Product Marketing Stakeholders

As Product Marketers, our primary role is to act as ambassadors and influence other departments with customer and market insights. I wonder how this dynamic changes when the PMM is a VP and the ‘other departments’ are the C-suite. I’m curious about how deep and challenging these conversations might be.

I just joined a new company, and their pitch decks are AWFUL and the sales teams are losing deals because of poor pitches. I'm working with a few key stakeholders to create better pitch decks, but several CSuite team members are apprehensive about trying something new because we'll be filing for IPO soon. They'd rather be consistently bad, then differently good.

Weekly status, shared google docs, etc

Would love to get your perspective on generating excitement around your new product, vs. continuous enablement on the core capabilities of your solutions

I'm new to Product Marketing. In the interviews that I've done, I am being asked to present a marketing portfolio.

For eg: Should PMMs be aligned with PMs (we have a 3:1 mapping), or should PMMs be aligned with the market/buyer persona or something else?

I'm tasked with doing market research -- voice of the customer, competitive intelligence, and doing internal interviews -- to segment a new market and what we need to invest in to increase market penetration.

As an influencer you might just share market and customer research, competitive intel, etc. as another input for PM to consider in their own decision making; whereas if you're a true partner, you're discussing and debating with them, as equals, what product roadmap decisions should be and why, where PMs and PMMs bring different inputs and value to the table as equals. Thoughts on being an "influencer" vs. being a "partner" in guiding the product roadmap? Thank you.