go-to-market. Enabling sales effectively requires making the competitive information actionable and easily digestible. Whether you’re creating battlecards, sharing competitive updates in Slack, or leading a competitive play sales training distill it down to the key points and bring it to life with examples with what worked in deals. Finally to test if your messaging is resonating you can: * Test copy across competitive campaigns and landing pages * Look at competitive win rates before and after competitive enablement * Sit in on sales call or listen to call recordings to see how competitive messaging points are resonating * Ask industry analysts for feedback

The answer here is in the question. My approach to differentiation starts with understanding why the product or service you're responsible is uniquely suited to a specific customer. And then focus on what makes you great, not what makes others less good. Too many companies (including a few I've worked with) focus too much on the question of "how do we compete against X competitor?" This creates a backwards-looking mentality and you're always in reactive mode. I will say it's my favorite thing to compete against someone who's more concerned about me than I am about them... they can chase my message all day, and all I have to do is worry about making customers wildly successful. Way more fun. How do you know if it's working? If sales are up, win rates are strong, average deal size is up, and the competition is starting to talk about you more? It's working. 

Competitive positioning is a key component of defining core messaging. If we sit down and come up with copy on how to best describe our offerings, a key step is to compare that against how competitors describe themselves. You’ll likely be hit with an unpleasant surprise that about half your copy has already been used directly or indirectly by competitors. Some words might be well-adapted lexicons that prospects associate competitors with. Developing your positioning and messaging without this key insight would lead to bad outcomes. I always try to find words we can “own” in the prospect’s mind when associating the value to our products and brand. These words should be unique from the competitor’s identity and still be aligned with the prospect’s language. We try to stay away from feature differentiators and focus on how we help customers solve the problem in a better way. The most effective forms of training for sales are role play sessions combined with learning materials as everyone learns and retains information differently. Salespeople in different segments (SMB, MM, Enterprise) may need different forms of enablement to drive meaningful results. Testing your messaging with potential target buyers from interviews or tools like Wynter is the best way to confirm if your positioning is on-target.

Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this topic I'd encourage you to read. But to your question, most will try to differentiate off features. In most cases this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is really difficult to truly differentiate in this case. There are some tactical things you can pursue to drive differentiation: * Social Proof * Lean-in to aspects of your solution that customers rave about! I've seen this be everythign from the sales team/process, to customer support team, implementation, education, and more. I call all those out just to say it's important to think outside our product as well. * Competitive content - while it's tactical, if you have a comparison page it enables you to tell a story about how your different -- and not just about features. * Brand - This is the ultimate differentiation, but it's not an overnight fix. Consider what's unique about the attributes of your company, and lean-in to building your brand around that which will give prospects a clear view of your company.  Beyond the above, it's really about storytelling and messaging. Instead of just thinking about how your product is different from compeition, think about the changes your prospects are experecing in their day-to-day and tell a compelling story around that -- and then educate them on how to win, with your product.

Our competitive differentiation is central to our overall company/product positioning. They're almost the same thing. We have a high-level view of our position in the market vs other categories of tools, and a deeper view of the specific capabilities that make us unique.  Enabling sales is a constant function of updating self-serve resources, delivering training, and sharing major intel. good luck!

With messaging, the one thing that I always push my team to think about is what’s unique to Shopify that no one else can own. Can someone slap their brand on top and say the same things? If so, the messaging and positioning is not good enough. We want to ensure that we are sharing what is most valuable to our business and that no one else can claim.

