ProductMarketing.com

Why marketers have trouble with full-duplex social technology

Just read Why marketers have trouble with full-duplex social technology by Josh Bernoff.

Great quotes:

The problem is simple. Marketers don't understand channels where you have to talk and listen at the same time.

and

The marketing industry's idea of a two-way communication is to put an 800 number or a web address in an ad and take orders.

and

Your company has a chance to turn its email list into a two-way communication. Except that most mass emails from companies are "do not reply". "We want to talk to you," they say. "But we don't want to hear back from you. Unless you want to place an order, and if so click here."

How much of your marketing is communicating AT people instead of WITH people?

Adele on Roles

Adele Revella offers this simple, straight-forward definition of four roles: inbound product manager, outbound product marketing manager, marketing communications, and sales. Read more in Let's not waste a good crisis.

Product, category or need?

You gotta worry about products where you have to create the need. Ugh. You can do it, but it's hard and takes too long. In "What are you selling? Product, category or need?", Gopal Shenoy puts it this way,

A product sell is basically where a prospect walks in and says “Give me this product” - the customer knows that the product solves a well known problem.

Which type of product is yours?

PS. Gopal, congratulations on becoming a US citizen!

on geeks and flakes

Scott Sehlhorst reminded me about Geek Marketing 101 by John Dodds.

John writes,

It is so named because I see amongst many geeks a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is, and a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses.

Scott adds,

Don’t let them know, but we’re on our way to understanding how this stuff works.

I spend time with marketers and developers constantly yet I often forget about the chasm between the two. A marketer says "Talk to me like I was a five-year-old," a phrase which translates for a developer to "I don't know enough to work here."

Technical people are often obsessed with technology--the "how" of the product--but people don't care about the 'how' until they understand the 'what'. Marketing people are often obsessed with competitive positioning, the unique selling proposition--they are more concerned with the "what" than the "how"--but customers don't really care how you're better until they understand what you're gonna do for them.

Geeks and flakes need to meet in the middle: what are we going to do for customers?

on unrealistic schedules

Bill Miller writes about unrealistic schedules:

I often wonder why software teams always seem to be committing to unrealistic schedules. You know when the sales team signed a contract with a customer to deliver functionality on a date without ever asking the engineering team whether it were possible. Never mind the roadmaps identify an entirely different set of functionality than what was committed. And guess what? The product roadmaps can’t change either; the sales team has signed contracts on that functionality too. 

Product managers, sales people, marketing departments, and executives make commitments all the time--and often they're unrealistic. We commit to a roadmap and then change it. We can't really commit to schedules when the feature-set keeps changing--but then we commit anyway. Yeesh. We have long advocated time-boxing as a method for balancing the schedule and commitments. Come to our Requirements That Work class to learn an agile approach to product planning.

Years ago, the president of a startup asked the product manager to commit to an aggressive date. The product manager discussed it with the dev lead and the whole team and agreed that, yes, they could make the date but it involved a fair amount of overtime. The team agreed to work Saturdays until the project was complete. When the president announced the decision that development would work Saturdays, he also committed the entire sales department to work Saturdays until the project was complete.

The moral: being a team-player means that the people making the commitments should have some skin in the game too.

driven more by emotions

Does this sound familiar?

Kristin Zhivago writes:

The problem with marketing and sales is that they are the functions inside companies most likely to be driven more by emotions and anecdotal "evidence" than they are by facts. The result is never as profitable as it could be.

If salespeople dominate decisions, without the benefit of qualitative customer research and buying process analysis, the atmosphere is always dominated by fear of losing the next sale, and activity is always frantic.

I don't need to add any commentary. Go read what Kristin has to say.

Ten active listening skills

Active listening is about more than gaining understanding. Active listening is about giving. Giving assurance that you understand someone's needs. Giving confidence that you will address those needs. Giving feedback and acknowledgement that someone's input is valuable. If you haven't tried active listening, you may think it is a passive, receptive activity. Here are ten active listening skills that will help you, your customers and your team from Tyner Blain.

Is your copy getting in the way?

In Is your copy getting in the way?, Kristin Zhivago reminds us to "Retire those old useless phrases. No one's reading them. They are a complete waste of your writing time and the buyer's reading/buying time." Phrases like "scalable" and "user-friendly" mean nothing to the buyer. Instead use phrases like "able to handle 1,000,000 elements" and "performs operations in obvious ways"--you know, phrases real people use in describing their problem. As I posted previously, I don't want my insurance claim paid; I want my car fixed.

