ProductMarketing.com

Video: Seth on Marketing

Seth Godin's inspiring talk on "Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department". Thanks to Neil Davidson for sharing it.

Friday fun: ING says 'don't freak out'

"Don't freak out"? How cool is that? This bank is great! What would your bank say? "We hope you will like the changes to our website. Our next-generation system is both extensible and scalable to better serve your financial needs."

And what would your company say about their website facelift??

on Win/Loss analysis

There's one special form of research that many product marketing managers are neglecting--and they're missing a great tool. It's win/loss analysis. Who better to tell us what we do right and wrong in selling than someone who recently tried to buy--either successfully or not?

Have you ever had a great buying experience and wanted to tell someone? How about a bad buying experience? You tell everyone but wouldn't you prefer to tell the vendor?

Smart product marketing managers use win/loss as a tool to document and measure the buying process. What steps does the buyer go through when making a decision? What information was used--and what was missing? How could we help you make the right decision for your situation?

One product marketing manager shared her win/loss story with me. She did a dozen interviews--some deals won, some deals lost--and wrote a report detailing the product and process problems that were revealed. And then her boss left and was replaced with a new VP. So, uh-oh, now everybody has to interview for his or her job. She went into the new VP's office and saw her win/loss analysis on his desk. He said, "This is the only document I've seen from this department that I trust. Everything else is based on opinions."

Hmmm, couldn't you make better marketing decisions if you talked to some people in the market? It's so crazy, it just might work.

But wait! Shouldn't your sales reps do win/loss analysis? Absolutely not! They're terrible at it; and, furthermore, it's not their job. Their job is to sell more of your product to more clients. And their focus is on a single deal (or perhaps two). Product marketing managers should be looking for the patterns in all wins and all losses for all buying cycles, not the results of individual deals.

Another product marketing manager found a pattern in all wins. Every deal the company won had one thing in common: The buyer participated in a non-customized demo in the company briefing center. Amazing! You'd think the buyers would want a demo tailored for their specific needs. But custom demos are frequently prepared at the last minute; even then, they often miss key points, because they often rely on the sales team's understanding of the technology. For this company, the solution was to standardize the selling process around a common demo. The company hired a kid from college, gave him the demo room, and said, "It's yours. Have it always ready for a standard demo." He built a beautiful demo based on the primary message and key features from the product's positioning documents. He set up a scheduled image restore that ran at midnight; so every morning, the demo setup was pristine, no matter what was done to it the prior day. And he was always ready to do a perfect demo. After all, it was his actual job, not an interruption of his real work. In the end, he ran the demo center as a marketing program--with a dedicated staff and a dedicated facility. Will this approach work for you? Do some win/loss analysis to find out.

Do you know your customer's buying process? A little win/loss analysis will tell you plenty about what you do right and wrong in your selling.

Need help? Contact my friend Alan Armstrong at Eigenworks who specializes in third-party win/loss analysis. He knows the process and understands the industry.

Marketing isn't a list; it's an approach

Good marketing isn't about your product and its features. Good marketing is focused on solving a problem and then helping buyers buy. It's not a list of tactics, but an approach to putting the customer first in your thinking. Not "We should be blogging," but "Our customers are searching blogs for information about our specialty."

So product marketing managers should not be responding to individual Requests for Proposals (RFPs) or invitations to tender; they should create a sample document with great answers to the most common questions. Product marketing managers shouldn't be doing demos; they should create great demos for the sales team to use. They shouldn't create presentations for a single client; they should create presentations for use at every client.

Great product managers find patterns in customer requests and build features that address urgent problems for the buyer. Great product marketing managers find patterns in the buying process and build tools to answer buyer questions.

Twitter 101 for Business — A Special Guide

Here's a great intro to Twitter for product managers and product marketing managers. Twitter 101 for Business — A Special Guide.

Marketing is offensive?

While I always think of what we do as 'marketing' in the classical sense, it just seems easier to refer to it as 'product management' when talking to most people.

Apparently, Yahoo agrees with me.

 

According to Yahoo, "marketing" may be offensive. Maybe it's because some sales people like to call themselves marketing reps or maybe it's because too many marketing people talk about products and programs instead of buyers and their problems. (for more on this, watch Got a Great Product? Get Over it!)

In any case, I guess I'll keep referring to what I do as product management and leave marketing to others.

Friday fun: almost 1000 posts

David ("they call me 'Meerman'") Scott posted his 500th post this week. Congratulations! But according to my blogging tool, I have posted almost 1,000. As they say in grammar school, "neener neener neener."

But then, David's posts tend to be longer using, you know, big words and stuff.

Agile 2009, Chicago

It's only a month until Agile 2009 in Chicago. The conference has hundreds (thousands?) of sessions on various aspects of agile development including product management. I'll be leading a panel with Laureen Knudsen titled "product owner or product manager or both?"

Be sure to look for me and the folks from Enthiosys at the conference.

Cooper | Stratus Air concept project

Check out this brilliant Stratus Air concept project from Cooper Interaction Design. As a frequent flier, I want it now!

Product managers and designers should pay attention to the research aspects of the video, particularly the development of personas and their goals.

Changing the Pragmatic Marketing Framework

Periodically--and very carefully--we update the Pragmatic Marketing Framework to align with current best practice for technology product management and marketing. Jim Foxworthy, Pragmatic Marketing's Product Manager, explains the changes in this video.

Selling the framework

How do you sell the Pragmatic Marketing framework internally? Many people have found that my ebook on The Strategic Role of Product Management is a good beginning.

Jim Foxworthy has started a thread for Pragmatic Marketing customers on LinkedIn. How have you gotten traction? What approach did you use? What results did you achieve? Got some ideas? Join the discussion.

Friday fun: What if Luke accepted Vader's proposal?

VADER: Luke. You can destroy the Emperor; he has foreseen this. You don’t know the power of the Dark Side. Join me, and together we will rule the galaxy as father and son!

LUKE: (Pondering) The whole galaxy?

VADER: Yes.

LUKE: Every star system?

VADER: Even the ones with the big useless gas giants that nobody visits.

LUKE: Well… I’m not sure. Is there a health plan?

Read more in What if Luke accepted Vader's proposal?

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?