We’ve found that few product managers can handle both responsibilities well because the ideal qualifications for the two roles can be quite different. We believe the marks of a great Product Marketing Manager are:

• Sales savvy -- sought after by the sales organization as the product expert
• Credible—has deep understanding of customer needs and market dynamics
• Strategic – recognizes market opportunities and influences product direction
• Analytical – spots insight from data; facile with spreadsheets, analytic tools, and finance
• Creative – proposes fresh ideas from website copy to strategic partnerships
• Communicative – writes a blog, uses social media for thought leadership, passionate speaker
• Smart – applies solid business judgment, quickly learns new things
• Influential – has the ear of executives as well as line management

We’ll cover performance metrics in another blog post. Please let us know your own thoughts on Product Marketing Management in a high tech company.

Resources

• Silicon Valley Product Management Association


• Pragmatic Marketing


• 280Group on product management


• SDForum Marketing SIG

1. Trends in the marketplace
Start with the relevant trends in the marketplace that are driving the need for your solution. Are regulations increasing for a particular industry? Has the financial crisis forced your customers to cut back in an area of their business? Are new platforms like Facebook leading customers to expect a similar experience in business applications? Keep it high level, stick to just defining the trend and resist the urge to solve the trend or link it to your product features too soon.

2. Challenges
The story flows best if your next step is to link those trends in the marketplace to the specific challenges they create for your customers. Increased regulation creates a lot more work for compliance teams to set up controls to meet those requirements. The downturn in the economy over the last few years has caused most businesses to have to find ways to do more with less. The explosion of social networking has created security and privacy concerns as employees use unsanctioned applications for business use. This section is where you need to be sure you understand your customers pain points in their own language. You need them to engage and agree that they are experiencing these challenges before they will be interested in listening to how you can help solve them.

3. Ideal Solution
If you have done a good job on the first two sections, now you should have their attention. Give some brief examples of how best run companies have addressed these challenges. Again, this should be generic, and not about your specific product. Compliance teams are automating compliance activities to better manage the increase in regulation. Companies are moving to cloud-based solutions to consume business applications with minimal upfront cost. Business social networking companies like Jive and Chatter from Salesforce.com are capitalizing on the desire of employees to have a secure social networking experience at work. Obviously these examples should also be functionality that your solution happens to also offer. You have given them the criteria by which to evaluate potential solutions for their challenges and now . . .surprise your solution meets all those criteria.

4. Finally . . . introduce your solution!
Here is where you can finally talk about how your company can help solve these challenges. Be careful, though. This is not your opportunity to churn out your laundry list of cool features, charts and product diagrams. Be consistent with the flow we’ve been following up to this point. Carefully match the specific benefit that your solution offers to each of the three or four trends and challenge areas you have introduced in the beginning. When creating this story, it may be helpful to start here and work backwards, as long as you work back to real challenges you know your customers have. Either way, telling a consistent story that holds the reader’s hand through the same four challenges and leads them to the matching solutions is the best way to keep their attention. Extra points if you can make the slide layouts match for each section to make it impossible for them to miss the connection. Oh and you should be able to cover all of this in four slides – one for each section.

Here are some additional PowerPoint tips from two of my favorite presenters, both with ties to Apple, Guy Kawasaki, and Steve Jobs.

Is PowerPoint the currency of your company? Have you seen other helpful outlines for creating effective presentations? Let us know what works best for you.

If clients are struggling with poor open rates, more often than not it has less to do with the usual suspects – creative, subject lines and spam triggers – and more to do with issues of content and the relationship the company has with the people they’re emailing.

Fact is, email is no longer a viable lead acquisition tool – so forget trying to make rented email lists perform like they did 5 or 10 years ago; it’s not going to happen. However, as a tool for lead nurturing or customer marketing, email can still be extremely effective, and in those scenarios, we see double-digit open rates consistently, provided marketers do two things:

1. Respect their list, by taking a responsible approach to opt-in, opt-out, and email frequency; and

2. Deliver consistent information of value that’s personalized, targeted, and relevant to the recipient.

Fail on either count – i.e. bombard your database with “one size fits all” emails that are strictly promotional -- and no amount of creative tweaking or email deliverability testing will help.

If you're targeting IT management what offers really are working today versus the old model of whitepapers and webinars?