Are you outside-in?

Here's an old story from the insurance industry:

Vendor: "Customers want claims paid in a timely and efficient manner."
Customer: "I want my car fixed."

Customers don't care about insurance claims and appraisals; those are the tasks that the insurance company process mandates. The customer's goal is to be driving a repaired car.

When you talk about your products, are you focused on the buyer's goals or are you still focused on the vendor's prerequisite tasks? Are you using the buyer's language or using industry's jargon?

Speaking in buyer language

Salesperson gets on the phone to make a cold call. Salesperson uses script written by copywriter who has never had to make a cold call and who doesn't talk to real, live customers. Person on the other end of the line hears the script, and hangs up on the salesperson. Salesperson decides to ditch the canned pitch and start using his own from this point forward. Company has wasted a lot of time and money on pitches salespeople will never use. Does this sound familiar? Read more here in Revenue Journal.

Either we hire sales people who understand the business with the expectation that they will create their own deliverables or we hire sales people who will rely on the pitches created by marketing. Frankly I prefer the former. I've long advocated that everyone who works for your company should know what we do here; they should care fervently about it. Developers, sales people, marketing, tech support, documentation, even finance and others who don't encounter customers should care. Companies that don't care seem to have more hand-offs and "not my job" problems than others.

If we choose to deploy sales people who do not know our products or understand the business, then we will have to rely on 'scripts' and and pitches and collateral and sales tools from marketing. And guess what? Marketing will have to understand the market and the products. They'll have to create Buyer Personas grounded in research. They'll need to speak in the buyer's voice using language that real buyers use.

Have you ever attended sales methodology training? The first day is marketing! Buyer personas, probing for pain questions, positioning. These are the things that the effective product marketer should already have documented long before the product is launched to the sales force. But when we don't--or when we use ineffective vendor language--the sales team must rely on their own skills and market knowledge to fill the void.

If product managers and marketers don't do their strategic jobs, the other departments will fill the void.

The recipe for a brand

Laura Ries offers this recipe for Marketing a Non-Profit Brand. She writes, "They are really the same as building a strong for-profit brand since the goal is the same -- to own a position in the mind." It's a clear straightforward list of things we should all be doing.

focusing our efforts... on the customer

from Work together to increase your sales: "The secret to getting your salespeople and marketing people to work together is to stop the interdepartmental, political arguments about the selling process and start focusing everyone's attention on the customer's buying process. This is the only way to stop the political tug-of-war."

Read the whole series of articles on Revenue Journal.

Put your sales on track

Check out The fundamental fact that will put your sales on track on Revenue Journal:

"What makes marketing and selling so different from other business activities? It all boils down to one fundamental fact. It doesn't matter how you think your product should be sold. What matters is how the customer wants to buy it.

How Can Product Managers Help Marketing?

Whether you as a Product Manager report into Marketing, Development, or another group, you play a critical role in helping Marketing position and explain the product so that the message resonates with your product's prospects.

The Marketing folks are the experts at taking an image of your software product and polishing it until it really shines. They can make the product message sound truly compelling, and artfully express how you stand compared to the competition.

But except for a minority of exceptional 'marketeers', Marketing is submerged in the day-to-day mechanics of generating the message, the collateral, the supporting materials, and talking to all necessary audiences from media to investors to prospective business partners.

What the Marketing folks don't have, and it's the raw material that they absolutely need to portray the power of your product, is the specific and essential perspective on the business users of your product and why they use it.

Take a look at How Can Product Managers Help Marketing? to see how you as Product Manager--and you may very well be the only one who can do this--can contribute to Marketing in order to make your product's marketing stand out in the busy, crowded, and uncertain software market that we find ourselves in today.

Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople

In Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople, Seth Godin comments on the expectations that sales people have of marketers, plus two that marketers should expect of sales people. Go read it... he makes some really good points.

(No really, go read it.)

(Did you? OK.)

I originally posted a negative screed about sales people but then reconsidered. Seth's points are all excellent. What is the best way that we in product management can help sales people? Answer: deliver better products. Too many product managers are devoting too much of their time to helping individual sales people close deals; too few are focused on helping development create better products. Recognize that selling technology products is hard but selling great technology products is much, much easier. Product managers must understand the life of a sales person and learn to help them. Here's how: help the company deliver better products faster.

