What strategies are you using to align stakeholders around customer priorities?

I'm in favor of what I call the 'State of the Union' report - and doing this every quarter. A 'State of the Union' report is created by a product marketer for their main revenue-generating product(s). It covers (within the quarter):  (i) the number of net-new wins for that product, the overall new revenue, overall win rate, average selling price, and potentially how many customers churned that product. (ii) feedback from 3-5 customer interviews - what do they like about the product, what do they ...Read More

I think the best approach for PMM is to employ a mix of programmatic and opportunity specific approaches to aligning stakeholders around customer priorities. Programmatic approaches are best for clarifying improvement opportunities for the existing buyer and customer journeys. Tools like win/loss analysis, monitoring key sales pipeline metrics (closed won ratio, time to close, etc.) and investigating where any metric is underperforming, and customer advisory boards are all great ways to keep a f ...Read More

The key is to first align on the framework for making decisions (e.g. market opportunity, customer retention/expansion goals, revenue impact, etc. and how you prioritize each) and then ensure the teams have the relevant information (e.g. customer research, feedback, metrics, or analysis) to make the actual decision when it comes to customer priorities. In smaller orgs, it’s easier to gather everyone from product, PMM, and customer-facing teams to have frequent meetings to stay aligned. For examp ...Read More

Systematizing the capture and dissemination of customer and market feedback is key here. At Ironclad, we spent a lot of time designing and building a system in Coda that brings in customer feedback streams from across the company and disseminates it in real-time to the parts of the business that need it. The real-time aspect of the system allows XFN partners to self-serve asynchronously. We also meet with product and sales several times a quarter to synthesize and discuss areas of concern bubble ...Read More

The product team at Intercom are very invested in understanding our customers so they often themselves talk to customers, interface directly with sales, read customer feedback from conversations in Intercom and so on, and we have a very talented research team who do more in-depth studies for us. This mean that it's not just down to PMM to represent the customer voice (which is a nice place to be!) That being said, in general the key to getting alignment around priorities is being able to demonst ...Read More