Can’t B2B Sales and Marketing Just Get Along?

So what’s the answer? It’s not glamorous, but it’s imperative – sales and marketing must come together to establish a blueprint for success. In a methodical manner, they need to hammer out the processes, messages, and strategies for pulling prospects in and getting them to buy.

How Do You Measure the Effectiveness of Your Product Marketing Managers?

A huge contribution to outcomes is to be the expert on your buyers. Product marketing managers are often confined to the four walls of their offices with little contact with real buyers in the market. Set a quota that requires them to interact with potential buyers, outside the office and write up what they learn. Start with eight or ten per quarter. These are interactions that are not conducted as part of a sales call.

3 Big Secrets For Small (Niche) Products

When you are tasked with managing a niche product, you need to be careful that your profit margins don’t get eaten alive by your distribution costs. Since you will be sending small numbers of products to lots of different customers, these costs can quickly spiral out of control.

the essential parts of product management

What essential parts do you envision yourself contributing as product management? This is a question I have asked myself and those in teams over the years. Take some time to regularly ask yourself how you are participating, supporting and contributing in your role. Then take a look at the team around you. This is a great starting point.

Learning from One Data Point

That’s the power of one data point. If you care to look, a single data point or case is an incredibly rich story. Just listen to the story, tease out the logic within it, and you’ll learn more than by attempting to listen to fifty stories and fitting them all into the same 10-variable codification scheme

On Competitive Advantages:

So what qualifies as valid competitive advantages?  Here are some candidates:

• First mover advantage – you are the first to solve this particular problem in this particular way. (This could work for and against a business though. It’s much easier to launch a product into an existing category than to make your own product category.)
• Deep knowledge about your target market’s needs and wants, enabling you to build something that solves their problems better than the competition has solved their problems.
• Special soup technology nobody can easily copy, even if they hire away your chief engineer or read and understand all of your published patent applications.
• Deep relationships with big fish at key potential customers (if B2B) that gives you a big head start on business development.
• A team with domain expertise that can execute at twice the speed of their competitor’s team

Why Innovation Depends On Creative Approaches:

Crowdsourcing is a great concept, in theory, but in practice, you need to figure out what will motivate people to participate and what will drive them to maximize the quality of their contribution. By channeling participation through a game, the UW team recruited 57,000 contributors. Out of that number, enough people were motivated to achieve the highest score possible, thus increasing the quality of many individual contributions. That’s a far better result than the team would have achieved had they used an obscure biochemistry forum to post the question, “So, what do you think?”

Product Manager: Don’t Step On Your Long Tail…!

Your ultimate goal here is to be able to define a unique spot in the market for your product. You want to make sure that your potential customers view your product as being unique and unavailable from any other vendor.

Rupert Murdoch – Zero; John Nash – One:

Understanding your market involves not only knowing what problems your customers face, but also predicting how your competitors will behave. Competitive analysis is not just capturing a snap-shot of their products and positioning today, but also forming predictions of how they will respond to the disruptions you will create in your market by innovating. Markets are not static – you have to understand both how your customers’ needs will evolve and how your competitor’s offerings will change, in order to understand how your product will perform

Hybrid Feedback is Stronger:

As last week’s commenters pointed out, there’s a challenge in offering multiple choices vs. asking for freeform responses: You might get more responses but still be missing the root cause of customers’ concerns/problems/ideas.  They’re right. Freeform answers alone are flawed. Multiple choice options alone are flawed. You need to use them both together in order to generate unstoppable, reliable hybrid feedback!

Startup Messaging:

The essence of my talk was that good messaging answers the following questions for potential customers:

• What the heck is it? (meaning can you tell me in plain language what it is that you do)
• Is it for me? (meaning does your messaging appeal to the segment that you are targeting)
• Why buy it from you? (meaning what are the compelling reasons to choose your offering over a competing offering)

What every marketer, product manager, product marketing leader and CMO needs to know about content:

Whew… that was a long title, so is the presentation, but it is spot on.  Marketing content isn’t a haphazard “get it done set of tasks” for us as marketeers and brand folk.  Mark Fidelman from Seek Omega nails in 74 slides.

What Every CMO Needs to Know About Content Strategy

Startup Musings – An “Oh Crap” moment:

The product release was a textbook example of excellent teamwork and extraordinary efficiency in execution.  The fatal flaw was mainly my fault.  That kind of fatal flaw had happened before on a different platform.   The lead engineer on the project hasn’t seen it before, but I have.  I should have anticipated it and made sure SQA tested for the condition that would have triggered it. But I missed it.  I was colossally lucky someone caught it before it was released into the wild.

