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What is this About?

May 18, 2011 By

Here’s a deceptively difficult question for you to ponder (inspired by Steven Pressfield’s excellent latest book, “Do the Work“),

What is this about?

If you are working on developing a new product, can you answer? Can you do it without a ten page PowerPoint deck? How about to someone not familiar with your product line or industry? If you only had 10 seconds to explain in front of a room of potential customers buyers could you convince them?

What is this about?

Ok, so now that you get the point, take a look at how you are talking about your product in your marketing campaigns, advertisements, web sites, sales decks, blogs. Does the message still come through? Do the sub-points add or strengthen the overall message? Ultimately, are you building the overall story or watering it down?

Talk to your customers. Ask them how they describe what you do? Does it align to your story? Does what you think is valuable and different align with their assessments? Does your “special sauce” really taste special?

Now take a look at your competitor’s marketing, advertisements, web sites, blogs. Does what they are saying compare to your story? Do the differences jump off the page or do you need to go down a level or two?

Like what you find?

If not, return to the start and ask, “What is this about?” Fix from there.

Image Credit:  Colin_K

Filed Under: feature, Product Management, Product Marketing Tagged With: , ,

What Proven Winners Can Teach You: Marketing Lessons from the Garden

May 1, 2011 By

Let me start with a little disclaimer:

I am not a gardener and I most likely will never be one. While I do visit Home Depot regularly, I spend as little time as possible in the garden section. Over the last few years, the majority of plants we have purchased for our home landscaping have met a disastrous end under the Texas sun.

This should now be history after I came across the best marketing sign I have ever seen at in the Garden Center:

(click to see full size image)

While there were lots of little signs all over the garden section with little instructions of where and when the different plants needed sun, this one stood on on many levels:

  • Clear end-cap placement
  • Distinctive packaging
  • Positively strong and recognizable product name (who ever got fired for buying PROVEN WINNERS)

And most important was the clear, crisp messaging with strong value points. Rest assured that these flowers are heat resistance, fit anywhere in your garden, need little maintenance, and play well with the rest of your plants. With these features is there any wonder they are the #1 plant brand?

I am sure I paid a premium for these Proven Winners but the feeling that I was getting some extra value for my purchase (plus a flower that might hang around a bit longer) was worth it in my book.  I also know that their Product + Packaging + Placement +Promotion found the perfect buyer, the clueless plant persona, at the exact right time.

Excellent execution!

 

Filed Under: feature, Product Management Tagged With: , ,

Start With The Customer Prodcast #3 – All Hat, All Cattle

April 18, 2011 By

In this week’s edition of the Start with the Customer Prodcast (a product focused podcast), I am humbled to be joined by three product superstars – April Dunford, of Rocket Watcher,  Jim Holland, of Product Management Tribe, and Scott Sehlhorst, of Tyner Blain.

We started the call playing armchair product manager while discussing the latest news of the Blackberry Playbook launch – from their product strategy to their misses with the launch and messaging. We then continued to the topic of customer conversations and the power of the product story.  We concluded on the challenges of product marketing alignment within the organization and how it needs to work.

Enjoy the show and would love to hear your thoughts!

You can listen here:

Or download through iTunes.

Show notes:

Runtime:  36 mins

BlackBerry Playbook Launch

Customer Conversations

Product – Marketing and Management

  • Where’s the fit in the organization?
  • The Pragmatic Marketing Framework
  • Aligning product and marketing – keeping them close
  • A shared understanding of the market
  • From an agile development perspective, where does the Product Owner fit?
  • The blurring of the lines between Product Marketing and Marketing
Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Start With The Customer Prodcast #2 – The Suck Threshold

April 13, 2011 By

Welcome to the second episode of the Start with the Customer “prodcast”.  In this conversation, Scott Sehlhorst and I start off the discussion on customer dynamics and trust relationships.  From there we continue the case example from the last prodcast on Dropbox by discussing the impact of Amazon’s new Cloud Drive and the emerging Cloud Computing wars.  Finally, we end with some book recommendations.

Enjoy the product discussion!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes.