I have a few lenses that I look through for competitive differentiation: 1. The Positioning Canvas -- I mentioned this in an earlier question, but it's worth repeating the effectiveness of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas (must reading for any Product Marketer). With this methodology, you and your team will go through an exercise of defining 'competitive alternative' -- the task here is to identify what customers would use if you did not exist AND to look inwards at what unique attributes you have that your competitors do not. Highly recommend using this as part of your competitive differentiation exercise. 2. Company Strategy -- Many people think competitive differentiation is limited to product. It's not. I like to look at competitive differentiation through a combination of (1) product strategy, (2) GTM strategy, and (3) operational strategy. Often, you can find -- or create -- differentiation in one or multiple of these areas. One way I've put it all together is to develop a 'Buyer Consideration Attribute' map and workshop strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis competition on the most important attributes. <-- Informed by Blue Ocean Strategy (another must read) Once you have a good thesis on competitive differentiation, it's time to document it and enable as many relevant teams as possible. Not just sales. Product management and engineering needs these insights to inform their roadmap. Marketing needs these insights both for messaging strategy and in determining other GTM elements like channel, audiences, and more. And then, yes, Sales and customer success needs easy-to-understand and easy-to-take action enablement so they have 20/20 vision of who they will be up against in deals and so they know how to navigate conversations....and win deals.

Not necessarily. The goal is to ensure that for whatever initiative (launch, pricing, campaign etc) youre leading, the north star is clear, expectations from each member (or group) are clear, and the communication is very clear. The only group that usually 'needs' their own reskinned decks and docs are senior leadership. They usally get packaged updates that are much more streamlined with a focus on updates, risks and asks. If you have other stakeholders that are asking for their own format, Id encourage you sit down with them ask why. Its a huge burden on you to make multiple documents, so the best approach is to figure out a middle ground.   A few tips: * Before starting the project, get everyone's buy in on their role in the project. Use a RACI if that's the culture, or at least a simple document saying if someone is in the 'working team', 'approval team', informed/consulted team etc. This will ensure expectation management up front. If someone comes up later saying 'why wasnt I involved' you can show them the paper trail to explain no malintent * Drive home this divison of responsibility in your kickoff call (as in HAVE a kickoff call for sure) * Ensure that everyone involved is on the recurring meeting invite, Slack channel, Teams group, whatever you use for comms and accountability * If you have a top down culture, explicitly build in meeting cadences for review, approval, stakeholder feedback and call it what it is. Dont assume that people will know things, or pay attention 'offline' * Over communicate -- pre-meeting, agendas, status boards, recapss. Call out what's stakeholder relevant, whats not No easy way to do this, but its a lot of cat herding that if done well can drive massive organizational alignment.

Part of our jobs as PMMs is to drive alignment across teams of diverse stakeholders, all of which speak different languages, care about different things, and want to be approached in a specific way. When it comes to key strategic projects, I believe that tailoring your approach to meet the needs of your stakeholders is critical to achieve maximum success and collaboration! This could be as simple as reframing certain elements of a master deck/doc you’ve created for a key strategic project. Depending on who you’re communicating with, identify how you can adjust your project updates to ensure those particular stakeholders find your work important and valuable. For example, marketing may care more about how you helped them generate more high quality leads vs product may care more about product/feature adoption. No matter who it is you're communicating with, identify their key measures of success and think about how you can align your outcomes to their objectives.

Building a launch process from scratch is a big lift, but early work like identifying all stakeholders will set you up for success once things get rolling. I frame product launches as "commercialization" to anchor my thinking. To expand beyond a single word, this means we're making a new product or component available for people to buy. To identify the stakeholders required to accomplish that goal, rely on your customer's process as they go from problem awareness to activation and support. This approach gets bonus from me for creating a customer-centric mindset early in the launch process. Some high-level questions to start thinking about this: * How will customers and prospects become aware of the new offering? * How will customers and prospects express interest in the new offering? * How will customers buy the new offering? * How do customers get set up and trained on the new offering? * How will customers get help with the new offering once they are using it? Pro Tip: When you land on your initial stakeholder group, ask the team "Who else needs to know". This simple question helped me resolve a few gaps in the past that would have caused major issues downstream. Regarding changing stakeholders, the level of effort from different teams and functions will naturally shift over the course of a launch. Letting people check-in and check-out has led to dropped balls and miscommunications more times than I can count. Stakeholders should have enough invested in the entire commercialization effort that they want to be aware of the work going on. You can have information radiators for update communications to leaders, but silent observers don't add much value to launch project meetings.

