Product managers guide to working with internal stakeholders
The most critical stakeholders that you as a Product Manager should engage with are :
- Product Marketing
- Sales
- Customer Service and Support
- Customer Success
While it is important to create alignment on your product strategy with these stakeholders, it is equally important to collaborate with them to shape your product strategy.
In order for you to maximize your product success, here are some examples of how you can better engage with stakeholders. These are not exhaustive, rather indicative of how you can collaborate.
Product Marketing
Product management and product marketing should really be joined at the hip. They need to work together to make sure the messaging and positioning is aligned. This means that they must have a good understanding of each other’s roles and responsibilities. Product management should provide product marketing with a deep understanding of the product roadmap, features, and benefits. On the other hand, product marketing should provide product management with customer insights, market trends, and competitive analysis. By working together, they can ensure that the product is developed with the customer in mind and positioned correctly in the market.
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Competitive analysis
Marketing often does competitor analysis so they can better arm their sales teams with playbooks and how to respond in a competitive situation.
A key aspect is to understand how competition is positioning their products. A common adage is not to focus on competitors but delight your customers. That’s true. The point is that your competition is doing the same, and maybe they are doing it better than you. So understanding how your competition is challenging you is important. You don’t have to focus on all competitors. Just the few who you see in the field or are more active in the set of customers you are targeting. Let’s say, one of your key competitors is telling customers that their workflows are superior and very flexible compared to yours. That means, you need to get ahead of that messaging when presenting to prospects and customers. Otherwise, a doubt is created in the minds of the customers for whom workflow is critical. You need to prevent that doubt in the first place and play offense. It could be a new feature you can build or it could just be better messaging in sales demos.
Work with product marketing to understand these competitive headwinds and help your company stay ahead. -
Industry Analyst sentiment
In B2B, product marketing has good relationships with key analysts from Gartner, Nucleus, Forrester etc who are monitoring your space. It’s invaluable to get in front of these analysts and get the industry landscape and more importantly, how you are responding. While marketing has a good handle on working with the analysts, product managers should also be involved with them. This helps you understand the industry direction and provide a critical input to your own product strategy.
Sales
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Friction in demos or handling sales objections
Attend some of the prospect demos that salespeople present to see how they are received. Are the prospects gaining a good understanding of the product? Ideally, prospects should understand the product after one meeting, so the next meeting can focus on the sale. You can assist the sales team by identifying which parts of the product need improvement to shine during a demo.
During demos, customers may have a lot of questions. It is important to provide sellers with the right information so they can respond effectively to these objections. Handling objections is a critical part of making a successful sale. It increases your probability of a sale and makes the sales cycle more predictable.
In a growth startup, it is critical to build that repeatable sales motion. A product managers role is invaluable in helping shape that repeatable sales process. They can help with the right materials, talking points and FAQs, in addition to create a rocking demo with real life data. -
Win-Loss Analysis
Another way for product managers to collaborate with sales (typically sales ops) is by analyzing win-loss data. Such data can provide valuable insights into why deals were won or lost and help identify areas for product improvement. It can also refine the ideal customer profile (ICP) and avoid pursuing prospects for whom the product is not well-suited.
Understanding where sales are gaining the most traction, such as in specific customer segments, industries, or domains, is critical. By doubling down on these areas, product managers can maximize success and shape product strategy.
Typically sales operations should be able to help with analyzing this data.
Customer Service and Support
In B2B environments, customer support is essential to the success of customers. Support is responsible for making sure that issues faced by customers are resolved in a timely manner to their satisfaction.
One area to work with support for a PM, is to understand the patterns of incoming requests. Are their specific areas of the product that generate more tickets? Are there any friction points when a customer is using your product?
Some bugs will eventually move through your JIRA backlog, but as PM you should look at all incoming requests. A lot of requests are simply questions from customers – “How do I do this?”, “ I cannot find this action” etc These are invaluable inputs to help you improve your product experience so that customers don’t have to ask these questions and are able to resolve these on their own. Or perhaps there is an opportunity to create some FAQs, or Videos or Help articles. Maybe an in app guide to help the user.
Another area in working with support is streamlining your triage and escalation processes. In B2B environments, engineering will get a lot of high priority requests. But you can work with support teams to establish a cadence and prioritization framework. Not everything can be a priority.
Finally, involve your support team in your launch process. They will be the first to bear the brunt of your customers when something new is released. It is critical to help arm this first line of defense.
Customer Success
Finally, customer success is a key stakeholder in maximizing the success of your product. Their job is to ensure customers are onboarded and are using the product and getting the value. Mature CS organizations are involved with the customer at every step of their journey, not just at the end when renewal is coming up. A product manager needs to ensure that they set them up for success.
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Onboarding process
Sit through a customer onboarding process. See how much time it takes. Are their specific steps that have friction e.g. integrating with another application? or setting up reporting templates?
The faster you onboard, the better customer experience you create. As a PM, you can remove any friction during onboarding. Perhaps you can automate a few things so that customer success does not need multiple meetings with customers. -
Usage monitoring
There is a high correlation between customers who have low usage of your product and churn. Customer success should be on top of customer usage patters. But as a PM, you need to understand the root causes of low usage. Maybe the feature is not important, or the feature is not adding value or even worse, maybe this is the wrong customer.
Usage monitoring and fixing the root causes are critical to make sure your product will be adopted across your customer base. -
Churn analysis and mitigation
Find out why customers are churning. Is there a specific pattern on the type of customer who is churning? At what point do they churn? What can be done to to reduce churn?
These are exactly the key success criteria for a customer success organization. As a PM, you can help analyze the reasons for churn and help improve the product experience. This could imply adding new features in your product, or providing better training or materials to customer success teams.
Conclusion
Personally, I establish connections with all stakeholders because they are a primary source of input for my product. In addition to talking to customers, I rely on the insights from my internal stakeholders. They are much more present with customers and have to deal with their frustrations.
It’s important to get to know your stakeholders, understand their motivations, and help them become better at their jobs. The product you build has a direct impact on their success.