Here’s the show notes:

Runtime:  35 minutes

The Trust Pyramid

  • Intro from Scott’s recent post, “representing how people have different levels of trust in the assertions of others”
  • Ratings and reviews
  • The power of the “like button”
  • Planning for word of mouth the start
  • Social can’t help a bad product
  • Building for engagement
  • The suck threshold (great example of where you don’t want to be)
  • Avoid the Fidelity Belly
  • Toyota’s vs Hyundai’s product strategy

Case discussion:  Amazon Cloud Drive

  • Intro to Amazon CloudDrive
  • Cloud storage as a market disrupter
  • Positioning around music – and then expanding
  • The benefits and risk of launching first (the MP3.com story)
  • The upcoming Cloud wars and investing for the long term
  • Proactively building the product to define the market

Books on the table:

  • Unfolding the Napkin:  The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures (Scott)
  • Tell to Win:  Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story (Josh)
  • Enchantment:  The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions (Josh)

 

Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast Tagged With: , ,

Windows Phone – The Problem with Coming Late to the Party

March 22, 2011 By

Trying to launch a product into a well defined marketplace is not an easy endeavor. Thanks to Microsoft, we have a perfect case study to watch.

First off, let’s put aside the fact that Microsoft has had a phone operating system for years. Instead, let’s focus on the relaunch of Windows Phone 7 to compete against the dominant mobile operating systems, RIM, iOS, and Android.

Give Microsoft credit for doing some research and at least looking for a way to differentiate in this crowded market.  They identified a great insight that most smart phones users were highly engaged with their phones causing them to miss events happening around them.

So how did Microsoft use this insight?  When the phone launched back in October, the idea that a smartphone could be too engaging was at the forefront of their messaging. However, while the commercials were cute, it was confusing what Windows Phone actually did differently?

Prof. Calkins, from Kellogg School of Management, captures the difficulty of acting on this insight,

How do you get people to stop focusing on their phones?  I suppose you could produce a phone that doesn’t work very well, or is so frustrating to use that it isn’t worth the time.  You could also create a phone that simply shuts off, perhaps after you’ve used it for more than seven hours in a day.  It looks like Microsoft will promote the product by saying it is so easy and quick to use that you can check it and then focus on other things.  I’m just not sure this is how the world works.  There is always something else to check, or a new app to use, or a new website to visit.

Fast forward to March of 2011 and things aren’t going so well.  The original message doesn’t seem to have worked and sales aren’t taking off.

So, here comes round two of the product message:  ”When was the last time your phone surprised you… in a good way?”

So, is this the message that really explains what the phone does?  It’s a phone for gamers. It’s a phone for movie watchers. It’s a phone for business. It’s something your old phone isn’t??

As far as I can tell this could be an ad for any of the smartphones out on the market – they are all app platforms at this point.

If there is something special about this phone, Microsoft isn’t doing a good job helping it standout. First it’s like no other smart phone out there and now it’s doing the same apps as Android and Apple. This is where launching late has really put Microsoft in a bind.  The race to develop apps is on and the competition already has a massive lead (Apple Apps – 350k, Google Apps – 250k, Microsoft Apps – 10k).

I have never owned a Windows Phone so I can’t tell you if the phone is better or worse than others on the market but I can tell you that I have not seen anything yet that peaked my interest to find out.

This has to be the hardest part of trying to get attention in a marketplace that is dominated by other players.  Incremental improvements will make it difficult to stand out and impossible to “surprise” people.

 

Image credit:  bthouse68

Filed Under: Product Management Tagged With: , , ,

Agile Marketing: The HubSpot Way

February 13, 2011 By

This week’s guest blogger is a very talented marketer that I had the privilege of speaking with at the last ProductCamp Austin on the Art of Being Relevant in 2011.  Kirsten Knipp,  Director of Product Evangelism, Marketing at Hubspot, also gave a talk on marketing the agile way that I thought was fantastic (and I was not the only one – she won Best Presenter! ).  Big thanks to Kirsten for agreeing to share more on the topic.  Here is her guest post:

Waterfall.

Scrum.

Agile.

What do those terms have to do with marketing?

Not much, yet.  Marketing teams typically manage to annual goals with some quarterly targets based on big projects and initiatives that are spec’d out in ‘squishy’ terms.  That’s one of the reasons it is really hard to be a marketer.  How do you prove the value of marketing effort?  How can you adapt to changing market conditions when you’ve got a 6-month campaign that’s been pre-paid?  How can you respond to the needs of your sales team without failing to deliver on other priorities?

Enter Scrum.  I was skeptical when I first joined my current company, HubSpot, and learned that we were going to start working in ‘monthly sprints’ per scrum or agile methodologies.