The best way to identify the stakeholders is to identify the success metric for the launch, and then figure out who is directly responsible for hitting that metric. Typically your product manager is a stakeholder, but often you'll have a customer success/sales organization involved and also engineering. Stakeholders are also up and down the leadership chain so be sure to include the leaders of those who are directly responsible. Stakeholder changes are inevitable so I tend to learn on documentation to help smooth over the transitions when they happen. Do you have your messaging and positioning documents ready? Your marketing strategy? If so, anyone new coming into the launch will immediately be able to understand your plan and you won't need to spend lots of time ramping them up.

Product Launch is where all the magic happens. So many stakeholders have both vested interests and points of view of how the launch should be executed, but only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the product, go-to-market team, and the external market, so is best positioned to champion the process.  We've broken our launch into four phases where the first and last stages have the most stakeholders present, and the middle two have the fewest. What we've had success with understand that some roles just need to be informed when the launch kicks off. This can be a wide range of stakeholders who just need to be informed on just the facts - what are we launching, when are we launching it, what are the goals of the launch and what behaviors do we need to change to achieve our goals. The Phase 1 work here is about strategizing - where you need the business goals and objectives understood to really land your launch. Here is a great time to confirm who needs/wants to be a part of the execution "crew" through the next 2 phases.  With the kickoff in the rearview mirror, we narrow the audience to the people who have to go do the majority of the work to drive the launch, and we rely on our partners in Product Management, Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Customer Success - teams that need to make sure the go-to-market team is ready to market, sell and support the change. A lot of the Phase 2 work here is about planning what to do and when to do it, and creating the content and context to equip, train and coach your teams.  Finally, there's the launch, when you can "push the button" on getting all the things you created to market. There it's effective to bring the same stakeholders you informed in Phase 1 back to the table to share learnings and close the loop.  We continue to iterate our launch motion, but it's becoming a strength for us as we've earned the trust of partner teams over the last 18 months. 

Product launches take a village to execute successfully! Start by defining your launch goals and plan. This will make it easier to identify your stakeholders, which can include individuals or groups that will be involved in the launch execution and/or impacted by the outcome of the launch. At Zendesk, we use a tiering system to determine the level of effort required to support a product launch and the stakeholders that will need to be involved. For example: * A tier 1 launch is typically reserved for brand new product offerings that will have a major impact on our customers or the business. A tier 1 launch would span many different stakeholders across product (e.g. product managers, engineering, pricing, etc), core marketing (campaigns, events, PR, SEO, brand, etc.) and GTM (enablement, pre/post solutions consultants, partners, etc.). * A tier 3 launch may be a smaller update to an existing product with minimal impact. As opposed to a tier 1 launch, a tier 3 launch would require less stakeholder involvement. We may pull in the web team for website updates, docs team for release note updates, email marketing, etc. As with most product launches, things are constantly changing! Involve your stakeholders early and often, and make sure to get their buy-in on the launch goals and the role they will play. Proactively and constantly communicating with your stakeholders makes it much easier to pivot if necessary as things change or challenges arise.

Great question! This is a common scenario for growing organizations. As a smaller PMM team, you'll have to work to set project priorities. This is not an easy tasks, but what helps is being transparent and communicative with your teams across Product, Sales, Marketing and others.  For growing organizations, work with your Sales Department to understand their biggest pain points and align on where you as a PMM can best support. Prioritize the feedback and the work you're able to take on vs what you might have to revist or commit to later. This conversation seems obvious, but keep having it. Set up recurring touchpoints (even if for 15min) to hold each party accountable to what was committed.  Finally - Be consistent and meet your deadlines. This is important when building a fostering trust across the organization. Trust is fundamental to establishing strong relationships. When working with your stakeholders be clear about expectations, deadlines, roadblocks, and deliverables.