For all the talk of rich media, we’re finding that offers such as videos and podcasts, even if they’re very short, still don’t perform as well as the old standbys – downloadable, printable content like white papers, analyst reports, buying guides, solution briefs, etc. They may be old-fashioned, but they appeal in part I think because the reader knows that, having responded, he/she can consume the content at his/her convenience. Rich media is simply more work, iPods or no.

eBooks are the flavor of the day when it comes to offer content, but when you pull back the covers, they’re really longer, well-packaged white papers. Still, the word “eBook” seems to communicate perceived value for some reason, so if clients are willing to invest the time and resources in developing ebooks, they can perform quite well.

Webinars are still as popular as ever, though – critically – these days they’re much more effective for lead nurturing versus lead generation. As a first step for a new prospect, Webinars may be setting the proverbial bar too high, but as a next step for a prospect that’s already familiar with your company, Webinars can be a valuable tool for moving people along the sales cycle. Plus they’re easily re-purposed in hosted form for Web content or content syndication.

How should tech firms be combining email marketing with outbound telesales or teleprospecting?

Per my comment above, I don’t really consider email to be a viable lead acquisition tool any longer, so I’m hesitant to suggest any role as a complement to outbound telemarketing, except that on a one-to-one level, following up a phone call with a well-crafted email will never hurt, especially when (if you believe industry statistics) fewer and fewer people are responding to voicemail.

Where email marketing and telesales/telemarketing DO work well in concert is in the context of lead nurturing. With today’s marketing automation platforms, companies can trigger automated emails based on prospect behavior, lead score or demographics, and couple those emails with automated alerts to the relevant sales rep.

What else should VPs or Directors of Marketing consider when architecting an online marketing campaign to drive high quality leads (not just quantity)?

The quality of leads has much less to do with the marketing vehicle – email, search, direct mail, whatever – and much more to do with the offer itself. For example, if your offer is a high-level, educational white paper, you’ll likely generate leads that comprise a broad range of interest, from tire-kickers to buyers. However, if you orient your offer content to prospects later in the selling cycle, for example: a buying guide or customer case study – you may generate fewer leads, but those leads will almost certainly be more “sales ready.”

Thank you, Howard, for your terrific insights here! Howard can be reached at howard AT spearmarketing.com.

• Start and end on time – keep it to one hour a week maximum.
• Assign homework -- send out an agenda in advance with homework assignments for the reps. Here are prep questions that always generate solid insights and best practices sharing:
• Describe a win since our last call. Why did we win?
• Describe a loss since our last call. Why did we lose?
• What is your strategy for upselling an existing customer?
• What objections are you running into the most and how do you handle them?
• What differentiators resonate the most with customers?
• What is the pain point that’s driving your customer’s purchase?
• Listen -- most sales managers I’ve seen love to hear themselves talk. It’s far more effective to use these sales meetings to have the reps talk about their business. Yes, their business is the focus not you. Ask questions. Put people on the spot. Try to listen 90% of the time and keep your talking to 10%. Encourage discussion rather than asking for data you can get yourself from your SFA system.
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• Be up beat – I’ve seen sales managers use sales conference calls to humiliate certain reps for under performing. This may appear to work in the short term but it only leads to rep turnover in the longer run. So keep the meeting up beat and focused on team productivity not on any one individual‘s performance problems. Reps don’t need to like you but they do need your encouragement and recognition.


• Use your SFA system – one of the most effective approaches is to use a tool like Go-to-Meeting or WebEx to share your screen as people talk about a specific opportunity. They will learn that they must have your sales force automation (SFA) system updated and ready each week.


• Invite marketing – have your field marketing team listen in and especially have them lead topics on competitive win/loss, value propositions, lead generation, differentiation, and objection handling.


• Maintain control – it’s easy to go down a rat hole if one rep decides to go on about a particular sales objection they run into or about the poor quality leads they are getting from marketing. Limit these rants. I like to acknowledge the issue and have the rep go offline with someone in marketing or product development and come back with a recommendation to the sales team. Make them solve the problem rather than you.


• Look at system issues – I’ve seen sales managers browbeat reps in sales meeting expecting to get better results from them. This never works. Instead, look deeper into the issue which might be frustrating you and the team. Is there a training/competency issue? Process gap? Missing sales tool? Lack of motivation and discipline? Compensation issue? Diagnose before you pound the table for better results.


• Publish notes – sales managers almost never take notes and even more rarely send out action items from sales conference calls. What a missed opportunity to ensure good sales execution and follow through on commitments. Take notes. Publish right way then review briefly on the next sales conference call. This will build accountability too.

Here are red flags that tell us when product/solution management is most needed.

