Archive for product marketing manager
John the Misunderstood Product Marketing Manager
Posted by: | CommentsIn a previous post I introduced you to John, the product marketing manager. John is very busy and has his share of frustration. Most of John’s frustration is because his role is misunderstood. Product managers think he should do one thing. Marcom another. Sales yet another.
How did John get here?
For many technology companies the job title of product marketing manager is a fairly recent addition. The job was introduced to fill a void between product management, sales, and marcom. It happens when product managers are so consumed with product development issues, they don’t have the bandwidth to work with sales or marcom. The resulting problem is a sales force that is not prepared to sell and marketing that misses the mark.
Why is John frustrated?
He is frustrated because the line between what John should do and what the product manager should do is fuzzy. One time he gets scolded because he did something the product manager felt was her responsibility. Another time he gets scolded because he didn’t do something assuming the product manager is responsible. Finger pointing is not a solution.
What is John’s role?
There are activities in the Pragmatic Marketing Framework that are about using products and there are activities that are about buying products. One way of clarifying responsibilities is to have product managers accountable for activities related to using products, and have product marketing managers accountable for activities related to buying products. Another way of looking at it is product marketing managers are experts on buyers and how they buy, and product managers are experts on products and how they solve problems.
Are you clear about your role as a product marketing manager?
Are you defining the role or waiting for someone to do it for you?
4 Steps to Solving the Cross-Sell Problem
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Many organizations I work with struggle with getting their sales teams to sell ALL the products in their product portfolio. This is particularly difficult to do when there are silos of business units each with their independently defined goals, that don’t include helping the other silos sell their respective products. This gets further complicated when each silo has its own sales force. In the absence of a big organizational change, what can you do to please management’s insistence that product marketing managers do something about the lack of cross-selling?
Step 1: Focus on the primary buyer not the products
Product marketing managers get stuck in their cross-selling programs when they focus on the features in the products rather than the problems they can solve for their buyers. Your sales team can’t possibly build sufficient knowledge about every product. They zero in on a few that will help them achieve quota. Each business unit likely has a go-to buyer persona they consistently call on. Who is that? Do you really know the buyer or just their title? If you haven’t already, build a buyer persona for this buyer.
Step 2: Identify the primary buyer’s top 5 problems
When you have a deep understanding of a buyer persona you have identified their top issues/challenges/problems and ranked them in priority order. For now let’s just worry about the top 5, because any problem that is a lower priority than 5 won’t get attention anyway.
Step 3: Find the products in the portfolio that address the top 5 problems
Take your understanding of the buyer persona’s top 5 problems and match the products in the portfolio that truly address one of their top 5 problems. Don’t force fit it or make it only work at the PowerPoint level. It either addresses the problem or it doesn’t. Don’t fool yourself.
Step 4: Define product bundles
The intersection between the buyer persona’s top 5 problems and the products that address those problems is your baseline for developing product bundles – that are anchored in the buyer persona. Develop positioning documents for your bundles and enable the sales force to close more deals.
Why ‘educating the market’ is a last ditch effort
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Sooner or later you’ll be asked to ‘educate the market’ (if you haven’t already). It’s a last ditch effort to generate sales for a product your company has spent a lot of time and money developing, only to find that no one wants it. You conclude the problem couldn’t be the product. It must be the idiots in the market who “just don’t get it”. Clearly they need to be taught about a problem they obviously are too stupid to realize they have.
Product marketing managers beware when you’re asked to educate the market because you may have entered a race you can’t win. First ask your colleagues what problem the product is supposed to solve and then question if anyone actually wants the problem solved. If there is no real evidence, push back. The force will be strong on this one, Luke, because the money has been invested and a return is expected.
How could you go wrong with a face thingy to keep from getting soup all over your face? Who doesn’t want one of those! I wonder if they have them in camo?
Bonus question… any Pragmatic Marketing alumni care to take a shot at the Marketecture for this baby?
Update: Changed ‘know’ to ‘no’ in 1st paragraph. Thanks to Mitch Glasser!
Where is the ‘product’ in a product launch?
Posted by: | CommentsPut another way, if a product is something that solves a customer problem, then a ‘product’ is all things necessary to solve that problem. Sounds simple enough but often confusing in technology companies where our ‘product’ is defined as the thing we’ve built, but the customer’s expectation (buying criteria) can be very different.
From a product launch perspective this narrow definition of product sets the stage for chaos, confusion, and blame, much of which is placed on the product marketing manager (often the job title responsible for product launch). Let me take a software example and look at the bill of materials that might be needed for a contemporary technology product. We would need the thing that we built and it should have all the things that make it a useful product with a delightful customer experience. Things like help, documentation, quick start guide, etc. We thought through the things our customer needs to use the product.