Anchor on the highest priority for the company, versus any one team. One of the hardest but also most liberating things about product marketing is that we are an inherently flexible function. Our skillsets are diverse, so we can quickly get into formation behind whatever is most important and strategic to the company at any given point in time. This is our greatest strength (and, if handled poorly, our greatest weakness), so don't let it go to waste! If the most important initiative at the company is revenue, make yourself indispensable to sales by holding your team to sales targets. If it is building a revolutionary product, prioritize product. Whatever you do, do not try to be everything to everyone. That just results in a lot of "RAM" (random acts of marketing) that don't make clear to anyone what you're actually good for.

You have to align on what priorities you are working on and when. I even suggest having a sort of PMM roadmap. If you can get that agreed to at the leadership level then it will be a lot easier to have conversations with your stakeholders across teams. There are always going to be firedrills you have to jump on, but by driving alignment and visibility at the leadership level you can make sure those are the exception not the rule.

While it might be easy to find industry standards on the number of PMMs per stakeholder team, I find the better marker to be the number of products in the portfolio, segments served, geographies, or even industries. Small teams can pack a mighty punch if swim lanes are clear and roles and responsibilities are understood. For example, a PMM team of 3 with respective focuses on core product marketing (use cases, value props, enablement, release/launch, pricing, etc.) audience/portfolio marketing (segment, geo, new biz/customer, etc.), and competitive (differentiation, dispositioning, strategy) can serve a growing set of stakeholders effectively, and as the team proves value, will scale with the rest of the organization. 

PMM sits at the intersection of these various stakeholder teams and keeps them aligned. No matter how big or small your company is, you likely have similar stakeholders that you need to manage and communicate with. To be effective, product marketing needs to have a voice across the company. I’ve always found it valuable to forge trusting relationships with someone in sales leadership, product leadership, etc. Make sure you’re communicating with them on a regular basis. With product, catch up regularly on upcoming releases, voice of customer, strategic launches, etc. With sales, review performance, key customer wins, strategic campaigns, etc. Having a regular cadence with these teams while bringing them valuable insights and a unique POV will ensure PMM has a seat at the table.

This is going to vary widely by organization, and you'll find Jr. PMMs doing the same work in one organization that a director or even VP would in another.  That said, as a general rule, the more junior PMMs typically take on more tactical work. This can take many forms, but content creation, ghostwriting, babysitting the demand gen team and refreshing existing collateral are all at the top of the list.   At the other end of the spectrum, more senior folks are likely to be out of the office - evangelizing the company, meeting customers, influencing analysts and training senior sales people. They will spend more time interfacing with the executive team, both on portfolio messaging and corporate messaging and brand.    Your head of PMM will also spend a lot of time hiring, mentoring and training the PMM team. I've spent as much as 75-80% of my time doing that at various points in my career. 

This very much depends on the company and individual team lead vision so I will just chime in with what it is like at Square.   In general, PMMs at Square cover a wide range of responsibilities regardless of level. These responsibilities include: 1. Develop product or feature launch/ GTM strategy and plans, including positioning and messaging 2. Quarterback marketing and sales partners (e.g., paid marketing, SEO, content marketing, lead generation) to execute GTM and growth plans 3. Lead customer research and collaborate with PMs on product strategy and roadmap 4. Lead pricing and packaging recommendations Square is a multi-product company, so our junior PMMs tend to focus on one product to learn how to excel at the role. Senior PMMs start to cover more products. Additionally, junior PMMs are empowered on tactical executions, but important, strategic decisions like tent pole product launch strategies and pricing decisions are led by senior PMMs. As a team lead, I focus more of my time building and coaching my team, elevating the reputation of the function within our company, and weighing in heavily on product and business unit strategies.

