Archive for pragmatic marketing
Getting Salespeople to Answer Their Own Questions
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A big time sink for many product marketing managers is answering the same questions over and over again that salespeople ask. You have a repository of sales tools and FAQs but they seem to continue to call or email with the same question they asked three days ago.
There are three things potentially going on that you can address. The first is that you (or your boss) continue to enable this bad behavior even after you’ve provided an answer in a place reserved for such answers. The second is that you don’t have a place reserved to put your answers in which case you have no one to blame but yourself. Third is that you enjoy providing answers. In this case you might be happier as a sales engineer rather than as a product marketing manager.
Food for thought
- Make sure you document every answer to every salespersons question. Build an FAQ. Every time you add something to the FAQ, let the salespeople know about it. You could email it, you could post it in your sales tool cemetery, or you could reference it your internal blog.
- Make sure you have a place where sales guys can get their own answers quickly and efficiently. If they can’t find it in 30 seconds you are going to get a phone call.
- Don’t reply or answer a question that’s already addressed in your Sales FAQ. It’s tough love but you have to build a dependency on the information you’ve already provided.
- Add a link to your FAQ in your email signature. Make it prominent and make sure the link works!
What have you tried to get your sales guys to stop calling you for things you already done?
Webinar today at 2pm EST with Steve Johnson
Posted by: | CommentsSteve and Scott Backer from Vovici are delivering a webinar today at 2PM EST titled The Role of Feedback in Product Innovation.
Here’s the webinar description…
Great products are grounded in an understanding of market problems. Exploring the role of market and customer feedback in driving innovative products, Scott Blacker of Vovici and Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing look at how research can support your product decisions. Which research tools are best for which steps of the innovation process? When do you use qualitative and when to use quantitative? And which customers do you listen to?
Click here for more information and to register.
Product Marketing Manager – who are you?
Posted by: | CommentsI’m conducting marketing research on you, product marketing manager. I’m doing this to support a project. I don’t want to create a generalized or stereotypical picture of you; I want to create the perfect picture of you. I want to know everything about you. I want to talk to you in a way that your jaw drops in amazement when I speak.
The first thing I did was to jettison my biases, my preconceived notions, and my personal experience. The second thing I did was to go to the job boards to read ‘product marketing manager’ job descriptions. The goal of doing this is twofold: to identify what is common among product marketing manager job descriptions and what can I conclude about the role. While I’m early in the process here’s what I can report:
- You may have the job title of ‘product marketing manager’ but sometimes you’re really a ‘product manager’
- You have a BS or BA (the discipline varies across industries)
- You might have a MBA
- You have 5+ years of experience
- You are a “self starter”, an “excellent communicator”, a “team player”, and have a “proven track record”
- You know how to use Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel
- You have conflicting responsibilities
- Your duties are often “as assigned”
- Your company has no flipping idea what you do or how to measure your contribution
Out of the 100 or so job descriptions I’ve read, only one stated “You are the expert on our buyers, how they buy, and their buying criteria.”. One. Only a handful of job descriptions explicitly state your area of responsibility is outbound. A few had so many responsibilities listed it would be a job so incredibly dysfunctional you could never define what winning looks like.
It must feel like you’re a rat running in a maze with no cheese.
I want to hear from you. What do you think about your role? Am I getting warm? Does your job description match what you actually do?
Repeatable Product Launch Process – Evaluate Phase
Posted by: | CommentsIn my post “Lunch is an event. Product launch is a process.”, I shared with you the Repeatable Product Launch Process and the first phase of the process, the Organize phase. The process is about getting the organization ready to market, sell, support, deliver and book revenue. If you need help in figuring out what to launch, start with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework and then the Practical Product Management seminar. In this post I will continue with the Evaluate phase.
Evaluate Phase
By completing the Organize phase, you will have established the goals for the product launch and then used the goals as a backdrop to establish the launch strategies for achieving them. In the Evaluate phase we now look inward to the organization to identify the constraints (speed bumps) that can get in the way of achieving the launch goals. While it’s often imperative to have stretch goals to get your organization to reach new heights, it’s equally imperative to identify and mitigate the people, time, and money constraints that could prevent it from happening.
At this phase of the Repeatable Product Launch Process it’s critical to know the launch readiness state that exists now (get a baseline). The brutal reality is that for most mid-to-large size companies the number of things you want to fix will exceed the time and resources you have available to fix them. The smart approach is to determine which things are the most critical to the success of the product launch and fix those.
A Launch Readiness Assessment is the tool we deliver in the Product Launch Essentials seminar that gives you this important insight. It provides a simple yet objective way to evaluate the launch readiness of a functional area. To make it an effective communication tool to your management team, the Launch Readiness Assessment rolls up individual functional area assessments into a scorecard.
On completion of the Evaluate phase you will have a realistic view of the launch goals, which may now need to be adjusted in light of your constraint findings. You will also have a clear path to which launch readiness areas need to be addressed. Later, in the Execute phase you’ll use the Launch Readiness Assessment as you’re building your product launch plan.
Next: Prepare Phase
In the next installment I’ll introduce you to the Prepare phase, where you’ll learn about organizing your Launch Team and talk about Filling the Gaps you’ve identified in the Evaluate Phase.
