Do you approach stakeholder management differently based on the team you're talking to? (Product, Marketing, Sales, Growth, Customer Success). And if so, how?

Yes, I always do.  

Treat each stakeholder like one of your “personas”. Understand their role, what their pain points are, what their goals are, what words they use and what’s important to them. Do a 1:1 with them, get to know them, their OKRs, interview them and find out how you can help them and work with them. Once you have a clear idea on how to deliver value to them, incorporate that into how you work with them, message them and position your work to them. You already do this as a PMM for customers and prospects, so applying this same tactic to internal stakeholders works just as well.

I even apply my PMM ability to speak to and treat personas differently in my personal life, with my kids, family and friends -- it really brings alignment across the board! I find our PMM skills in this area are a best practice for approaching life :)

Find your champion in each team and build a relationship with them. They can be your go-to person when you need advice on how to work with their team, you can bounce your ideas on them first to get early feedback and they can help socialize any of your ideas or strategies within their team. I find during this process, I end up refining my thinking, strategies and ideas too, so it’s win-win.

Test your ideas on stakeholders in each group and socialize early. The longer someone is exposed to an idea, certain words and strategies -- the more time they’ve had to process it and start weaving it into their thoughts and initiatives. Eventually, they will start taking ownership of those ideas too. You have to be patient, the bigger the idea, the longer it will take to be adopted. When I was at Oracle, a few of us had a novel idea and strategy and I socialized it across stakeholders in groups across the years...I never gave up. It was finally brought to market 3 years later. If you truly know your idea is a good one and have done your research as a SME (subject matter expert), then be patient and consistent and you will get there. On the other spectrum, there are of course ideas that can be socialized and have buy-in within a few days/weeks as well.

Use storytelling and examples for context and back everything up with data -- use customer data, market data, OKRs, MBOs, KPIs, industry benchmarks, customers stories, quotes, etc… When you can have data driven stories with stakeholders, tailored to them, you are validating your thoughts while using storytelling to give context and relevance, while making your ideas stick. People remember stories that are put in context, they don’t remember a list of facts.