Then we need to think about the steps necessary for our customer to get to the point where they can have that delightful experience. If the product is complex enough that implementation planning and services needed, who will do that? We may need to define a step-by-step implementation process. Is this process something we charge customers for or is it something they can do themselves? Does our product have any prerequisites? Is that something we provide or will we need a partner to fill that requirement?
Now we need the things necessary for us to make it a business, like a price, a way for accounting to book the sale, a plan to pay our salespeople, and a transfer of knowledge to our customer support team.
Then we need the things to help us communicate to the target customers in our market aware that we have an answer to their problems, like buyer personas, positioning/messaging, and a go-to-market strategy.
Where companies get in trouble is they mistakenly define their product as the thing their development team built (using criteria) without considering what their customer is expecting to buy (buying criteria). When the development team is done they throw it over the wall to the product marketing manager to launch. If it’s an incomplete solution from a buyer’s point of view it makes for a difficult sale, revenue expectations aren’t met, and the blame game starts.
We can get so caught up in the excitement of creating that we lose sight of the fact we’re running a business.
Why is product marketing so misunderstood?
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I have the privilege of working with many marketing teams at technology companies. A common theme is how many companies can describe what product marketing is, but they can’t describe the responsibilities of their product marketing managers.
Let me tell you about you, product marketing manager
Your name is John. You are 34 years old. You go by many job titles, most notably product marketing manager, marketing manager, industry marketing manager, and segment marketing manager. Sometimes your job title is product manager and you do it all. You have an undergraduate degree, usually a BS (no pun intended), and occasionally an MBA (about 30% of the time).
Your job is to develop and evangelize your products to prospects, customers, partners and analysts. You differentiate your product offerings from competitive alternatives in the market. You write a lot of stuff and build slides like they are going out of style. Your salespeople are constantly asking for one of these and one of those. You struggle to prioritize the gazillion things on your todo list because they all have one priority: high. Actually, your sales team believes you work for them and should do everything they ask you to do, no matter how ridiculous you think it is.
Last minute requests from salespeople (even though you’ve already created what they are asking for) is epic. Everything is a crisis and you know if you turn down their requests, they will complain to their boss, who complains to your boss, who asks you to do it anyway, even when you both agree it’s a complete waste of time.
You know you should be spending time doing strategic activities but there is never enough time. Of course, when you are asked to deliver said strategic deliverables and you say you didn’t have enough time, your boss stares at you in total disbelief.
You work with 2-3 product managers who are grousing that you don’t put enough effort into marketing their products. Likewise you work with a team of marketing communications people who are regularly asking for product descriptions, messaging, product highlights, web content, etc. Why aren’t you writing a blog already? What are you waiting for?
You are asked to write whitepapers that are really collateral printed on white paper. You are an expert at using jargon when you write (best-in-class, comprehensive, seamless, state-of-the-art, next-generation).
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?
Habitats of the Product Marketing Manager
Posted by: | CommentsThose with the job title of ‘Product Marketing Manager’ live in a variety of organizational habitats. There are four that I see as recurring themes, each with its own challenges and opportunities. If you were to get a product marketing manager from one of each of these habitats to sit down and discuss their roles, they’d be amazed at how different they really are (even when their job descriptions are remarkably similar).
The Product Manager Product Marketing Manager
I actually lived this one but seems to be rare. It’s where the person with the job title of product marketing manager functions as a product manager. In this habitat the PMM is compelled to work closely with development and scramble to fulfill go-to-market (GTM) duties as they near a crisis stage. Confusion on their role is abundant. Development, Sales, Marcom and the management team see the PMM in entirely different ways.
The no Product Manager Product Marketing Manager
In this habitat there are no product managers and Development builds whatever they like. Product marketing managers wait gingerly for Development to throw products over the wall with instructions to take it to market. PMMs reverse engineer positioning from product features (afterall, why would anyone build a feature that no one needed? Seriously!), work with Marcom to get the ‘checklist’ of go-to-market deliverables completed, and declaring victory throws the deliverables over the wall to Sales.
The Sales Support Product Marketing Manager
This is the organization that sees product marketing managers as captive suppliers to the sales team. There are little to no strategic activities performed by the PMM. It’s a life of doing whatever Sales wants like building PowerPoint slides, writing one-off pieces of collateral, giving presentations and demos. Basically these PMMs function as sales engineers without being called sales engineers. They get lectured for not being strategic, but when they say ‘no’ to the sales team for tactical requests they are punished.