Seth's Blog: Ten things programmers might want to know about marketers

from Seth's Blog:

In my travels, the group that wants to know the most about marketing, and seems to know the most about marketing (except, of course, for marketers) is engineers. Software engineers and programmers, to be specific.

Why? I think it's because online marketing is particularly interesting and often allied with programming techniques. That and the fact that programmers toil long and hard and get bitter pretty quickly when some marketing dork screws up their efforts.

Read more in Ten things programmers might want to know about marketers.

Time for Software Marketing to Grow Up

Tom Hogan of Catapult Direct advocates more customer focus and less product focus. He writes:

Despite being in its thirties, high-tech marketing is still an industry in its adolescence. And like any adolescent, it's unsure of where it wants to go but knows better than anyone else how to get there. Part of the problem is the crowd that Marketing runs with. Marketing hangs out almost exclusively with 'Product Guys' - not salespeople. Product Guys are like those guys who go on first dates and talk endlessly about themselves. Finally, as the evening wanes and the date is utterly bored, they smile engagingly and say, 'But enough about me. Let's talk about things I like to do...'For these Product Guys, it's all about 'The Product' and its capabilities. On sales calls, when talking about The Product, they just can't stop. 'But enough about the features, let's talk specs...'

Read more in Time for Software Marketing to Grow Up. I wish he used the term "Customer focused" instead of "Sales focused," as the latter implies that we should focus more on our sales people. And most people know that that is a formula for failure too.

Survey: Lack of direct contact with customers

from Lack of direct contact with customers:

Marketers on every level have internalized the bottom-line message. Marketers in our survey report that the customer data they are most concerned with for planning programs are value and profitability, and that increasing organizational discipline is important for the purposes of improving market and revenue growth. But when we put aside the grand vision of marketing and dug down into the details, the disconnects were somewhat startling.

The most troubling finding from our study is that marketers appear surprisingly detached from their customers. Marketers report an overwhelming reliance on their CRM systems as a primary source of customer data, with very little insight gained through customer service, distribution channels, customer organizations or communities, or even online customer networks.

Culture Crash

Much has been said about the connection between marketing and sales. Sales people see marketing as the source of leads and t-shirts; marketing sees sales people as the people who buy lunch and discount.

In Culture Crash, CMO Magazine comments: "'Some marriages will never work,' Cohen says, 'because the personalities are just too extreme.' Can the marriage between sales and marketing be saved? Most of the time, yes. But like all long-term commitments, the key to success lies in two-way communication. In the case of sales and marketing, the robustness of that communication is aided by technology but deepened by old school, face-to-face interactions. Think you can handle that?"

Perhaps clarity of roles is the issue. Sales people--and many marketing people too--think of marketing as sales support. Demos, collateral, leads, awareness, all with an objective of supporting a single sale.

In Don't Confuse Sales Support with Marketing, Adele Revella writes, "Technology marketers spend more than half of their time on sales support, a statistic that reflects an alarming state of confusion about the role of marketing in our industry. Yet the functions of Sales and Marketing are easily distinguished; Marketing focuses on a market full of opportunities, while Sales focuses on individual opportunities."

What is the true role of marketing? Marketing moves all buyers forward one or more steps through the sales cycle. Marketing should strategically define the key steps of the sales cycle, and the tools that support each step, giving sales people a roadmap to move clients from leads to close and beyond. Working closely with sales management, we can identify the necessary tools and techniques. Then sales people and their sales engineers can customize these materials for each deal, if it's even necessary; marketing should never create one-time use materials for a single client.

In fact, helping a single sales person is actually hurting the company. When a product manager or marketer helps one person, she isn't helping all the others. Wouldn't it be better if we created a better sales tool or a better set of leads? Or best of all, let's create a better product that solves a market problem. Let's create a product that sells itself.

Is your marketing function focused on one deal at a time or on all deals? Are we helping one sales person or a sales channel full of people?

Why Marketing ROI Misses the Mark

Robert R. Johnson (no relation) suggests, "Rather than adopting piecemeal approaches from finance, marketers should look to operations and production for a more defined set of measurement disciplines." Read more in Why Marketing ROI Misses the Mark from CMO Magazine.