Nicole Gardiner

It's a fun project to take overall quarterly objectives like sales enablement or new feature launches and tie them back to OKRs. In fact today, I was talking with my team about how we can measure success for a sales enablement next quarter. We're going to do this a couple of ways:   Sales confidence -- Are sellers using decks, scripts, etc more (track this through CMS) than they were previously Competitive wins -- what percentage has our win-rate increased from the previous half  Aside from this ...Read More

I believe the answer to this 'depends' on many factors, a couple of which are:  Company size  Org (PMM or reporting org) size If you have a large PMM team, having a more vertical org may make the most sense. At Cisco, I believe our PMM org is very balanced, not too flat or too tall, but would be considered vertical. That said, Cisco is a large company and having PMM leaders with teams of PMMs has been incredibly beneficial from a messaging and communications perspective. Each PMM is responsible ...Read More

COMMUNICATE! Early and often!  In a successful GTM plan you're collaborating up front with PM, design, engineering, PMO, NPI, senior leadership, integrated marketing (demand gen), regional marketing, and so many more! From a technical counterpart perspective, I've worked with design teams to work through customer feedback since PMM is talking to customers and to sales so often. Having regular syncs with engineerings helps you not only gain a more techincal perspective that you can then 'uplevel' ...Read More

Get that headcount ASAP! I kid, I kid.... kind of. My selfish, well, self, wants to say ask for approval as soon as you start -- first 30 days. Hiring someone doesn't happen overnight so you want as much time as possible to get applicants.  That said, the logical part of my brain says take some time to assess the business need and team need. I had a PMM team previously that included PMMs, PMs, Content Managers and Sales Enablement Managers. For a startup I'd bring on a content person first, assu ...Read More

This question is great and so very relevant. I've been companies where leadership has had 3 very different thoughts on the PMM org.  PMM IS AMAZING What the heck is PMM and why am I paying their salaries?  Eh, PMM exists but I don't care much about what they do. << my least favorite of them all, believe it or not.  PMM is amazing: This of course is an easy one! Keep doing great things and the leadership team will advocate for you. Communicate to them often on progress. Partner wherever nec ...Read More