ProductMarketing.com

Provide sales support... systematically

What is the best way to support sales? Well, it's easy just to respond to their incessant requests. "I need a new presentation." "I need a new brochure." "I need a new sales tool."

But the best approach is not to help sales people individually ; it's best to help them systematically. The effective product marketing manager looks for ways to help customers buy...using all the tools in the marketing arsenal.

After only a few site visits, you'll see many ways to help customers make the right purchase decision:

• Whitepapers to explain the technical underpinnings of your product
• E-books to articulate the ramifications of industry shifts
• Standard presentations and automated demonstrations that show the top issues facing customers today
• And much more

Plus you'll discover that salespeople can't find the information they need quickly, so a wiki or blog becomes an obvious solution.

How can you help your sales people with better information when they need it?

Friday Fun: United Breaks Guitars

Those who know me know I have a love/hate relationship with United. Love their website; hate their phone system. People? Well, maybe it's good that they changed their tagline from "The Friendly Skies." But when I bought a Taylor 12-string guitar at Dave's Guitar Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I had them send it to my home via Fedex. No way was I gonna have United handle it! Here's why:

Customer service is a key element of a product. How's yours?

The video has had 1,627,312 views as of July 10.

Also, check out Dave Daniel's analysis in Beware if your service sucks.

6 Lessons for Non-Dev Executives at Agile Companies

Rich Mironov offers 6 Lessons for Non-Dev Executives at Agile Companies. In particular, Rich writes:

The bottleneck is moving elsewhere. As Development catches up with its backlog – shipping twice as much software with higher quality – other parts of the company are being stressed. Channel Marketing has to brief resellers twice as often, Marcom must revise collateral every quarter, Support needs training on the latest update, Operations has new bundles to create and price lists to change. Finally, Sales has to deliver real revenue against the improvements it demanded. (“I know I told Engineering that we could close $16M if we added Finnish and Swedish versions…”)

It's been my experience that Agile adoption reveals broken processes elsewhere, particularly in product management. If product managers are busy supporting sales and marketing and whomever else, how can they provide a continuously prioritized backlog? (And if you've been following the principles in Requirements That Work and Living in an Agile World, you may indeed have a continuously prioritized backlog as well as an updated roadmap, business case, positioning, sales process--all the artifacts that define the business of the product).

As developers deliver more faster, the rest of the company struggles to keep up. Where once we heard sales and marketing people say, "if they could just deliver faster," now we're hearing them say, "Whoa! Slow down! We haven't the bandwidth to launch and learn all the new stuff."

Improving the effectiveness of any one department in isolation reveals broken processes elsewhere. Your company is an organism, each part inter-related with the others; it's not a group of silos. Although some people think Agile is just about development, it also impacts--positively or not--the departments that work with development. When optimizing one group in your organization, think of how the change will affect the others.

Blogs, YouTube, Twitter: Are your customers there?

Many marketers today are enamored with blogging and wikis and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all the new social media outlets. But make sure these tools reach your buyers. My buyers--executives at technology-based product vendors--are reading blogs; my customers are monitoring Twitter via #prodmgmt and #pmi.

Are yours?

The trick to any new technology or media is not whether it's cool; the trick is to find those techniques that are effective in reaching your customers.

If you're not reading blogs (and I think you should be), set up an account at Google, and then subscribe to one of the many blogs featured on Pragmatic Marketing's website, including my own at ProductMarketing.com.

Apple makes $$$ on iPhone

The Industry watcher iSuppli says that the new iPhone 3GS costs Apple just $178.96 to build. Apple makes $420 on each iPhone sold. They seem to imply that this is too much profit but they looking only at the cost of the handset; they overlook the cost of infrastructure, the cost of the excellent app store, and the cost of brilliant design.

The iPhone's success proves that creating a product that people want to buy translates into low price sensitivity. We don't really care about the cost of goods sold; we care about the value of the solution. And if market demand is any indication, it seems plenty of people value Apple's solution. Apple has priced their product correctly, ignoring the costs and focusing on value.

