March 28, 2024

Archives for 2013

Nothing Happens Until Someone Sells Something: Best Practices to Enabling Your Sales Channel to Effectively Sell Your Products

The following presentation is from my AIPMM webinar on Nov 1, 2013.

Too often, those of us in the product marketing role are not doing enough to help our sales team or sales channel be successful. Our typical approach to helping is to provide a new salesperson with some marketing collateral and a product presentation and then wish them luck as they look for prospects and try to close deals with anyone that listens. This approach is sufficient for the star salespeople as they intuitively know how to talk with the right potential buyers about their problems and then show these buyers how to solve these problems with their products or services. But unfortunately, this only represents about 20% of salespeople. The other 80% of sales people need more training and coaching to be successful and we as product marketers need to help them be successful. This is the process of “Sales Enablement”.

What happens when we don’t engage in the sales enablement process? Sales people pursue opportunities that don’t fit well with your solution, speak with the prospects that aren’t really decision makers, sell solutions that you don’t really have and the list can go on. But the overall resulting impact is wasted time and effort in pursuing the wrong opportunities, confusion in the market place and poor sales results.

How to Create Sales & Marketing Tools That Sales & Customers Will Actually Use

The following is my AIPMM webinar from Oct 4th, 2013.

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), “Up to 90% of collateral created by marketing is never used by sales.” That is an astounding statistic which should be a wakeup call to those of us in Product Marketing that we need to be doing something different. Most of the time, sales doesn’t use our tools because the tools are ineffective, and the reasons for this include:

  • Too many companies create a standard checklist of marketing and sales tools based upon what someone used in a past company, without any consideration as to what is really needed in this company.
  •  Too much content is about the company and their products with little discussion about the buyers and users and what they need.

Keynote Address at ProductCamp Minneapolis 2013 – All of the Responsibility, But No Authority: Get Over It and Lead

I was honored with the invitation to deliver the keynote address at ProductCamp Minnesota on Oct 19, 2013.   I decided to leverage some of my earlier blog posts and present on Product Management Leadership.   I hope you enjoy my thoughts and appreciate your thoughts on the topic.

 

What is a Go-to-Market Strategy & How to Create One

Going From Messaging Nightmare to Messaging Delight, How to Create a Powerful Messaging Platform

Earned Authority #3: Develop Great Working Relationships With Your Key Internal Constituencies

In my previous two blogs on the topic of developing earned authority as a Product Manager or Product Marketer, I addressed the importance of developing you expertise in the Product Management domain and in your Market domain.   But having great expertise is not enough if you don’t have great working relationships with your key constituents, especially those internal to your company.

One of the reasons most of us in Product Management & Product Marketing love this role is the opportunity to interact with other parts of the organization.   When I think about the key internal constituencies, these include at least the following:

  • Executives – you have to show you are helping them achieve their business objectives and request funding from them.
  • Sales – they can help you make your product successful or they can sabotage you.
  • Engineering – you don’t have a product unless they develop it for you.
  • Marketing – they are going to help you create awareness and demand.
  • Services – they make sure your customers have a great experience with your product.
  • Finance – they might just be key in helping you develop forecasts and getting your business case approved.
  • Operations – these people might be more behind the scenes, but are also a critical cog in the success of your products.

That’s a lot of people to develop great relationships with, but as most of us PMs and PMMs have strong extrovert tendencies, this should not be a problem.   Let’s look at some ways that we can develop and enhance these relationships.

  1. Treat people nicely.   As I write this, I can’t help but think of Amy’s Baking Company which recently has been in the news for the terrible way they treated their employees and customers at the restaurant.   Without going into details, let’s “not” treat our key constituents like they did.   Remember the Golden Rule:  “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”
  2. Solicit and respect the perspective and ideas of others in the organization.   Most of us in Product Management/Product Marketing think that we are pretty smart, but we don’t have all of the answers and there are definitely areas in which we know very little.
  3. Arrive at meetings on time and prepare for the discussion that is on the agenda.  If you are in charge, plan an agenda, invite only those that need to participate and keep on schedule.  Don’t make people wait on you and don’t waste their time.
  4. Interact with your key constituents in non-business settings.   Go to lunch with them or join them for a happy hour.   Participate in non-business, but fun onsite activities, like sports, parties, etc.  These allows you to interact with people on a more casual basis and gain insights into each other that you wouldn’t be able to do within formal meetings and help you develop friendships, not just working relationships.
  5. Learn about their interests and be willing to talk about what interests them.
  6. When presenting to different constituents, make sure to think in their terms and key objectives (What’s in it for them).
  7. Keep them informed about what is going on with you product.   Regular updates to the key constituents can buy you some good favor and will help prevent unwanted surprises.
  8. Give credit where credit is due.   When someone makes a great contribution that makes your product (you) look good, make sure to give them credit for their contribution.
  9. Take time to say “Thank You” when people take time to help you out.

If you’re looking for additional thoughts, I highly recommend Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends & Influence People”.   Even though it was first published in 1937, the principles haven’t changed.

 

 

How to Develop a Deep Understanding of Your Target Markets: The Starting Point for Great Product Marketing

What Product Marketing Can Do To Overcome The Eight Most Common Barriers To Accelerating Sales Revenue

How Product Marketing Contributes to Revenue Growth & Product Success – Webinar Series

We partnered with AIPMM to conduct a series of Webinars on what Product Marketing can do to contribute to product success via revenue growth.  The role of Product Marketing is often misunderstand and through these webinars, I hope you better understand the strategic nature of the Product Marketing role and how they must partner with Product Management and Sales to drive revenue and product success.   The series of webinars includes:

Please click on the associated link for registration information.

