Do you have any success/failure story to share around how you managed to influence a difficult stakeholder? Lessons learned?

Friction with stakeholders definitely comes with our jobs. While it can be stressful, frustrating and evening maddening, ultimately I think it also makes us better PMMs. That's my biggest suggestion for how to approach these situations. Ask yourself what can you learn from their pushback?

A few years ago I had a sales leader tell me on sales leadership meeting that our play for a specific competitor was completely broken and he was instructing his team not run it anymore. Obviously having this brought up in front of a group sales leaders is about as unideal of a situation as I can imagine, but here's what I did. 

1. Maintained my composure - as hard as that was, but it allowed me to turn the tables a bit.
2. Starting asking him a bunch of questions about how he came to this conclusion and what his team was seeing.
3. I shared what our win rates looked like with this competitor(which at the time showed no indication of our play failing). 
4. I asked to speak to his team directly to see what I could glean from their experiences and what modifications we needed to make.

Ultimately, we uncovered that it was actually unqiue to a customer segment in his region and not indicative of an overall issue with our positioning against the competitor. It still warranted a fix and I worked with him to alter the play.

Here are my pointers for managing difficult stakeholders:

• I cannot do my job without my stakeholders so I have to have working relationships with them - even if they drive me nuts. Often times that means you have to be bigger person and maintain composure during your interactions. Remember that this should be a long term relationship - it's ok to have heated disagreements. Just don't do anything that's going to poison your relationship in the future.
• Make sure your stakeholders feel heard. This is the single most important thing you can do. If they feel like you understand where they are coming from and what they are dealing with, they are much more likely to trust you. 
• Talk through tradeoffs and priorities. In the example above, the time I spent getting to the bottom of the problem was time I had to take from other projects. If you don't feel comfortable talking through the tradeoffs directly with the stakeholder, talk it through with your manager and then go back to the stakeholder and say "We hear you, but right now we don't have the resources to work on it. We can fit it in next week, next month, etc. If it needs to happen sooner, we may need help from your team to make it happen." This is a great tactic to see just how important the project is to stakeholder. If they push back you can escalate to leadership.
• Use data. Avoid getting in disagreements based on opinion - you'll get no where. If there is no data, get your counterpart to agree that the first step is to get the data and then you both can come to a decision on next steps.
• Find a way to give the stakeholder a win. It doesn't have to be the win they initially pushed for, but it needs to be a win for them. In the example above, the quick win I was able to give that stakeholder to bring him to my side was work directly with his team. It turns out he felt his sellers were being left to fend for themselves. 

So much of Product Marketing is about information and invisible influence. The challenge is that while Product Marketing doesn't own Product, Marketing, Sales, or Services - we are expected to serve these teams with equal rigor and depth. It's what makes our function both fun and challenging, and there is no shortage of stakeholders to manage at any one given moment. As best as possible, you need to be diplomatic. 

I've learned that so much about relationship management is about setting clear and specific expectations about what you will do and what you won't do. Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments, so it's important to talk to your key stakeholders early and often about what they expect, and check back to make sure you've delivered against them. 

For years, I have worked through the concept of shared goals with my stakeholders. I sit down with leaders in Product, Marketing, Sales, and Services to co-develop a set of goals that we are going to own together. For example, I partner with the VP of Revenue Enablement on increasing sales confidence, which we baselined together and work towards improving through every project we partner on. This allows us to ask at the start of things we take on "is this going to increase confidence" and decide how best to prioritize our work. It's easy to get out of sync with stakeholders are things change throughout the year, but if you can establish SMART goals for the year, you can focus on what's important as opposed to falling victim to random acts of PMM - which has plagued our space since the dawn of time.  

This helps influence because you are operating from a shared objective as opposed to what you need (or what you think the business needs), and also tells your partners the things you can help them solve. I find that the majority of Product Marketing conflicts with difficult stakeholders stem from a misunderstanding of the role, driven by previous experiences they've had with that function. We're lucky because we get to reset that perception every time we show up.

This is a great question, at times we’re quick to talk about successes but very few share examples of failures. We all failed at some point and we probably learned the most from it. No matter how good of a leader you are, there will always be stakeholders that can be difficult to interact with or at times may even become hostile. It’s important to identify these stakeholders early on because they could disrupt or even bring an end to your product launch, GTM plan or project.

Here’s a failure example that happened to me when I first became a PMM team lead. I once worked with a finance stakeholder that frequently expressed skepticism and questioned the metrics presented by Product Marketing. I had just recently joined the company to lead PMM. After witnessing a couple interactions, I took it upon myself to develop a bi-weekly KPI dashboard with the PMM team and asked each PMM to use it going forward. The dashboard was well received by all stakeholders, yet one month later at a project review meeting, the same finance stakeholder was pushing back on approving the budget for a specific initiative of one of the PMMs on my team, citing lack of credible data to substantiate the business case. I engaged in a debate with that stakeholder in defense of my direct report. That debate didn’t produce meaningful results and we ended up not achieving the intended outcome, which was to get budget approval and most importantly, get everyone inspired by the initiative.

After that meeting, I decided to schedule a lunch outside the office (to allow for a more comfortable and candid conversation to take place). I learned that the finance colleague was not trying to discredit PMM as a function but instead had a history with a specific Product Marketer on my team, that frequently overestimated budget and KPIs. We decided to come up with a plan where we would work together on a template for budget forecasts with frequent reviews, we did it for the entire PMM team to avoid singling out the specific PMM on my team he had a history with. Months later, that colleague not only was supportive of our PMM initiative but gave a positive peer-feedback review to the PMM he had a negative history with.