The concept of scrum as part of agile development has mostly been applied in software development – where there was a strong desire to move away from the waterfall method, which was mired in long cycles of definition and coding before any product was released, often resulting in stale or late-to-market products.  Instead of building a behemoth, full-featured offer, agile relies on the completion of small chunks of ‘shippable code’ that can be ideated, built, tested and shipped in the time span of a single sprint – usually 15-30 days.

Agile doesn’t have to be limited to software development, or marketing for that matter.  You can apply this same concept to any work – the premise is based on a few key concepts and roles, simplified and adapted here based on how we employ them at HubSpot:

  • Sprint – a defined period of time in which a team commits to complete certain work
  • Task / User Story – a tightly defined chunk of work with specific outcomes
  • Story Points – the estimated level of effort a chunk of work will take (way more detail could be spent here – perhaps a future post will detail how we use story points at HubSpot)
  • Standup – a daily meeting, held standing, where members of the team share what they worked on yesterday, their plans for today and any ‘blocking’ items hindering their work progress
  • Sprint Commitment  – a public meeting where teams commit to their stories for the coming sprint
  • Sprint Review – a public meeting where teams review accomplishments and incompletions from their past sprints

Marketing at HubSpot employs a monthly sprint in which each of two teams drafts stories for the month, estimates points and collaborates to prioritize and ultimately commit to a set of stories for the coming month.  That doesn’t mean we don’t have a 2011 plan.  We do.  But, we’ve found that working on smaller monthly goals be it the number of leads or a specific content item, is much more manageable than chasing after a 12-month goal.

In fact, when I recently shared HubSpot’s agile marketing practice at Product Camp Austin – slides embedded here, I broke down the benefits as I see them:

1)     Transparency – so many companies see marketing as a black box of voodoo.  It’s not.  There are certain activities that lead to success and measuring them helps you figure out what they are.  At HubSpot, we share what we are working on with the company – in the process getting both feedback and buy-in –ultimately increasing transparency and gaining credibility for our work.

2)     Prioritization – it’s very hard to say no or ask ‘what slips’ if someone asks you for something and you don’t know how much effort it is or how to map it against current priorities.  The beauty of transparency and agile is that we have a monthly list of what we are working on.  Yes, we can take on a small favor here or there – but if someone asks for a big shift – it’s a very open conversation to say, I will need to NOT do this particular story instead.  Prioritization becomes a very rational and productive conversation instead of a tug of war.

3)     Predictability – Because teams assign points to their work and the daily meeting reviews status and progress, including blockers, there are rarely big surprises.  If someone on my team has an issue, we typically know inside 24-48 hours – and as a team, we can decide if another member can chip in or if we need to influence another team to help remove the blocker.  No matter what, I have yet to reach the end of the month and find that ‘stuff didn’t get done’.  There is an element of personal ownership and team accountability that scrum and daily standup create which could never be replicated by a boss telling a team what to do – a huge benefit in today’s flatter and faster organizations.

All these things add up to smart, fast and flexible marketing – a must in today’s world of social media and inbound marketing.  Transparency breeds more data driven decisions and input from the rest of the organization.  A monthly (or in some orgs bi-weekly) cadence means you are completing chunks of deliverable work, even small ones, with a turnover that provides feedback and results quickly.  Tasking out activities and talking through them within a team enables quicker problem resolution and allows for re-prioritization if there is an emergency or new market opportunity.

One could wax philosophical about agile in marketing – but this is a blog not a book.  At HubSpot, we don’t employ agile to the letter – we’ve adapted it in ways that work for our team.  Others might work for you.

In the end, I am a convert.  I don’t want to work on a 6 month plan.  I am enjoying agile – even though there may be a bit more ‘planning overhead’, there is also a lot more satisfaction in a job well done every month with results to show and the ability to tell my sales team – you know what, we can’t do that this week – but, we start a new sprint in about two weeks – I think we can prioritize that and get it done, without missing a beat.

How do you manage marketing efforts today?  A daily checklist?  A 6 month plan?  How could your organization employ agile?


Image Credit:  Flickr

Filed Under: Guest Blogger, Product Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Sales and Marketing: Till Death Do Us Part

February 10, 2011 By

I have recently come across some really good analysis on the alignment gap between sales and marketing.

In his article “3 Reasons Your Marketing & Sales Departments Aren’t Clicking” Carlos Hidalgo is making a critical observation. Marketing and sales organizations typically don’t have a common viewpoint on what alignment should be based:

“The truth is that the right thing around which marketing and sales teams should align is their buyers. Today’s B2B buyer is looking to engage with their vendors and have a relevant 1-1 dialogue. They don’t care about the internal squabbles that may occur between marketing and sales teams. They want to feel attended to. So, marketing and sales need to collaborate on how to have the dialogue with the buyer.