Another avenue that some companies take, is the TYPE of PMM you are. So you can be a product marketer, a solution marketing, a segment marketer, a vertical marketer - these all still fall under the role of Product Marketing, but rather than focusing specifically on tacitical to strategy, they're also segmented more granularly on their individual focus. So a vertical PMM, may focus on everything across the portfolio, that relates to the banking industry, and tailors messaging, GTM motions, and enablement for that specific vertical. 

This can certainly vary depending on the company! Here are some examples of areas that would be owned by different product marketing levels based on my experience: Messaging & Positioning * PMM: Crafts messaging and positioning at capability/feature level with some coaching * Sr. PMM: Drives messaging and positioning at the product/feature level and coaches others on product/feature level positioning * Director: Drives messaging and positioning at the category level and ensures alignment across teams Sales enablement * PMM: Creates materials and conducts enablement sessions on sales fundamentals (e.g. first call deck, demos) * Sr. PMM: Orchestrates enablement initiatives and programs at the product level or across multiple features. Identifies opportunities to increase pipeline by collaborating directly with reps and sales leadership. * Director: A mix of strategic/tactical partner to sales leadership for their functional area. Ensures execution of sales-facing content and training. GTM strategy & execution * PMM: Plays a specific role in building GTM strategy and execution for area of focus (e.g. buyer, competitors) * Sr. PMM: Drives GTM strategy work across multiple products, features, or initiatives (e.g. pricing, narrative). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and processes. * Director: Ensures the success of the development of GTM strategy and responsible for their teams’ execution of GTM programs. Considers the portfolio strategy (e.g. where a particular launch strategy fits in amongst other launches). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and processes.

I love this question. I’ll step away from PMM for a minute and say - regardless of what function you’re in at a company, you should be championing yourself and your team constantly. People who ‘get ahead’ in business not only create value, they make sure others know that they create value. What makes PMM hard is that you don’t own a number -- there’s no clear attribution. You can’t say “at the end of Q2 we grew revenue by X% YoY” in the way a sales or DG team can. So you need to constantly be talking about what you are delivering and how you are partnering with teams who do own numbers. What are the channels for communication in your business? At Gainsight, Slack is a major channel. I post often to our Sales channel about projects we’re working on, things we’ve delivered, and I give kudos to others. I do so in a very clear and consistent way. Another idea is asking for your team to be a part of regular weekly business reviews with the Exec team (or asking to be featured one week) if they exist. There’s always some kind of exec alignment session that happens every week or month - find it at figure out who owns it and how to get on it. Also - this is part of your manager’s job (to both trumpet your work and figure out the right forums to do so) so ask them directly how you can get more visibility for you or your team’s work.

Marketing your accomplishments is critical! It is epecially important to align leadership expectations with reality since product marketing roles and responsiblities can vary greatly from business to business or even across products/BUs.  My team and I address this in a few ways. First, we share quarterly email updates with a broad distribution list. These emails include our topline priorities, related initiatives, shoutouts to our key stakeholders (since most of what we do is collaborative), learnings and pivots, as well as a link to an archive doc with all of our previous updates for easy reference. I also ensure my direct leadership is aware of our goals and accomplishments so they can know what we're focused on and can speak up when given the opportunity in higher level meetings. Finally, not leadership specific, but we are active on team slack channels sharing key activities across sales, marketing, and product teams in real time.

Tying your work to tangible outcomes, specifically those related to product growth and revenue, and socializing it has worked well for me. Here's my approach: Have a revenue-first mindset. Businesses exist to make money. One of the first questions I ask myself about any launch is "how can we leverage this to drive revenue?" Before getting strategic or tactical, I explore the different angles we could position or message the launch to drive revenue. Releases small, medium, and large have the potential for revenue impact.  Work backwards. When setting launch goals, I work backwards from the company goals, and map the connection so I know where tactical efforts and outcomes ladder up. This trail is helpful when communicating the value of your work, especially at the executive level.  Map your tactics to the growth framework of choice (flywheel, funnel...). This has worked really for me when presenting GTM plans and running reviews. Organizing your tactics into a strategic framework helps folks see all of the areas Product Marketing touches, understand what areas your work is contributing to and how it all works together.  Socialize wins and learnings. Beating your own drum brings visibility to your work while also increasing morale (wins) and knowledge (learnings) across the company.  Celebrate others. Spread the love and it will come back around to you. Word of mouth is a great internal marketing tool. I've found that when you celebrate and champion the work of others, they are more inclined to do it for you — which increases your visbility throughout the organization. 

