A Time with Conflict

Wednesday, August 16th, 2023

When I had more of an outbound role in Product Marketing, we received an analyst report which raised a number of issues around the product.

Nevertheless, the head of Analyst Relations wanted to run campaigns driving people to this report. Her response was that doing so allowed us to "control the narrative".

I disagreed. I felt that the report wasn't good, the right thing was to work with the product manager and ask what is coming and why wasn't anything shipped in the last year. And we should instead arm the field to have conversation around it.

She did not want to have this conversation, in part, because she was friends.

I said we need to socialize this with others who might be impacted, and I set up a meeting to include her and the head of enterprise sales.

The head of enterprise sales sad flatly, We should not be running campaigns directed to this. He was fine with arming the field with how to address the concerns.

In the meeting, she agreed; but when he left, she went back to her original argument, "We need to still run this campaign so we can control the narrative."

I asked her, "Shouldn't you have brought that up in the meeting? I don't agree with it, but if you think it's valid, you should present it, do you want me to help with this?"

She said she wanted help to run the campaign.

So I started a thread with her, the enterprise sales leader, and included what she had told me about controlling the narrative. The sales leader responded, "It's the same as what I had said in the meeting: no campaign."

The analyst relations person then said, "Why did you forward what I sent to you about controlling the narrative?"

I checked with the sales leader and he said he is flabbergasted that there's so much push from AR; but he didn't know what to do.

So what's the conflict?

My own judgement and the opinion of the head of sales both felt the campaign was not right. We couldn't figure out why she insisted.

The solution (not a great one) was I told the sales leader, let's try to contain it from going into active deals, and let's also see how impactful the report actually is. He said he'd already gotten some emails from active prospects asking about it, and I helped him to scale a mitigating message and got the blessing from AR.

I offered the AR person that we would do a campaign, but we actually had demand-generation events that I am working on to present new features and content; this was not going to stimulate demand, but I would find a way to work it in.

She got upset, and said this should have been launched already since the report was already published.

I said I'm going to work with her to get it done.

However, I had revenue generating campaigns to focus on, so worked on those; but it resulted in weekly she came and asked where was hers, why was it late, what does she need to do.

Finally we got it done, and it didn't have negative impact.

What did I think I did right?

What would I do differently?

Things to write and think about