This sentiment is echoed in an excellent research report from Forrester Analyst Jeff Ernst B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Starts with the Customer (note: you will need to be Forrester customer to access the report. Alternatively read Jeff’s thoughts on his blog).

In particular, Jeff recommends the following to overcome the obstacles of alignment:

  • Develop a common understand of the buyers’ needs
  • Map activities around the customer’s buying process
  • Align marketing and sales initiatives around the customer

I could not agree more.

Marketing is all about moving the customers through their buying cycle journey and only by starting with this common understanding will the so called ‘great divide’ between sales and marketing become history.

I would also like to urge my fellow marketers to stop focusing on what makes us different from our sales counterparts and rather focus on how together we can provide the best buying experience to our customers.

We are all sales people. We are all marketers. Stop the blame game. Start working on your synergies. Till death do us part.

Image Credit:  Flickr

Filed Under: feature, Product Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Startup Marketing Interview with Rocket Watcher April Dunford

February 8, 2011 By

If you haven’t seen it, April Dunford, who writes on the Rocket Watcher Blog, has been working on a marketing framework for startups. She has recently released a second version of the framework early in January of 2011.

The general idea behind the framework is to present all the activities that product marketing can and should be engaged with when it comes to building your marketing program.

April was nice enough to sit down with me and spend some time talking about the framework:

Here’s what April and I cover in the video:

  • Where the idea of the framework came from
  • What phase of a startup does the framework apply
  • What’s next

A big thank you to April for speaking with me and for sharing her knowledge on product marketing. If you are in B2B marketing (startup or no startup), April’s blog should be on your short list of weekly reads.

Image Credit: Flickr“

Filed Under: interview, Product Marketing, Product Marketing Videos Tagged With: , ,

The Art of Being Relevant

January 17, 2011 By

The 6th ProductCamp Austin was held over the weekend. For this session I had the privilege of moderating a panel with 3 marketing superstars – Ketan Pandya, Kirsten Knipp, and Bertrand Hazard.

The topic of the panel was being relevant. We started the discussion on how to define relevancy and then continued into how to become relevant when you are just getting started. We then spent some time on maintaining relevancy and how to know when it is starting to slip away.

Here is a quick session recap from our panelists,

We had planned on talking more about career management but time got away from us thanks to great discussions and contributions from the audience.  Here are a few points from the panel captured by Lisa Wells on her blog:

  • Always try to look bigger than you are.
  • Look at what you do well and amp that up. (Focus on core competencies – choose what you want to be known for).
  • How do you know you’re not relevant? When you’re too big to take risks. When revenue going down. When you get fired.

To help get the audience engaged in the discussion, we offered a little T-shirt incentive for participation with one of our messages – Don’t Just Be Social, Be Relevant.  Finding the right place, the right time, and the right message was a theme that came up several times in the discussions.

If you would like to see more, the panel was broadcast on the LiveStream and you can find the recording here.

I have a few more takeaways from this year’s winter ProductCamp that I will post later in the week.  Additionally, you can find more of the presentations that were recorded here and the slide decks on Slideshare.

Filed Under: favs, interview, Product Camp, Product Marketing Videos, Slideshare Presentation Tagged With: , ,

Starting Off 2011 – Welcome Bertrand Hazard

January 4, 2011 By

A bit over two years ago, I started this blog to capture my efforts for a side project. The project didn’t go anywhere but the blog has managed to survive and has turned into a project of its own that I can honestly say has been a lot of fun.

Over the holidays I spent some time reviewing the blog and trying to determine what to do and what not to do in 2011. I decided that I really was starting to enjoy writing and wanted to keep the blog going and maybe even spend some more of my (limited) cycles trying to make it work.

To help on that end, the big news for 2011 is that Bertrand Hazard has agreed to join on as a founding editor and contributor. I met Bertrand through ProductCamp Austin and we spoke at the last event together on the topic of Product Marketing.

Bertrand has a lot of experience in marketing products (see About) and is a natural blogger (you can see from his first guest post). I am positive that working with Bertrand is not only going to be a lot of fun but also full of marketing insights.

Looking forward to some great posts and discussions in 2011!

Image Credit:  Flickr

Filed Under: Product Marketing Tagged With:
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