Great question. At Zendesk, we do a lot of monthly/quarterly syncs with product leadership, sales leadership, marketing leadership, etc to discuss top programs and communicate achievements. Quarterly business reviews are another great way to share top wins and learnings. We also leverage supplemental channels like Slack, company/team all hands and our GTM newsletter. This can vary by company. To determine what works best for you and your team, you’ll need to figure out a way to speak the same language of the people that you’re trying to communicate with. Take the time to understand the priorities of your key stakeholders and executives so you can align your outcomes to their measures of success. Identify their communication preferences so you can establish a communication approach that best meets their needs. When you’ve taken these steps, it’s much easier to build visibility and communicate achievements in a way that resonates with your audience.

Influence comes from repeatedly bringing fresh insights and a distinct point of view to the table. To influence product strategy and the roadmap you need to take a broader view of your market and the customers than your friends on the product management team. Invest in a deep understanding of your customers, your competitors, and the market at large. Map out mid- to long-term threats and opportunities. Validate those threats and opportunities with customers, industry experts, and your internal experts across product, user experience, customer experience, sales, sales engineering, and client services. Summarize the insights, provide the market context, and lay out strategic options together with your product partners. Get buy-in from the executive team. Partner with the product team to deliver solutions that solve real customer problems. Rinse and repeat :-)

* Demonstrate the basics: messaging, positioning, ability to make an impactful/relevant/meaningful presentation that conveys the value prop + differentiators of your product or portfolio. Cant be influential if your house is on fire.  * Learn the business REALLY well. How is money made, who do we sell to, how is the sales team structured, what are their main sales motions, is it self-serve/direct/partner driven? Learn it ALL. Then figure out where are opporutnities to add unique value: better targeting, better messaging, more customer interaction, roadmap changes. Dont try to change things you don't understand * Do what you say, fast. Dont make excuses, just get it done. Then your credibility will go up.   * Have a POV. Why are things the way they are? Test out your POV with sales, product, CSM, other stakeholders and refine it. But have a POV, and when the time is right, you will get your shot to make that POV into reality

Product marketers have to work and communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders to push ideas and initiatives forward. Influence is critical for PMMs to be effective, and that comes with building trust. Invest time in understanding your stakeholders’ needs and pain points to help you determine how you can best work with them. By speaking the same language as your stakeholders and proactively providing the insights and information they need, the more they will lean on you and trust you to get the job done. Immerse yourself in your product, the market and your customers. Use those insights to identify opportunities where you can add value: influencing product roadmap, helping your sales team close more deals, ensuring your messaging is compelling, etc. Bringing valuable insights and a unique point of view to your stakeholders will improve your credibility and make you a more influential PMM.

