How do you align internal stakeholders as a product marketer?
Internal alignment takes time. Here are a few recommendations for getting started and fostering strong relationships for the long term.
First - it's important to recognize and write down who your stakeholders are. For Product Marketing this is often Sales, Marketing, Product as primary stakeholders with Implementation, Solution Consultants, Customer Success, and Support playing crucial roles as well.
Second - work with each of these groups to understand their world. What KPIs, goals, metrics keep them up at night? What objectives and initiatives are they trying to run in order to increase pipeline, build brand recognition, or delight customers? Understanding your stakeholder world will help to align on areas you as PMM can support.
Third - communicate your plan of action to your stakeholders. You cannot help everyone all the time, everywhere. Yes, we know this, but it's easy to spread yourself too thin and ultimately not deliver a high caliber project. Communicating your plan might mean focusing more on the Sales team for the quarter. Working with those stakeholder to update sales material, draft strong objection handling responses, improve the pitch deck and script. This time is well spent as insights often lead to campaign ideas for awareness and adoption that support marketing.
Fourth - 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.
Product marketers have to work with a lot of stakeholders! I always recommend two strategies for keeping internal stakeholders aligned—and they both require consistent work.
I recommend rigorous documentation and ongoing updates to get stakeholders aligned. Why? Because alignment is a process, not an outcome. Put another way, you can be totally aligned at the beginning of a project and completely misaligned the next week!
Rigorous documentation helps develop early alignment. By documenting your goal, audience, expected outcomes, and timeline for the project/initiative, you create a durable reference that can be shared and iterated on faster than a series of 1:1 meetings. It also forces you to really think and be opinionated. For example, you might write down your timeline as next quarter, but your CEO—in seeing it in the document—lets you know that they'd really love to pair the launch with an upcoming fundraise next month. Writing the project plan down helped you learn about a really important deadline well before starting on the project, at a time when you have maximum flexibility to scope the project up or down.
Ongoing updates helps keep alignment over time. I've never worked on a project that didn't change at least a little (in scope, timeline, audience, goals, budget, etc) over the course of execution. Ongoing updates help everyone stay on the same page—and raise the flag about issues in real time. It's also a great forcing function for you to focus on only the most important things. I like to write weekly "sprint updates" in a public Slack channel for big projects that outline the biggest to-dos and tag responsible parties. This level of visibility means I'm thoughtful about what I sign up to do, and gives all of us a healthy bit of social pressure to stay on track. Even better, you allow stakeholders to stay updated on decisions big and small. This is CRUCIAL for them to trust the process and stay aligned as the project naturally evolves.
While this will depend on the company culture and existing relationships across stakeholders, there are first principles that I always find helpful.
- Crystalize your story and strategy first. Start by mapping out your goals, critical context, and what you need from each stakeholder end to end (with placeholders for inevitable unknowns). The more buttoned up you are, the easier it will be for your stakeholders to help you.
- Think from the vantage of each stakeholder you're seeking to build alignment across before you go to them. For example, if your objective is to build consensus on launch positioning, how do you make it tangible to each stakeholder why it's worth their time to weigh in?
- Create a shared single source of truth for discussion and debate, including roles/responsibilities (e.g., a RAPID framework). Not only does this help you manage input, it creates transparency which can help disparate stakeholders understand all angles more efficiently.
- Provide clear timelines and regular updates. Rarely is one stakeholder paying as much attention to your priorities as you are. Keep in front of them with digestible updates for both upcoming and achieved milestones (with success metrics as possible!).
- Celebrate team contributions. As you progress against your goals, always take the time to think through each person who helped you move forward. Provide authentic recognition and gratitude.
Getting stakeholder alignment is critical for the success of any project or initiative. I think this skill set is even more important to a PMM as a large part of the job is getting teams aligned on the desired outcome and path to achieving your goals.
Step 1: Understand who the proper stakeholders are. This may differ with every project. I like to create a project plan at the beginning that includes the RACI model (a model that identifies roles and responsibilities within your project and stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed)
Step 2: Determine their needs and expectations: Once you have identified your stakeholders, determine what their needs and expectations are. Take the time to understand what is important to each stakeholder, such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, or market share. This will help you tailor your communication and messaging to their needs.
Step 3: Develop a shared vision. Work with your stakeholders to develop a shared vision for your project or initiative. This will help ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals. This includes what are the goals and key metrics you're tracking against in this project.
Step 4. Communicate regularly. I like to set up weekly, or bi-weekly meetings with all the necessary stakeholders to communicate progress and roadblocks. This creates transparency and trust across the org.
I use the following template to align internal stakeholders around a project:
PMM Strategy Brief
Goal:
What impact are we trying to achieve on our business?(i.e. Awareness, PipeGen, Pipe Acceleration, Pipe Close, Adoption, Cross-Sell, Up-Sell, Increase Competitive Win Rates, Revewals etc.) Be Concise.
Projected Impact [S/M/L]:
Business Insight:
Why are we doing this? Why Now? What trends are we seeing with prospects or in our customer base that led to us wanting to do this initiative?
Program Summary:
Describe the project's objective, typically a problem we're solving or an opportunity we're pursuing. Explain why it's worth our time & budget.
Key Milestone:
State the go-live date and/or any unmovable events. MLT to fill in additional pieces during the first review.
Meeting Cadence:
List when meetings will be held
Messaging
Persona:
Who are we going after?
Core Messaging:
List the major Program this initiative rolls up to. Include the pillar pain and benefit below.
Takeaways:
Bulletize the takeaways we want the consumer of our content to walk away with.
Product/Feature Summary
Product/Feature Name:
What product/feature are we talking about?
Current Situation:
Describe [descriptive] what the persona does today.
Product/Feature Description & Future State:
What does the product do and how does it change what the persona does?
Our feature:
Now, customers can:
Pains & Benefits:
List 1 to 3 pains and benefits. State the business value of each (quantifiable)
Screen Shot/Demo:
Insert link to screenshot/demo to help the team understand the product/demo.
References
Who is involved:
List the people who are on your working team outside of and the stakeholders who're directly impacted by the project. Outline each person's role in the project.
Subject Matter Experts:
Who can the team go to for product insights, thought leadership, insights, ect. Essentially, who will you interview for information, who would be your webinar speakers, Blog authors, and Internal experts.
Reference Material:
Bulletize and link product marketing documents that may aide in development.
Deliverables
Required deliverables and deadlines to get a message in market [webpage update, customer communications, sales tear sheets]
Measurement
Tied to T-Shirt Size and original goals. Work with cross functional team to establish what are our KPIs.
To align internal stakeholders, it is important to identify and understand their needs, goals, and priorities, and to develop a shared vision that meets these goals.
Some specific actions I take to achieve this alignment:
- I try to identify and understand stakeholder needs
- I develop a shared vision and plan, usually leading to the creation of OKRs
- I implement the DACI model and advocate for using it
- I communicate and engage with stakeholders via regular meetings
- I also regularly share progress on our projects and make sure that all stakeholders know where we're in the process.
Stakeholders management is and art and a science. It will take time to master it.
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