What tips or best practices do you have for convincing channel teams (or other teams) to fund your projects or initiatives, when Product Marketing commonly doesn't have their own budget to spend.

Answer

6 Answers

Consumer Product Marketing Stakeholder Management

Mike Polner

Adobe VP, Product Marketing & GM, Next Gen Creators | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts • 6y

Budget is earned, not given.

Align to a top-level business goal or objective that's critical, start small with an experiment, measure it, and prove your value. Make it a no-brainer where if the initiative isn't funded somebody will be coming to the team saying - look at how much impact we're missing out on!

1,788 Views
April Rassa

Celigo Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, Adobe • 4y

Once you have a plan, you can assess the data and determine the financial impact, linking it to a strategic company goal.

The key is to attach to company business objectives and make a business case for why the specific project/or initiatives will drive results and how success will be measured. It may be helpful to organize goals or ideals into three categories: current, near term, and future. This will help the team conceptualize a high-level strategy for each priority item on the list.

424 Views
Rayleen Hsu

The Knot Worldwide Marketing Consultant | Formerly Meta, Strava, eBay, Nextdoor, TeamSnap • 4y

I think the same best practices hold true no matter what kind of proposal you're putting out there that you need to secure buy-in for - come to the table with a clear, structured ask and always bring data to the table to support your ask. Specifically: Clearly outline your objectives. Clearly communicate what you're hoping to accomplish by outlining your success metrics and/or learning agenda. No one expects you to have all the answers from the get go but it's essential that you clearly articula ...Read More

698 Views
Savita Kini

Cisco Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI • 8y

This is an interesting question. I have been a PMM and I have been in channel enablement leader in APAC. Maybe let me offer my perspective of being on the field. My stakeholders were regional sales leadership, not PMMs. But I need PMMs & PMs to support enablment. I am in the middle - responsible to orchestrate demand with supply. The challenge was first of all getting the data from the field (that was a whole another story!!), once I had data, how to address the business and who I needed was ...Read More

560 Views
Tracy Montour

HiredScore Head of Product Marketing • 3y

As a product marketing leader with no budget, I totally empathize with your concerns but I am here to tell you it is possible. It's all about relationships. You need to work with marketing, product, and sales leaders to align on iniatives and convince them it is a good use of their time, resources, and budget. You can do this by mutually coming to an understanding of the problem at hand, and why the spend is justified. Always come prepared with an ROI analysis/forecast!

270 Views
Elizabeth Brigham

Davidson College Director, The Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship • 8y

Hmmm...I actually haven't had the experience of PMM not having budget to spend, so not sure I can really speak directly to this. I have worked at a start up where we basically have no budget at all, but that's another story on scrapiness. In general though, any time I've had to write a business case to get funding for an initiative, I typically follow this format: How will my initiative materially affect the business? Revenue growth? Cost efficiencies/economies of scale? Market expansion? Why am ...Read More

1,075 Views