The key lessons for me here were: once you identify a specific difficult stakeholder, don’t make any assumptions, don’t jump to solutions, instead take the time to connect with the stakeholder, have a candid conversation and most importantly lead with empathy, try to understand where that stakeholder is coming from and if possible, work on a solution jointly.

Whether you’re new to your role or are trying to elevate your current function, stakeholder management is one of the most important soft skills of successful PMMs and future leaders.

Here’s a strategy I follow to ensure you’re managing stakeholders effectively:

Identify key stakeholders. List everyone who has influence on important decisions that can impact your team, project, or funding. Don’t just list internal people, also include 3rd party partners (agencies, vendors, partner-brands) and end-users who will benefit from your work and have influencing power (big clients, thought leaders, influencers).

Categorize key stakeholders. Your time is limited and let’s face it not everyone will share the same set of common beliefs. Because you can’t spend all your time trying to satisfy everyone, it’s helpful to group stakeholders based on their influence in the success of your project and how much vested interest they have. Tier 1 stakeholders are those that are the most impacted by your project and have a strong vested interest in its success (e.g., Product, Sales, Customers). Tier 2 stakeholders those that are important for the smooth running of your product launch, such as project support teams (e.g., CRM, Performance, Customer Service).

Listen and empathize. When presenting your project to each stakeholder, take the time to listen carefully to everyone’s point of views, concerns, or objections. Don’t be quick to judge, don’t have your guards up and filters on, instead just listen and take notes of all the comments. If something is unclear, seems negative or confusing, ask for clarification either during the meeting or offline. Schedule individual 1-1 conversations with those stakeholders that came across as obstructive or difficult. The goal for that 1-1 conversation is to understand their reasoning, the context, the history or background for the concerns or comments raised. Show empathy, try putting yourself on their shoes without judgement, reach out to their side and ask if they have a proposed solution or would like to partner on one. Offer to come back with an answer or solution to mitigate their concerns.

Be responsive and communicate. Once you've talked to all concerned and relevant stakeholders' and determined which actions to prioritize, make sure to take the time to respond on what actions you will take. Be firm yet collaborative with those stakeholders whose feedback or comments you don’t agree with, give a clear and logical explanation as to why you don’t agree with and keep them updated on the progress of the project as you would with other stakeholders you agree with.

Lastly, be okay with the fact that you can’t please everyone and remember that success comes from doing what’s right for your customers even if it means politely disagreeing with internal stakeholders.

Oh, geez, I have a LOT of failures to learn from! One of my biggest failures to date was during my time at AdRoll. I was leading PMM and we had a product launching in the attribution space that was having a pretty major identity crisis. Some of the biggest questions at hand:

1. How do we do attribution/incrementality testing better than what exists in the market today? (differentiation)
2. How does a vendor like us, who helps companies run ads, also provide trusted attribution insights across the entire marketing funnel and channels that we don't run? (building trust with target audience)
3. How do we monetize incrementality testing? (pricing and packaging)

Major challenges to research, break down, and turn into an aligned strategy. And the stakeholders we were working with had put forth a pretty confusing plan to get there—one that made a lot of assumptions about the market and users. But I failed to help my team influence difficult stakeholders and it caused the product to falter and get delayed as a result. Here are my lessons learned:

• Documentation, documentation, documentation. Having a GTM strategy documented is a huge way to help you and stakeholders—who may see things very differently than you—to start to work through your different opinions toward a joint goal (of creating the GTM plan). It's so much more productive than talking about things in the abstract, and helps you get into nuanced conversations (e.g. "If we want to launch the beta by June we'll need to lock in pricing by April so that engineering can use May to build the billing flows." versus "What should we do for pricing?") We didn't start documenting well until halfway into the project, and only after did we start to see the tide turn.
• Create milestones and shared goals. Very similar to the point above, is that working together toward something is so much more powerful than working in the abstract. Try to understand the milestones your stakeholder wants to reach and the outcomes they want to drive. Where there is alignment, try to formalize your tag-team to make it happen. By setting a milestone to conquer, you create the right motivations for both of you to work out any conflicts in service of delivering the success. Again, something we didn't do until far later in the project.
• Create visible gut checks. Sometimes your difficult stakeholder is the VP of Product. Or the head of sales. Or the CEO. And it can feel scary to deliver feedback directly that you disagree with their strategy/plan. But one practice I've since learned is having 20% and 80% reviews with a broader group. A 20% review is sort of like a strategy gut check, where you share how you're going to move forward before you start executing with a broader stakeholder group. An 80% review is all about polishing the details and preparing for launch. Creating space for a 20% review means that the broader group can call out concerns that "echo" and reinforce the feedback you're giving. Put another way, a strategy gut check gives you the chance to take an objective view on what to do next, which can be your ticket to a better outcome. I know this definitely would have helped in the example above!

You'll notice that all of these thematically use process to help you drive toward the best outcome. It's totally possible that all of the above could bring to life that you are actually the difficult stakeholder—which is still a good outcome because it means your process helped you find space to pivot before it's too late!

A difficult or opinionated stakeholder is sometimes the hardest thing but something you all likely encounter in your product marketing career. If you have the luxury of time to observe their working style you can try to adjust your approach on your own. If you don't have that time, make sure you ask others for feedback on how best to work with this person.

I once held an important meeting with one of the executive team and thought I had everything prepared. I had asked for topic ideas ahead of time from this exec and the rest of the group and brought my own topics up as well. But when we got into the meeting, it went upside down. The exec wanted to focus on one topic and we never made it to any of the other topics I had on the agenda. After the meeting I reached out to someone who had been at the company a long time to ask what they thought had gone wrong and how I could do better the next time and that's when I learned this exec only likes to deep dive into meaty topics live and prefers to keep the smaller, more numerous topics to slack or email. The next meeting I had with this exec went much better because I had done my research on their style ahead of time!