Stakeholder management is an important skill of all PMMs. If you're actively driving an important program or initiative, there are a few tactics you can try out.
1. Organize, structure, and lead regular "cadence meetings" - For cross-functional initiatives, people often don't want to volunteer to be the program manager. If you're willing to put in the work and set up the calendar invites, manage the agenda, run the meetings effectively, and foster healthy participation and collaboration - you'll dramatically increase your influence. These are opportunities to speak up and share ideas. Not an easy thing to do.
2. Reporting - Every important project will require some level of reporting. If you provide transparency at the right level and offer consistent reports on a regular cadence, you can surface issues early and gain visibility. Again, reporting is not often seen as a fun thing to do.
3. 1:1s - You may get shot down but it doesn't hurt to set up a monthly or quarterly 1:1 with senior leaders to get feedback and mentorship. It's not a daily tactic but if you rotate through key senior stakeholders you'll build rapport over time.
4. Customer feedback - There's feature feedback that will come through the software but that doesn't capture customer feedback at the sales level. Sales teams often struggle to collate and prioritize feedback on why they lost a deal. As PMMs, you can help make this a regular report back to the leadership team with ACV numbers attached. Hugely influential.
The other effective thing you can do is deeply understand your persona, solution, product, market, industry - whatever. Become a subject matter expert (SME). Be the person people come to for insights and expertise. There's no quick fix for this. You have to be willing to put in the time to study the market, talk to experts, talk to customers, and get close to the sales team.