• Sales is selling “future”, features that development and marketing say is not yet committed
• Product Marketing is frustrated that product roadmaps (prioritization) are non-existent, changing weekly, or simply not rigorously managed.
• Development team is worried that they may not necessarily be working on the most valuable feature set or what customers will buy now.
• Support manager is urging proactive development to drive down helpdesk calls due to bugs.
• Customers are beginning to lose confidence that the development process will meet their long term needs.

• Own the “Plan of Record” which is a prioritized list of features for development over the next 2 -3years.


• Establish and lead a cross functional team to ensure the whole product meets customers needs (e.g. marketing, support, development, operations, finance, and manufacturing).
• Manage milestone completions; ensure, for example, that a product is ready for launch only after having met all the exit criteria spanning the cross functional team.
• Provide visibility to executive management of all scope, schedule, and risks affecting the success of the product launch.
• Own the creation and updating of the “Market Requirements Document” (MRD) and “Product Requirements Document” (PRD); note often Product Marketing is the owner of the MRD and Product Management owns the PRD.

Expect to see tension between Product Management and virtually every function head such as Product Marketing, Development, Support, etc. The best product managers I have ever seen tend to think of themselves (and be seen as) the “general manager” of the product by being able to own all aspects of the product that affect its financial performance and success in the marketplace. Please share with us your own stories about how product management has made a huge difference in your firm.

I never forgot this lesson---that great execs get their hands dirty to stay grounded in the business. With that thought, I decided this week to jump in and take on some cold calling for one of our large technology clients which has retained us for demand generation strategy and execution. Here is a snapshot of one hours’ worth of my efforts—again, I’m not a professional inside sales rep but found this exercise very helpful. By the way, I purposely called during the lunch hour to maximize my chances for catching IT managers/executives outside of their meetings:

So what are my initial conclusions from this?

• The list quality was quite poor; only 50% of the list had valid contact information
• Was shocked that 4 of the valid 25 contacts actually picked up the phone and would speak to me; I was beginning to think that no one answers the phone anymore.
• Pleased to get 1 of 50 contacts result in a completed web survey and the start of a qualified sales opportunity. That’s 2% (or maybe 4% if you throw out the bad contacts), far better than I would have expected from cold calling. That’s probably why telemarketing is still a vibrant industry.
• Maintaining my attitude was critical. I did “drills” by calling 5 folks then pausing, stretching, and walking around my office before taking on another batch of five. That helped shake off any lingering feelings of rejection. I found it best to think of this as a game, a sport.
• Content and approach are key; I was not pitching anything. I was simply asking permission to ask them questions about their IT infrastructure. People are surprisingly open to telling you about their shop in return for a small incentive ($25 Amazon certificate in this case).

Please share with us your own stories of cold calling successes, failures, and lessons learned.

Lists are perishable goods – we saw a big difference in open rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribes between lists that were clearly kept up to date and those that weren’t. We controlled for offer, segment, and message.

Be specific on job titles – it does cost more to target a specific job title like “Director of Server Operations” than a generic one like “IT Director” but you’ll get better open and response rates.

Check at least 3 current references – I got burned by one firm which delivered the list to me after receiving their $8,000 but the list turned out to have only 1/3 of the relevant contacts that we expected, and a 43% bounce rate (bad email addresses). Shame on me for only relying on a couple references. Here are some questions you might ask your references (Jon Weiss at Access Response, had great inputs here):

• What list did you get from the vendor?


• Was the list you got current? How do you know?


• Was it at least 85% deliverable meaning no more than 15% of emails bounced?


• Did it uniformly have the detail demographics you expected?


• Did you have to go back to them to make good on a guarantee?


• Were they responsive to your needs even after your sent money?


• Overall did you feel that they were a good company to do business with?

Give yourself two weeks lead time – Don’t make the mistake of leaving too little time between placing the list order and needing to do the email blast for web surveys. Some firms are on the ball and responded very quickly with good quality lists, while other firms slow way down on their responsiveness once they get their upfront money.

We’d love to hear your own war stories and victories.

1. Our marketing department is doing so much already, why add social media to the list?
Are your customers, prospects, partners, or competitors on social media sites? If so you should join the conversation. Can your prospects find what they are looking for amidst all those other marketing activities you are doing? Social media can offer them a single portal or entry point to answer their unique questions and learn more about your product or service.

