What are your best practices for building a cohesive partnership with Sales and Product Management?

1. Have a true desire to partner, and explictly tell them that's what you want to do. 
2. Tell them what you are working on and why. Show them how they can be involved. Be specific.
3. Ask what the 2-3 most important things they need from you are. Learn why those are the things they want. Figure out how to give them what they need without blowing up your priorities.
4. Tell them what you need from them, then ask how best to make that happen so it doesn't duplicate or burden.
5. Be nice, even when it's hard or not reciprocated.

I would stop using words like "cohesive partnership," first off :-) Mostly kidding, but be authentic. I haven't run into many sales people in my career who use purple prose like that. Communicate simply, directly and clearly. 

Apart from that, walk in their shoes. Shadow calls. Show them you care. Comiserate. Go to the bar with them at the end of the day. 

Purely tactical: I have a weekly cross-functional meeting with product and enablement, present on sales all hands, conduct regular road shows on sales team meetings, and meet on a case by case but semi-regular basis with sales leaders. Facilitate great meetings, offer PMM as a service, and follow up.

Great question! Nifty actually did a guest post on the Product School’s blog about that.

 
In a nutshell, they concluded that the interaction with the product and sales groups requires some collaboration, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be constant. An example of this would be to envision two vertical lines that go toward the same goal, but do not necessarily interact with each other all the time. 

A great suggestion they made was to include an innovative cloud-based project management software to centralize all workloads under a single platform. This way, the sales team will know at what stage a product team is testing or adding a new feature, and the product team will see what revenue metrics are and what the results are of a product features evaluation.

My biggest advice: serve as the connection between sales and product, and you'll strengthen your relationship with both teams. These two teams should be well connected but often are operating in silos and feeling frustrated with one another - and that's where PMM can step up and provide a ton of value. 

Almost always, sales teams feel like they have no idea what's going on on the product side - when things are launching, if their feature requests made it on the roadmap, how to get their customer into an upcoming beta, etc. They're fielding hard questions from prospects and often don't know how to share that feedback with the product team in a way that's effective, and they often don't know what they are and are not allowed to share with a prospect or current account, which can get them in trouble or ruin a deal. 

On the other hand, product teams aren't able to get a relaible and accurate view of what's going on on the sales side in a way that helps them prioritize and ship product. They want insight into what the actual trends are that we're seeing with prospects versus what is a one off piece of feedback from an individual seller so they can understand what is signal and what it noise. They want to be able to get a list of all the different feature request that come in, so they can see which might require significant investment and what are the types of updates could be made with very little engineering time but could provide an easy win on the sales side. They want to feel confident that once a feature or product is out in the world, the sales team is going to sell it, and sell it well. 

As a product marketer, you can strengthen your relationship with both teams by serving as the bridge between those two sides of the business and creating the right systems and processes so the right information and insights flow freely between the two teams. It's a slamdunk for the PMM to be seen as invaluable to both teams, and often not that hard to set up. 

My other advice: set the right expectations with your time and effort. So often I see PMMs that are so eager to impress their sales and product teams that they overpromise what they can do for them. In the short term, it helps each team feel excited about how PMM can help. But in the long term, it erodes trust and accountability since the PMM can't deliver on everything that a partner team expects them to, even if they are delivering a ton of work and value. Even if saying no to things is unpopular, setting the right expectations is the only way to actually build a partnership.