Archive for marketing
Pragmatic Marketing Mixer in Austin
Posted by: | CommentsPragmatic Marketing is hosting
an informal networking mixer at Gabriel’s Café on Tuesday, October 18th at 5:30pm.
Gabriel’s Café is located within the AT&T Executive Conference Center on the UT campus (hook ‘em horns).
Y’all come and hang out with us.
Publish or Perish – B2B Marketing in the 21st Century
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Focus on the content not the tactic
There’s a gazillion tactics that b2b marketers can choose to get a message to buyers in their market. If there’s one thing that has the most impact for most buyers is content. Buyers seek out answers to their problems and the first, and easiest, place they go is their favorite search engine. The key to your success as a marketer is going to be on the content you produce and the number of places you syndicate it.
Don’t worry about whether others think you are taking a short cut. Be your own most prolific plagiarist.
It’s not easy but keep at it. Focus on the ideas in your content not the vessel. Once you have the idea down then consider the possibilities to get your great ideas in front of the people who can influence a buying decision for your products. A blog post can be repurposed as an article. An article can be repurposed as a webinar. A webinar can be repurposed as a Podcast.
6 ideas right now
Take a piece of paper and jot down 6 ideas you can write about right now. If you’re more comfortable as a visual communicator use a whiteboard and take a picture of it. What are you waiting for?
Features and Benefits oh my
Posted by: | CommentsI see the features. Where are the benefits?
How Do You Measure the Effectiveness of Your Product Marketing Managers?
Posted by: | CommentsToo often the primary measurement of a product marketing manager’s performance is the number of leads they generate. Is this really the measure that reflects their individual performance? First, for most organizations, what’s classified as a ‘lead’ is really a response to a marketing initiative like an email or direct mail campaign. Let’s call these what they actually are: responses. Second, the number of leads generated is rarely a reliable predictor of how many of deals will be closed, particularly in complex B2B selling. Third, the definition of a good ‘lead’ is rarely consistent among salespeople, let alone across an organization.
So if generating leads are not a meaningful measure of individual contribution, you could always go to another common measure: deliverables. Data sheet. Check. Sales presentation. Check. Demo script. Check. Deliverables are necessary for sure, but are they a measure that reflects an important outcome, like selling more stuff?
How about measuring performance based on outcomes. Whoa. Wait a minute. You’re asking me to measure my product marketing managers based on revenue? Yeah, I am if it’s a measurement that is valued in your organization. I’m not suggesting they go on sales calls or become sales engineers. And I’m not advocating that they should be compensated on individual deals. But there are ways that you can measure Johnny’s contribution to the overall success to the products he supports in the market.
Arguably there are a whole range of issues that could negatively impact the product marketing managers ability to deliver on a given revenue goal with discounting being the elephant in the room.
What can product marketing managers do to positively impact revenue when they aren’t the one’s doing the selling?
Become the experts on your buyers
A huge contribution to outcomes is to be the expert on your buyers. Product marketing managers are often confined to the four walls of their offices with little contact with real buyers in the market. Set a quota that requires them to interact with potential buyers, outside the office and write up what they learn. Start with eight or ten per quarter. These are interactions that are not conducted as part of a sales call.
You have plenty of experts on your products. Who’s the expert on your buyers?
Identify and correct bottlenecks in the funnel
Conduct ongoing analysis of deals looking at the each step in the funnel. Identify where deals are getting stuck and focus on corrective measures. Identifying patterns over a series of deals and avoid drawing conclusions from a single deal, which could send you on a wild goose chase. Removing a bottleneck in the funnel can have much more impact on sales throughput than generating more leads.
Removing bottlenecks improves sales throughput, effectively increasing the volume of deals your sales channels can deliver.
Take ownership of win/loss analysis
This isn’t the forensic style of win/loss analysis where you look for the person to punish for not winning the deal. It’s the type of win/loss analysis where you identify patterns that can lead to potentially huge revenue improvements. I advocate having product marketing managers own this activity in collaboration with their product manager counterparts. Each has a different filter on the activity that results in identifying different insights.
It’s easy to assume the problem is with the product or price, but is that really true?
Do we really need a new definition of “marketing”
Posted by: | CommentsIn 2008 the American Marketing Association introduced a new definition for marketing. I found it in an article listed by BtoB Magazine in their 20 most popular stories of 2009. Intrigued and curious I wanted to know what I was missing. Afterall, in my role as an instructor with Pragmatic Marketing I’m teaching product marketing managers and product managers. Anything new in the marketing arena I should be keeping up with. Here is AMA’s new definition of marketing:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
It will be used as the official definition of marketing in books and taught in university lecture halls nationwide, according to the AMA.
It read to me like the enterprise-class, mission-critical, scalable, state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, jargon that is often used in technology marketing. I imagined the series of endless conference calls and wrangling that led to the final wording, but also wondered “What problem was the AMA trying to solve with a new definition of marketing?”. Perhaps it had become outdated or stuffy. Could it be that the organization that should be the premier advocate for a market-driven approach were operating in an inside-out manner?
I read further and found AMA’s previous definition of marketing:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
It is, after all, three words shorter. I guess that’s good. At the end of the day I’m not sure that most of us would really notice much of a difference between the two definitions.
I think I’ll stick with Drucker:
“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
—Peter Drucker
FUTURELAB: Why Thought Leadership is Your Most Valuable Asset
Posted by: | CommentsJon Miller posted on his blog about thought leadership over at Futurelab and he really nailed it. Many marketers focus so much on doing “stuff” (my technical description for deliverables) from a menu item of tactics when they should be focusing much, much more attention on (my term for this is “obsess over”) thought leadership. Why?
“In down economies, prospects conduct even more research leading up to the purchase. This means B2B marketing professionals must help educate prospects in the early stages of the buying cycle; doing this well can help frame their buying process and establish your brand as a trusted advisor that understands their problems and knows how to solve them.”
At Pragmatic Marketing we work very hard to maintain the thought leadership position we have earned from our customers.
What are you doing to build or fortify your thought leadership position?
