Clara and Marcus launch their plan

CHAPTER TWO

[If you’re new to Clara and Marcus’s big adventures at WidgetCo, you can start here.]

Clara, WidgetCo’s product manager, and Marcus, Clara’s friend in product marketing, are allied in their vision - they can see WidgetCo’s future in generative AI. They just have to convince everyone on the management team.

In our last issue, we read about Clara and Marcus putting their audience first by using the Who What What table to understand each member of the management team’s biases and concerns. Now they are ready to take action.

“Before the next strategy meeting we need to prime the pump,” Marcus said.

“And make sure we keep Jones out of the loop for now,” said Clara. “If we get Justine and Hector on board, Jones won’t be able to object, even if he is VP of Product Marketing.” (Click here for a little backstory on the team.)

“Exactly. So how do we get to Hector and Justine?” Marcus looked worried. Neither he nor Clara could just waltz into Engineering VP Justine’s cube and Hector, the CRO, was always out meeting with customers.

Clara and Marcus knew they needed to master their channels. They had to identify not just the best way to reach Hector and Justine, but the best message to get their attention.

“I’ll Slack Justine just the link to the article I read about what three competitors are planning and tell her I’d like her input,” said Clara. “Then I can float our idea and see if she tears the skin off of my face.”

“Great, and I’ll take the customer data and send Hector a text. I can ask him if he’s hearing/seeing similar things in the field,” said Marcus. “Then I can invite him for a drink. He’s supposed to be back on Thursday.”

“When are we going to go to Monica?” said Clara. “I think we wait until after we at least soft-sound Hector and Justine, right?”

“Yeah. And I’ll let Gary know what Hector says. The key to Hector is just listening to him. If you can sit with him for long enough you do start to pick up patterns in his customer conversations. Gary will want to hear what the customers are doing.”

“So we have a plan. And we’ll just keep repeating the same thing - ‘We see a way forward that meets both requirements.’ Right?”

“Yup,” said Marcus. “And now I have to go to Jones’s team meeting and pretend to pay rapt attention.”

Clara and Marcus will: master their channels, listen, and embrace repeating themselves. These are three of the six essentials for every leader/communicator. Next time we’ll see where that gets them!

[You can find extra tidbits of WidgetCo backstory on poseycorp’s blog.]