One of the most important outcomes of stakeholder management is getting buy-in, and that comes easiest when there's trust. Getting buy-in is absolutely critical to moving projects forward, and the first 90 days is a great time to lay strong foundations.  Here are the three actions I take very intentionally to build trust with my peers and cross-functional partners: 1. Ask questions and listen intently. The same way I approach different audiences with different positioning or messaging is the same way I approach building trust internally. It starts with showing a genuine interest in other people — putting them at the center of the interaction — and listening intently. This allows me to understand the lens through which they see the world, the company, and our product. I can meet them where they are. Example: It's my first 90 days and I am making my rounds in getting to know the Sales team. I ask questions about our audience and how what they're hearing on their calls aligns to the slide decks and collateral. Are they using that collateral? Do they feel like it works? Why or why not? I demonstrate a genuine interest in how they show up to work and their day-to-day, so I can best put myself in their shoes. I may learn from my conversations that they don't feel like they have input on the collateral created for them, it's not really useful, and they just build things on their own as a result. This gives me insight into them feeling unheard and a desire for closer collaboration on the things that directly impact how they do their job. Let's say we start working on a new sales deck. I create a small consulting group of high-performing and influential sales folks to collaborate with (true story). Together, we come up with the idea for the deck to live within the new product we launched, passively demoing that new product while speaking to the broader platform. This approach satisfies the closer collaboration the team is seeking, produces a fantastic idea that supports our new narrative, and results in greater buy-in across the broader Sales team. 2. Create clear documentation. Don't expect people to read your mind. When I was at a previous employer, one of the things we would say is "clarity is kindess." I really believe that when you have the best interest of a stakeholder in mind, clarity is best. It sets expectations and empowers people with the knowlege and understanding to make decisions. Example: I was running a big launch at a previous employer. There were lots of moving parts, and lots of stakeholders — including executives. It was really important that the folks executing on deliverables understood why they were creating what, and that the executives understood why we were making certain decisions around timelines and tradeoffs. This required very clear communication across documentation, Slack channels, etc. My approach was to create a comprehensive GTM plan that included the strategy and tactics (single source of truth) and separate project plans to manage the plethora of deliverables. The GTM plan included the thinking and why behind what we were doing, our goals, and how we would collectively achieve them. The projects plans included that thinking at the project level. For executives, I ran GTM reviews. There I gave them insight into the strategy and where our efforts fell within the GTM funnel, so they could see the complementary relationships between each tactic. I also communicated go/no-go criteria for moving forward from a product readiness perspective, including what we were and were not optimizing for, and why we were or were not making certain tradeoffs. That clarity (and the confidence it exudes) helped me get their buy-in and move the launch forward as I saw best for the customer (even when it meant pushing back on their sense of urgency to fix bugs and conduct more beta testing). 3. Overcommunicate. This is especially essential in a virtual environment. It's definitely something I don't think I've mastered and continue to work on. Overcommunicating means communiting clearly, early, and often — which also requires a level of vulnerability. It means erring on the side of too much information. It's asking for help as soon as you need it, or sharing an idea when it's not quite buttoned up.  Example: Within my first 90 days in my current role I laid out my plans through the end of the year. Part of that plan was cleaning house — creating structure, getting organized, and identifying missing parts. I knew it was important in positoning us to optimize for speed and execution. The challenge was, at a company level, people want to see marketing doing stuff — producing content, running experiments, etc. And, at the team level, people are wondering what (if anything) is going to change about their roles and responsibilities. At both the leadership and team levels, I communicated my thinking, goals, and foresight as I was refining my plan — answering questions and implementing helpful feedback along the way. Overcommunicating brought them into the journey and being part of the story I was building with the plan also gave them greater understanding. Ultimately, resulting in buy-in.

Great question! With a bit of extra effort, there are many things that can be done to forge relationships that build trust in a virtual environment. To do this successfully, invest time in getting to know your stakeholders and identify opportunities where you can add value and share your knowledge. Whether it’s a 1:1 or a team happy hour, dedicate time every week to get to know your team members on a personal level and build rapport. I have found that establishing common ground and better understanding the people I frequently interact with creates a much easier and more productive working environment. Our team at Zendesk uses the Donut app for Slack to connect teammates on a regular basis. I would highly recommend this if your team is using Slack. If you see a report or customer insight that is relevant to your product area - share it with your product manager. If you have a special skill (e.g. making great product demo videos), host a lunch and learn session with your product marketing team. Sharing your insights and expertise can make others more likely to consult you and demonstrate that you are credible.