What do you do if your key stakeholders are not engaged with your product?

If you can't win internally, you won't win externally! Identify key champions in different teams and ask for candid feedback. Find out goals and pitch the benefits of championing your product in a way it's aligned to their role. Some common cases: If it's sales or partners, could be commision - is there a SPIF or incentive you can implement? If it's CSM, could be excess of negative feedback from customers or low morale, anything you can do for their VIP customers? If it's Marketing, could be bandwidth or budget constraints - any internal resources you could pull to support? If it's Product, could be a change in priorities or bandwidth, anything you can help with upcoming releases?

Develop, socialize, and execute aligned SLAs that clearly define the ground rules. As you build engagement, clarify critical points of the process. Understand the end-to-end moments of engagement and see if there are upstream dependencies that are precluding effective collaboration. If the lack of engagement is cultural, rather than procedural, focus on learning from your stakeholders through inquisitive conversations. Develop relationships with stakeholders so processes seem less transactional and more mutually beneficial.

It's frustrating sometimes. Let's focus on what matters to them. Ask them about their biggest challenges, and then connect the dots – show them how your product solves their specific problems. It's all about shifting the conversation from "what" to "why they should care".

In my experience in product marketing. I have found it essential to make communication the lowest common denominator of relationship building with all stakeholders, vertically, and horizontally. Communication requires outbound and inbound dialogue to occur frequently, with regularity. Understand the communication style and norms of your organization, as well as the expectations and needs of key stakeholder groups.

To achieve effective stakeholder communication, actively updates via emails, presentations & casual chats to individual preferences through a multi-channel approach. Show transparency by being upfront about challenges. This builds trust and keeps stakeholders engaged, whereas sugarcoating setbacks damages their faith in the long run.

This is crucial! Facilitate a collaborative goal-setting session with key stakeholders. Have an open discussion to align on priorities, objectives, and define what success looks like. Getting buy-in upfront prevents misalignment and conflict down the road.

In addition to decision-making, create advisory boards or product councils that give stakeholders a formal voice. This ensures consistent, regular feedback loops rather than ad-hoc engagement.

When you offer involvement, you also need to demand their commitment. If you ask them to review something, press them to review it. If you need feedback on a decision, press them to offer that feedback. If they are serious about getting involved, they will do so. I've been involved in many product and proposal projects in which feedback wasn't offered until AFTER the decision was made. This is worse than no feedback at all.

I'd amend this to just say "celebrate." During my 10 years in proposals, over half of the proposals were not wins. Celebrate anyway because you got the thing out, which is success in itself. My losing proposal to the Western Identification Network laid the groundwork for future successful proposals in Albuquerque, the state of New Mexico, Pinellas County, and many other organizations.

We don't do this enough! Quantify and showcase the business impact of product milestones in terms that resonate with those stakeholders. For executives, highlight revenue, cost savings, etc. For customer-facing roles, share positive user feedback and usage metrics. Tangible results breed confidence and buy-in!