Earned Authority #2: Develop Your Expertise in Your Market Domain

Way too many Product Managers (and Product Marketers) are experts in their products, but unfortunately, not experts in the market domain where their product competes. I often here people say that Product Managers should know everything about their product and be able to answer any question about their product. That can be useful, but even more useful is to know the details of their market, of their buyers and users, the kinds of problems they are experiencing and the kind of problems they expect to encounter in the future.

So Why is Market Expertise So Important?

Let me give you two reasons:

  1. The most successful product managers that I know are experts in their markets.
  2. You key constituencies (internal & external) care more about your market expertise than they do about your product expertise.

Why Your Key Stakeholders Care About Your Market Expertise as a Product Manager?

  • Your engineers care about your market expertise. They would much rather work on product ideas and functionality that address specific market needs than they would on product ideas or functionality that you thought would be cool. Trust me, even though engineers are known to develop things just because they are cool, they really do want the products they work on to be successful and want that new functionality they work on to be used by users. Have you ever written a product requirement and gotten push back from the engineers as to why that needed to be done? I know that has happened to me and in all cases it was because it was something that I thought would be cool and not something the market expressed a need for. I can think of one specific example where there was a feature I thought we needed in the product, but if I had presented that feature to the engineering team without any market evidence, they would have pushed back on it as something unnecessary. But one day while speaking to a customer, the customer related to me the specific market reason as to why they needed the feature and based upon that, it was easy to have it added to the product.
  • Your sales team cares about your market expertise. When sales people try to sell product features, they fall flat and rarely succeed. But when they discover prospect’s problems and are able to show how your product solves those problems, they succeed much more often. Guess who they count on to understand those market problems and to make sure the product solves those problems? You, the Product Manager. So unless you, the Product Manager, have deep market expertise and understand your customer’s and prospect’s problems in depth, how will the sales team know how to sell your product?
  • Your marketing team cares about your market expertise.  How can you develop or contribute to a Go-to-Market Strategy if you don’t have market expertise.   Just like the sales team needs your guidance, so does the marketing team.   They need you to provide guidance on target market segments, buyer and user personas, value proposition and competitive differentiators and key messages to communicate.   Once they have a clear understanding of these key items, they can rock with marketing, but you can’t tell them this without developing market expertise.
  • Your management team cares about your market expertise. One definition of Product Management that I like is to maximize the value of your product for your customers, partners and company throughout the life cycle of the product. That’s what your management team cares about because that ensures profitability for today and tomorrow. You can’t do this unless you are a market expert. When you present a new market opportunity to or evaluate a new market opportunity for your management team, they want to see a clear and viable business case based upon a clear understanding of how you can solve big and pervasive market problems, not about cool products. You can only do this if you are a market expert.
  • Finally, your customers care about your market expertise. The buyers of your product don’t care about cool features. They care about how it helps them solve problems they have or help them become more competitive. They want to be able to do things faster, better and cheaper, and you can only help them do that if you understand their problems or the obstacles to achieving their objectives. And you can only get a conversation with senior executives if you show that you understand or want to understand their problems and look for ways of solving them.

How to Develop Expertise in Your Market Domain

So if I haven’t made this perfectly clear, your credibility as a Product Manager and your ability to motivate others to support your product plans rests upon your depth of Market Expertise.  Here are some suggestions to build your market expertise and credibility.

  • Most important of all, you must spend time speaking to your customers as well as the non-customers in your target markets. Meet with and get to know all levels of influencers and decision makers.   From this, you can observe and hear them talk about their challenges and problems and discover how they actually use your product.   You should find a good balance of doing this over the phone and meeting face-to-face.   By doing this, you’ll learn many insights that you’ll never discover with your butt in your office chair.
  • Actively participate in online communities that your company hosts or that are relevant to your market.   Observe what people are talking about and contribute to the discussion to demonstrate thought leadership.
  • Go on an occasional sales call.   I wouldn’t recommend that you overdue this, as the sales team might turn you into the sales engineer, but this will give you another perspective on the needs of your target market.
  • Have regular conversations with you business partners, channel and suppliers.  They have needs to meet and will offer additional insights.
  • Do Win/Loss Analysis.  You’ll rarely get an accurate picture from sales of why you won or lost a deal, but you can learn a lot more by doing the call yourself, especially on the losses.
  • Speak with those in your company doing implementations or providing professional services or customer care.  They are front-line everyday and hear the conversations and complaints from your customers.   They are a great source for improving your products.
  • Set aside time each week to read relevant industry news.   This is one of those tasks that if you don’t schedule, you’ll never find time to do it.   Another idea is to use airplane time to catch up on some of your industry reading.
  • Use Google Alerts to get updates about important competitive or industry news.
  • Develop and help lead an active User Group or Product Advisory Council.  Make sure they meet on a regular basis and ensure they have time to present their needs as a group.
  • Don’t hoard what you learn and keep it all to yourself.   Share it with your key constituents.  Write short summaries on customer visits or do an occasional lunch & learn presentation.
  • Finally, if I didn’t say it enough already, I’ll say it again, spend time with your target market!!!

 Nuff Said!  Becoming a Market Expert is Your Primary Role!