Have you priced your product on its cost or its value? The trick of course is to create a product that people value. That means you need to solve a problem that people want to pay to solve.

As an aside, iSuppli's "About Us" page reads:

iSuppli Corporation helps clients improve performance in the electronics value chain by providing them with the facts, analysis and advice they require to know precisely how to succeed.

Huh?

Another introduction to Scrum

Here's a great Introduction to Scrum by Andy Brandt. (Thanks to my friend Jon Gatrell for sharing this.)

After viewing, check out my Living in an Agile World ebook for more on the distinction between product owner and product manager.

Leadership and Kindergarten

Michael Ray Hopkin offers this post from Jim Holland on Leadership Lessons from a Kindergarten Class.

My addition to the thread is this: "When you go out in the world, hold hands." It’s easier and more fun to do customer interviews with a colleague.

What Kindergarten lessons would you adapt to product management?

Barb Nelson at Games Exchange 2009

This Friday, June 26, join the folks at Enthiosys for the Innovation, Design & Serious Games Exchange 2009 in San Francisco. The session notes say,

If you are interested in how games solve problems, you are invited to IDSGE. This event is meant for a range of practitioners... from those who have heard provocative things about games or who have experimented a little... through those who use games on a regular basis... to those who design and develop games in the physical and digital worlds.

Pragmatic Marketing's Barb Nelson will be there, discussing the need for understanding market problems as a key element of product innovation.

More at Jun-26-09: Innovation, Design & Serious Games Exchange 2009, San Francisco

Visiting customers "in the wild"

Too many product managers use opinions when data is required; they are in the office more than they should be. Market facts are found in customer environments, not in company meetings. NIHITO, baby!

It seems reasonable to be able to visit customers in their place of work but my friend Dave wonders about visiting people in their homes.

I think this gets into a tricky area. How do you set up a home visit? And should you?

I don't know about you but I'd be cautious of being alone with people in their homes. Lots of opportunity for misunderstanding. So be sure to do home visits with a colleague. And this may be inappropriate to say but I suggest that men should always do home visits with a female co-worker. Maybe I'm just a victim of the sexual harassment police but I'm uncomfortable being alone with any woman who isn't my wife.

If you sell products for home use, you really should understand the customer environment. Sitting in a person's home reveals much about the person and about the way the product will be used. You can see how the product does or could integrate with the rest of the household. With customers, you can see misuse of the product or whether it's under a bed or table without adequate ventilation, for instance.

Years ago, we had a pilot project for PC use in truck stops. Neither the engineers nor the product managers anticipated how much dirt was found in a truck stop! We found a thick layer of dust covering the motherboard, the fan could barely move from the accumulation of grime, and the PC was running much hotter than designed--there was no way for it to cool down. After only one month, the PC was choking! Poor thing! While not a home-use example, the truck stop was an environment that we couldn't duplicate in a lab. After all, we all work in air-conditioned cubicles.

One product manager specializing in home-school products set up three home visits with home school parents and learned much about the way the home school area was set up (or wasn't) and how the parents integrating learning into the family structure (or didn't). Could you see that in a coffee shop?

But if a home visit isn't possible, an interview at a coffee shop is a nice alternative. In fact, in most cases I would suggest that you start with an interview in a public place. If the interview progresses well and you create trust (both ways), then a home visit is a nice follow-up.

In a coffee shop interview, ask the client to walk you through a typical day. How does paper move around? What approval steps are necessary? When do they use the computer and when do they use Post-It notes? A coffee shop interview is better than a phone interview but an in-home interview is best of all.

In the old days, family doctors made house calls an integral part of their practices. How can you understand a family's health without seeing the family's environment? The same is true for product managers of products used in the home.

Friday fun: Post-It notes pixels

We love Post-Its here at Pragmatic Marketing. Here's something that required millions of Post-It notes and way too much time.

Enjoy!