3. If I invest resources in social media my boss is going to ask, where’s the ROI?
We marketers are always burdened with justifying our existence when all we really want to do is create cool ads, right? Kidding aside, I believe it’s going to become easier and easier to prove the ROI of social media activities. First and foremost, a strong social media presence will raise awareness of your brand and contribute to lead nurturing. Yes, those things are harder to measure. I recommend you think of social media as simply another entry point into your marketing lead funnel. Integrate it with the other campaigns, collateral and events you are already doing. Post links to your blog, white papers, webinars and demos. Studies have shown active participation on social media sites can also raise your company profile in search rankings. Compare your overall marketing funnel statistics before and after getting involved in social media, and while it may not be immediate, I’m confident you will see improvement in your ability to retain and move prospects through the funnel. Best of all, there is no incremental investment to get started in social media. Other than your product team’s time, that is.

Have you faced these questions in your organization? Let us know how you sold social media activities to your boss. And how you are measuring its success.

This approach is also not very effective for the earlier stages of a sales cycle, or more correctly stated, the customer’s Buying Cycle (from SPIN-Selling). This customer-centric view suggests that “push” model messaging (that drives most telemarketing scripts), is not conducive to the Recognitions of Needs phase. If your optimal prospects are in this phase, versus later phases where they have already defined their specifications (Evaluation of Options phase), or are nearing a purchase decision (Resolution of Concerns phase), then a more effective and economical approach may be as follows:

First, clearly define your target profile. Everyone talks about this, but we rarely see clients take a sales-aligned approach that outlines prospect personas right down to their color of toothbrush. Also, one that specifies situational attributes, problems & implications in the form of questions, and need/payoff solutions related to those questions. Personas should be created for the three primary account roles typically seen in most firms. From here we can create survey questions that fully qualify prospects. Telemarketing and email campaigns can be designed that ask prospects these questions, using an approach that gains high interest and lots of responses. Low-cost telemarketers can be employed here vs. high-cost salespersons. We’re not trying to close a sale at this stage, only qualify and set appointments.

We can now better sort our lists based on tight profiles, rifle shot lower cost telemarketers to qualify and set appointments, and then bring in the big guns. Once appointments are set, more senior-level conversational salespersons (not telemarketers) can engage with qualified prospects to move them to the next step in the Buying Cycle. The advantages are that our marketing costs actually go down and our close ratios go up. Also, we can better “score” our leads, thereby allowing us to effectively measure our marketing campaigns and prioritize our lead lists.

CSO Insights did a survey a few years back and found that while marketing pros think 70% of their leads are good to excellent, sales pros believe that only 1.3% of leads are “world class.” The reason for the disconnect is because all too often expensive and highly-trained salespersons are given cold call lists and asked to become junior telemarketers. Or, their firm has outsourced telemarketing but the leads are not very qualified.

In summary, a demand generation campaign should never be thought of as a tactical program measured by quantity. Instead, these campaigns should become part of an overall strategy that includes sales-aligned messaging, demand creation and lead nurturing measured by quality. We often work with clients and telemarketing firms to do just that using a unique new program called Vector, but there are many ways to accomplish this objective. The proof, of course, is in the results. For our clients, which include many name-brand blue chip firms, we’ve seen response rates go from 1.5% to 3.5%. Fields salespersons and leading resellers/distributors have doubled or tripled pipelines along with enthusiasm and offer praise for the marketing teams. Sales cycles have been cut in half and the amount per sale has gone up.

If these are the kind of results we’d like to see, then perhaps doing things the same old way and expecting different results is not our best course of action. If you agree, we encourage you to learn more about our exciting new Vector program that is driving revenue acceleration for many of our clients.

Insight into your product roadmap. Much like your direct sales managers, your partners are on the front lines. They have to answer to customers. They need to know when that bug will be fixed and when that all-important feature will be released. You may feel like your roadmap is highly confidential stuff, but engaging your partners in a product dialog not only builds loyalty but can also help you prioritize the features customers want most.

Help selling. My colleague Al Morgan recently recommended the importance of coaching your partners on how to deliver your sales pitch. Your partners are most likely selling more than just your product or service. Make it easy for them to learn your key benefits, sell against your competitors and handle common objections. Summarize key sales information such as target customer criteria, key features and benefits, competitive information and objection handling into a one or two page cheat sheet.

Also be sure your survey includes one question regarding overall satisfaction, such as a numerical rating for your partner program or a measure of your partners’ willingness to recommend your program to others, as a way to benchmark your channel program progress year over year.

