PMMs don't own the roadmap, the quota, or the budget, so nothing you plan happens until other people decide it helps them. That's why PMM is a strategic role, and also why it's one of the hardest jobs in marketing. You're a leader without the authority of a boss. People say yes to plans that protect their standing, come from someone they trust, and feel partly like their own idea. Solving their problems first is what gets them to say yes to marketing your products.
How people decide at work
- Big meetings are a stage. In front of their team or their boss, people defend the position they walked in with, because changing their mind in public feels like losing. A big ask they hear for the first time in the room makes them defensive, and "let's take this offline" usually means no. Minds change in private, one on one.
- Protecting beats betting. A VP will work harder to save a business unit that's slipping than to bet on something unproven, even with a lot of upside. Tie your plan to the area that's losing, as part of how it recovers, or show how your work makes up for that loss somewhere else.
- Each team has its own wants. Sales wants you to bring them warm leads, ready to buy, and help them pitch. Product wants you to launch their latest feature as if it's center stage at a keynote. The other marketing teams want to reduce CAC, don't believe the new product will help move the needle, and are trying to avoid taking on too much work. When you ask, think about their wants. If sales wants more warm leads, you can use that to get them to review your messaging or agree to your positioning.
- Favors create debt. When you help someone first, they want to pay it back, but asking for payback right away cancels the favor and makes it feel like a trade.
- People back what they helped build. A plan someone edited feels like theirs, and people defend what's theirs.
1. Map everything out
List everyone you need a yes (or a no) from on the project. For each person, write down the number they're judged on, what's worrying them this quarter, and what would make their job easier right now. Add one more column for how they already see you, because that tells you how much credit you have before you ask for anything. If you can't fill in a row, go find out by talking to their team, sitting in on their meetings, and reading their last update.
2. Be helpful
Before you ask for anything, be useful to the people on your map. Everyone wants a customer insight, a market insight, or something that comes back to their product, so bring them one, and bring it in three parts: what's happening, so what, and what we do about it.
Say a big competitor gets hacked. What's happening is their customers are nervous. The so what is that there's an opening to market how differently we handle security. What we do about it is a one-pager comparing their security to ours, sent to every active deal where they're in the running and every deal we recently lost to them. Sales gets something to send, marketing gets a campaign, and product sees where we win.
Same thing with features. If a competitor's new feature is getting a lot of noise, take it back to product, connect it to what customers are actually asking for, and show what it means for how we build. Do that regularly, and people start coming to you first, and that trust makes every ask after it easier.
3. Get input
Nobody should hear it for the first time in the meeting. Walk each key person through the plan one on one, ask what they'd change, and put their edits in, so everyone has already had their say. Start with the people you depend on most. If you need budget for a campaign, meet with finance first to learn their priorities. If you want product to build a feature, start with engineering to scope the size.
4. Speak their language
Once you've heard from everyone, write the ask in each person's number. "We need reps to adopt the new pitch" asks sales for effort. "Reps using this pitch closed bigger deals on large accounts last quarter, and two reps could pilot it in the first week of next quarter" asks for a small test that helps their number.
5. Be persistent
Write the decision down the same day, with who owns what, by when, and how you'll know it worked, and send it to everyone who was in the room and everyone who should have been. Then keep following up. When you don't have authority, updates are how you stay top of mind. Everyone remembers what their VP wants, and the next best thing is to keep reminding people what you're doing and how it's moving the business. Invite them to the review, even if they don't show.
Find where you matter most
You can't get it right all the time, and you'll lean toward one side, more product, more marketing, or more sales. That's okay. Every organization is different, so find out where product marketing makes the biggest impact in yours. In some companies that means being close to product. In others it means orchestrating the marketing campaigns, and in others it means being embedded with sales and sitting in on pitches. Figure out where your company values product marketing, and start there.
Don't be shy
What makes product marketing hard is getting every stakeholder across the company behind one vision for what you take to market. That's foundational work, most people don't want to do it, and you don't have the authority to make them. The way around that is to earn it. You're helpful, you speak their language, you take their input seriously, and you keep showing them the results. If you don't have authority, insert yourself into the work and bring something of value every time you show up, and the authority follows.
Output: a written decision people agreed to before the meeting started, and updates that keep it top of mind.