The Market-Driven Product Marketing Manager
In this habitat the product marketing manager coexists with product managers, where the roles of both are clearly defined. Product managers often are of the ‘technical product manager’ (TPM) variety with a heavier emphasis on working/coordinating with Development, being the experts on their products and using criteria. Product marketing managers are experts on their buyers and buying criteria, with a heavier emphasis on working with Marcom and Sales. In this habitat the PM owns the product strategy and the PMM owns the go-to-market strategy. Harmony (queue rainbows and unicorns).
Which habitat do you live in?
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 – Execute Phase
Posted by: | CommentsThis is the final of four posts providing an overview of the Repeatable Product Launch Process which is delivered in the Product Launch Essentials seminar. So far I’ve covered the Organize Phase, Evaluate Phase and the Prepare Phase. In this post I’m going to share with you the Execute Phase which is about building the product launch plan and measuring the effectiveness of the product launch.
Execute Phase
To recap, the Organize Phase is focused on getting agreement on what the product launch goals were and which of seven product launch strategies would be the most effective at achieving the launch goals.
The Evaluate Phase is about identifying the speed bumps that would get in the way of achieving the launch goals.
The Prepare Phase is the time to organize the product launch team and develop the plans/actions to address the speed bumps.
Build
By the time you’ve reached the Build step of the Execute Phase you will have established the launch goals, launch strategies, have a clear understanding of the barriers to success, and developed plans to mitigate the highest risk items. Now it’s time to build the product launch plan.
The Product Launch Essentials seminar includes a product launch toolkit that has a product launch plan template. The plan is designed to articulate the goals, strategies and plans to assure success.
Measure
One area that often gets ignored after the excitement of the launch date is how the product launch is progressing toward the launch goals. The realization of success or failure is determined many months after the fact when the details are erased from everyone’s memory.
I advocate monthly launch status reports for the management team to show progress against the launch goals. The problem with metrics in the marketing discipline is that there are just so many. Fortunately, it’s far easier to know what to report when the launch goals are determined up front. The key is to draw a straight line between what you’re measuring and your launch goals.
The final launch status report is the Launch Effectiveness Report. This is the opportunity to assess what has been accomplished, what was learned and what could be improved in future launches.
Going Forward
Product launch is not the end of development it’s the beginning of selling. That alone sets a entire value chain of activities in motion to assure a successful product launch. The Repeatable Product Launch Process helps you focus on the things that are most critical to the success of your next product launch.
If you have questions or comments about the Repeatable Product Launch Process, send me an email or add a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
Lunch is an event. Product launch is a process.
Posted by: | CommentsToo often we think about product launch as an event. The magic product launch checklist is consulted. The ‘required’ deliverables are produced. Unfortunately the sales velocity that management expects doesn’t materialize.
The problem in this scenario is that a successful product launch isn’t an event where appetizers, entrees, and desserts are chosen from a fixed menu. What’s needed is a product launch process where the items on the menu are revealed based on the goals of the launch.
The Repeatable Product Launch Process delivered in the Pragmatic Marketing Product Launch Essentials seminar is one such process. Over the next few posts I will share the highlights of the methodology. If you lack a product launch process in your organization, the Repeatable Product Launch Process is a good starting point.
Repeatable Product Launch Process
The methodology is comprised of four phases. Each phase consists of two steps. The Repeatable Product Launch Process is a strategic approach to product launch that is based on achieving an outcome rather than producing a set of deliverables.
Organize Phase
Like any successful project a product launch needs to be anchored in goals. What do you want to accomplish with this product launch? Is it a revenue goal? Is is a customer retention goal? Are you entering a new market segment and are more concerned with awareness?
A clear product launch goal not only defines success, it aligns the entire product launch team. Hint: a goal of ‘sell as much as we can’ is not a goal, it’s a wish.
Once you have an agreement with your manager on the product launch goals it’s time to choose the launch strategies that will help you achieve the launch goals. The choice of the plural ‘launch strategies’ wasn’t a typo. In any given segment there are different buying groups that must be considered. These include our customers and those that are shopping right now to name a few.
For example, you may have a six month product launch revenue goal of $5M. The product is a new version of an existing product. You expect the bulk of the revenue to come from your installed base and the remainder to come from net new customers. Can you see how having a singular approach wouldn’t adequately serve both buying groups?
At the completion of the Organize Phase you would have established clear product launch goals and identified the product launch strategies to help you achieve those goals.
Next: Evaluate Phase
In the next installment I’ll discuss how the Evaluate Phase adds a sanity check to your launch goals and helps you reveal your organization’s product launch readiness weaknesses.