Strategic Product Manager – Value Add or Added Value:

If you follow the edict (yes, edict) that value determines prices that determines cost, then your add-ons have value (assuming the cost is greater than zero) and therefore have a price that is greater than zero. So why offer them for free?

Business Insider – Competition Is Overrated: Stop Worrying About It And Just Build A Better Product:

Suppose you have an idea for a startup, and then do some research only to discover there are already similar products on the market. You become disheartened and wonder if you should abandon your idea.  In fact, the existence of competing products is a meaningful signal, but not necessarily a negative one.

Spatially Relevant – Content, Content, Content

As you develop content and set it free, there are some key questions a marketer should ask since while content should be set free, it’s not free to develop:

• Is this intended for the buyer/Analyst/Partners/Sales/Others?
• How will this content influence your audience to do some?
• How does this relate to your existing content/strategy?
• Does this establish a new content theme, if not related to previous content and is it a sustainable theme?
• Is the content reusable?

Neuro Science Marketing – Why Stories Sell

Short testimonials are not a bad thing at all. Letting potential customers know that other real people used your product with success is always a good thing. But turning a testimonial into a personal anecdote will greatly increase its impact. Adding a name, a face, and story will play to the way our brains evolved, and will be both more convincing and more memorable.

This also explains why word-of-mouth is such a powerful tool: if the story is told not by a celebrity or paid endorser, but by someone we actually know, it will be even more potent.

The Experience is the Product - The Phrase That Should be Banned from Product Managers’ Vocabulary

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”  If you feel the need to say this, then you have screwed up.

On Product Management – Why I hate that Henry Ford quote!

You’ve heard it before haven’t you?  It gets used all the time. Even  Steve Jobs has used it in interviews.  Unfortunately, the people who use this quote most often seem to be people who think they have all the answers or want to quash any discussion about getting outside validation of ideas or plans.

Product Bytes – Magical Thinking and the Zero-Sum Road

That gives us Mironov’s Roadmap Theorem #1: you can’t put something new into the current development plan without taking out something of equal or larger size. When stated this plainly, it should be as obvious as the law of gravity.

Where the Product Management Tribe Gathers – Transparency isn’t Invisible:

However, in many organizations, product management is relegated to “hoarding requirements” and nothing more. Why? I believe it’s due to the fact that the team hasn’t built a level of transparency within its organization, product management leadership doesn’t effectively or consistently know how to get the right information into the hands of senior management and executives, there’s limited understanding as to the value of product management and finally, by human nature we often collect or horde information and hold on to it until we feel it’s time to share or someone asks to give the information. What can we do to improve transparency in product management?

Rocketwatcher – Presentation Skills Lessons Learned from SXSW

It was painfully obvious when folks hadn’t prepared and even some seasoned presenters blew it.  At one panel, Robert Scoble ran a laptop connected to the screens and we squirmed watching him search online for the hashtag (a way to reference the talk on Twitter) that was printed on the card in front of him facing the audience.   The hashtag was (ironically/appropriately): “twittertools”

AIPMM – Three Tips For Successful Product Management Today:

Let product development decisions be made by the people who have to do the work to make the product happen. Because products are so complex, and markets change so quickly, there is no longer enough time nor the right words to communicate clearly to anyone outside of the process all the nuances of a market opportunity. Key strategic decisions still must be made by upper management. But empowering the people executing the process is the most efficient way to ensure your product stays relevant.

Strategic Product Manager – Using the Roadmap for Planning and Selling

Prospects may want to see your vision. You’ll need to make everyone aware the risks with showing prospects the roadmap. It could delay the sales cycle if they wait for future features or set poor expectations if they believe the roadmap will not change (and it will change). There is nothing wrong with sharing your vision, but the appropriate expectations need to be set for the Sales team and the prospect

The Experience is the Product - 3 Marketing Mistakes You’re Probably Making

Talk to 3 power-user and 3 semi-novice customers and ask them “how would you explain to a friend how our product is different from [competitor]?”   Are their responses factually accurate?  Are their responses similar?  If so, you’re doing a great job.  If your power users can explain the difference but your novice customers can’t, you need to find the explanations that work.

Prospects may want to see your vision. You’ll need to make everyone aware the risks with showing prospects the roadmap. It could delay the sales cycle if they wait for future features or set poor expectations if they believe the roadmap will not change (and it will change). There is nothing wrong with sharing your vision, but the appropriate expectations need to be set for the Sales team and the prospect