ProductMarketing.com

Sales success requires strong product marketing

I'm reliving my sales days through my daughter's new job. She took a job this month as a sales rep for a wine distributor. In describing her first day, I was aghast at poor support her company provides its sales reps. She has no customer data base other than an Excel sheet of buyer names (without locations or phone numbers), no forms of any kind, not even an order form, and no product collateral. All that exists is screen shots and random flyers stored in one of three places on the T: drive. Their web site is a mess with broken links and descriptions of wine regions, no product information at all that I can find.

My mental delineation between sales and marketing is that sales people focus on customers one-at-a-time while marketing people focus on all the customers collectively. I already see that she's inclined to be a marketing person rather than a sales person because she is aching to get everything organized for everyone.

Meanwhile I can't help but step in as her mentor. I know you can't begin with automation until you know what you're doing on paper. So we started with a Day Runner from Staples. Here's a week-at-a-glance calendar for appointments plus one-page contact sheets with customer name, phone, address, and buying preferences as well as a journal of all transactions. We threw the rest of the forms away. I'm creating a CRM system using paper! Next, I plan to help her with her product marketing: she needs a one-page description of each product organized by winery and vintage.

It's sad that she first has to do product marketing before she can really do effective selling.

Of course, the danger for a new sales person is that they spend a month "getting ready to sell" and not actually making sales; sharpening pencils doesn't pay the bills. So she's pushing ahead with a largely empty portfolio by finding her customers' locations in Google, calling on them to ask how they want to buy. Her customers are teaching her what they need from her and then she'll create marketing materials based on buyer language and preference. I blogged about this recently in "Speaking in Buyer Language".

Imagine what it's like to be a new sales person at your company. Can your new sales rep find product information on the intranet? If so, is it written in vendor language or buyer language? Product marketers can't complain about sales people if the sales people don't have the tools they need to make a sale.

My daughter's latest lesson is that the sales rep gets blamed when the order is fulfilled wrong. She's spending as much time navigating her own company's operations as she is selling. Is the same true for your sales force?

With all of our technology and all of our incentives and all of our promotions, we need to make sure that we expedite the flow of data from development (product), product marketing (promotion), and product fulfillment (place) so that our sales teams can do what they do best: selling.

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.

Impact by company size and revenue

Scott Sehlhorst has unearthed more trends in the 2006 salary data from the Pragmatic Marketing annual product management and marketing survey. In this article, he looks at total compensation relative to the revenue of the managed products, the company size, and the company age. Read Impact by company size and revenue.

Product Management Glass Ceiling Cracked

Scott Sehlhorst analyzed our 2006 survey results. He writes,

At first glance, there appears to be a huge disparity in compensation between male and female product managers. When we look in more detail, the evidence does not support that conclusion.

Read the full post in Product Management Glass Ceiling Cracked ...

Taking personas too far

Kim Goodwin of cooper.com writes, "Although personas are essential design tools, we think some people may be losing sight of the fact that they're just tools, and tools with a specific purpose at that. Lately, we've been seeing a lot of gold-plated hammers--unnecessarily elaborate communication about personas--and some fundamental misunderstandings about the relationships among research, personas, and scenarios." Read more in Taking personas too far.

What does it mean to be market-driven?

The DC Metro (subway) runs til midnight, even on game days. "Oh, the game ran long? Too bad. The metro closed at 12:00." Most people would be glad to relieve the congestion and save a little on parking by taking the metro--but not if they have to miss the end of the game.

On United, the young flight attendants try to be funny; the old ones gave up long ago. You can tell those who have been flying for a while. They are just sick of the job and it's obvious to all of us. Yet this weekend I was surprised and delighted to use my miles to get a free flight to Nashville. I booked online for the following day! Amazing. On one leg, they upgraded me to first class (if there can be first class on an Embraer puddle-jumper)--still, it was a nice treat courtesy of the gate agent. But once on the plane, I discovered that all four of the overhead bins were filled with the flight attendants' luggage.

I guess that's it in a nutshell. Being market-driven is realizing who the customer is (hint: it's not the flight attendants) and seeing the business and its products from the customer's point of view.

How many customer-facing people don't know or care who the customer is? Most fast-food servers don't care... except those at Starbucks and often at Subway. Most airline workers don't seem to know or care who the customer is... altho maybe JetBlue does. Teachers and professors? Do they know that the students are customers? (Your favorite teacher does!). Doctors and nurses know... and HMOs don't.

Companies and marketing departments who think that sales people are the customer don't know who the customer is.

Who is your customer?

What would happen if the developers possessed a deep understanding of their customers?

A thousand little decisions go into the creation of a great product. Most are not in the specs or master plans. Instead, they are implemented by testers and programmers. Yet, these are the same people that are traditionally lampooned as geeky and out of touch with the target customers. What would happen if the developers possessed a deep understanding of their customers needs and desires?

Read more in Lost Garden: The Passion of the Developers.