I am product marketer for an enterprise-level ERP. I am faced with a situation where I do not have access to the end-users of the software. The account managers are willing to help me acquire the user list but we are debating the best ways to acquire the same. Have you been in a such a situation and done something great about it?

The ability to really engage with our end users - whether through 1:1 conversations or broader campaigns - is critical to the success of any PMM team. If we aren’t able to continuously keep a pulse on our users and what they care about, we won’t really be able to do our jobs effectively.

I’m not surprised that this is the problem you are facing though. Some Enterprise organizations tend to be very protective of their end users and allow only certain teams to “own” the conversation with customers. I’ve been in an org myself where I’ve had to deal with this issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy solve (or a quick one), but perhaps here’s a couple of suggestions:
- I think it’s important to get alignment across leadership (PMM, Marketing, Sales) on the importance of “access”, and without this any effort will likely not last in the long term. What’s the root cause of this restriction of access? How can you address some of these concerns? It’s definitely worth some honest conversations
- If you can start small and show immediate value, you will build the case for why broader access is a good idea. So if you can identify a small subset of accounts with more progressive account managers and lay out a plan for how you want to engage (including what’s in it for them), this might be a way to go

I think this one is a bit tricky, because I wouldnt recommend creating a user list without appropriate PII governance. Rather than creating a user list, I'd suggest building an outreach stratgey that can deliver content to customers in a scaled manner. Some suggestions are in-app notifications that can serve easy consumption content at the right moment, or building a webinar series where your customers can sign up via your O&O channels. This way you can still enable users to get the information that will help them do their jobs better, but without introducting excess risk. 

In my opinion, this is an area where you'd want to leverage the product. In a consumer marketing setting, or in a B2B setting where your route-to-market is PLG, you'd lean on the product to deliver the education; rather than marketing to a user list. On my current team, we have PMMs and PMs who are focused on driving discovery of features. So perhaps an analog would be to map out the user journey, look for areas where product usage isnt where it should be (thus implying that there is user need for educational content to solve the underlying business problem) and then look for leading indicators across that user journey that might signal the moments where a potential breakage would occur. Serve educational content up in product, in those moments. 

Google Docs/Sheets/Slides are pretty good examples of serving up in-product education without it feeling too obtrusive. 

As for the PM benefit of direct access to end-users, I'd suggest you work with your Account Managers and create an opt-in program to recruit trusted testers and power users. By making it opt-in, you're protecting yourself from any PII risks, but you're also trimming down your list of customers who would join. However, a PM wouldnt need access to every customer, just a representative sample that can help the team understand patterns in usage--of which an opt-in community could absolutely solve. One of the teams I work with at my current role has an opt-in community of around 700 users, which they run pulse surveys with on a regular basis. It allows us to ask our audience specific questions and run quick feedback cycles.