What is your advice for PMM to work well with Product and Sales?

Make sure you have periodic meetings scheduled with each separate and some times with both together. As PMM, we bring the "voice of the customer" and the "Voice of the market" from the outside in, and we provide the messaging and positioning for the go-to-market strategy for the "inside out", so we need to get sales input and feedback intro product to influence the roadmap, and make sure we educate sales on the product in the best way possible so it resonates with their customers.

This is a fantastic question and often where PMMs either excel or fail. Product marketing is the glue between product, sales, customer success, and core marketing, and understanding how to align those four functions is the key to success.

Start with listening. Talk with each stakeholder (in your case product and sales, but I'd recommend expanding to customer success and core marketing / demand gen in many cases) and understand their priorities, upcoming projects, and anything they'd love to see from product marketing. Talk about their strategic goals and where you can work together. Run new projects past them (before they're complete) to get their input and buy-in, especially new messaging. This will add value to your work, but it will also help them understand that you value their feedback and want to work together.

I'd also recommend putting a regular alignment sync on the calendar to discuss various initiatives. For example, at Forethought we have a biweekly roadmap alignment call with representatives from product, sales, customer success, and product marketing. This helps everyone get on the same page with product priorities, and it helps me understand where PMM can be most helpful. I also have separate syncs with individual stakeholders in each department.

Communicate communicate communicate. PMM/GTM/PRODUCT need to be constantly communicating. Here's a sample cadence to get you started:

PMM <> Product

• PMMs and Product managers catch up weekly/bi-weekly on upcoming releases, roadmap changes, voice of customer
• PMM and Prod leadership meet monthly to review roadmap, strategic messaging and key product/product marketing topics

PMM <> GTM

• PMMs and sales leaders should be meeting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to review high level performance, gaps and key deals
• Bi-weekly Sales leaders and managers meet with marketing to review pipeline performance, marketing flow, upcoming initiatives, key wins, etc

There's lots of other checkpoints but this will hopefully get you started.

The most helpful advice I ever received for collaborating with Sales and Product teams is to reframe your thinking to be that of an Educator with these other teams being your learners. To be an effective Educator, you need to understand your material and equip your learners with the knowledge they need to apply the information in their own roles. Tactically, this will look very different for Sales and Product because their needs and functions are so different.

One of the biggest benefits I gained from this advice is a very tangible example of what good looks like for product marketing. Following the same Educator analogy, think about the most inspiring or memorable teacher/professor you had. The characteristics and abilities that made them stand out are very closely aligned with the same qualities that create a highly collaborative Product Marketer.