In-depth training. Deliver a one-on-one training to resellers that show interest after the intro. These can be 20 minutes at a sales team meeting, a 45 minute overview, or a 90 minute in-depth. Whichever path you are offered, take it and tune your presentation to fit the time and the audience. Sometimes the key takeaway is simply, “Call us, we can help!” Most sales teams have varying competence with your solution. For the top 20% of performers, you webinar may not add much. But if you can motivate the other 80% to get started, you’ve quadrupled your feet on the street!

Coaching. Sales reps that are new to your solution can often benefit from talking through an opportunity before proceeding. Setting up a “channel sales desk” to support those calls can pay big dividends in revenue, and provide you with early reviews of your solution selling program. While solution sales will never be “paint by number”, coaching can concentrate knowledge and accelerate success. Don’t expect that a portal will be sufficient. In truth, it can seem like just one more burden that stops that rep from acting.

Scorecards. To be explicit when describing your target opportunity, create a scorecard that maps to your ideal prospect. In the early days, it is better to have channel partners qualify out marginal deals quickly, and focus on prospects directly in your sweet spot. By using deal scorecards as part of the coaching process, you can ensure that solid deals get fast-tracked and poor fits are eliminated early. Plus, they are great training aids for getting newer reps on board quickly.

Demand generation. There’s no better training follow-up than solid leads. These get partner management motivated during the critical first few months, when you are building mindshare and selling habits with the reseller sales force. At this stage, consider running the demand gen campaigns directly, as the reseller is unlikely to have the resources or skills in-house, even if you supply the funding.

Resellers are very enthusiastic about this approach. It helps them be efficient and get into new markets quickly. It also helps them bring up the capability level of their sales reps without taking them out of the field for expensive training. Our client has seen tremendous success and a major renewal in interest since the program has been put in place.

Aventi’s Vector Marketing provides a powerful framework for supporting all of these elements. It ensures that consistent messaging and tools are constructed and that these in turn support successful demand gen and rapid, consistent, deal qualification. Keeping to the Vector framework for subsequent programs also lowers the “new learning” on the part of the channel partner.

In summary, giving your channel partners integrated and consistent tools, training, coaching and leads can differentiate your solution and build mindshare. That will increase your value, and make your channel partners more receptive to the follow-up programs in your pipeline.

Because:

• It's essential - if you don't, someone else surely will and guess what? users are out there talking, discussing, creating already; so whatever you do, don't ignore the conversation


• It's ubiquitous - you may think your users are not engaged in this way, think again...


• It takes resources - despite what everyone may tell you, it is not FREE.

Our presentation covered the following: "Launching New Offerings in a Social World: What to consider when incorporating Social Media in your Go-To-Market Planning!". Topics included:

• How to create a good go-to-market plan?


• What sound principles of marketing still apply?


• When is it appropriate to consider social tools?


• How should one incorporate social media vehicles in such plans?

You can view this presentation here.Social Media Work Shop Deck Nov 09 2009

Want to know more? My partners Anne and Jeff from the Aventi Group and I jointly conducted a workshop on precisely this topic at the recent Social Media World Forum on November 9th.

Needless to say this is a critical, intensive and thoughtful exercise when done right. But meanwhile I wanted to share a set of very simple (perhaps simplistic?) and over-arching set of criteria I use in conducting this analysis. Hope you find it useful. And please write and tell me what you think!

What sort of technology and services do you buy?

We buy hardware (servers, desktops, storage, networking equipment and firewalls), software (SAP ERP and Business Objects, Epicore CRM, Microsoft Exchange) and telecom (Nortel for unified communication). We also buy services such as data center hosting, remote application monitoring, network management, and even applications delivered as a service (Droisys and Protera).

What are some dos and don’ts for selling to a CIO?

It’s important to recognize the CIOs are very different from sales people. We are more analytical not as emotional so we don’t respond well to rah rah stuff. We depend of facts and figures because we are very process oriented. If a sales rep wants to connect with me, he needs to do his homework and know what business I am in, what problems I likely have, and uncover my needs and only then should he pitch a product that solves a specific problem for me. And finally, respect the CIO’s time. Get to the point.

I would also strongly recommend that sales people stay engaged from the pre-sale phase all the way through to the implementation. I find it very frustrating when companies transition personnel from pre-sales, to implementation, and to technical support. The disconnects between these teams are very very obvious to me and disruptive. I find that some of the folks downstream of the sales rep are clueless about my business goals and all the needs I already expressed to the sales team. The sales rep does his song and dance then disappears. That’s very bad for the relationship and even hurts results.

What collateral or information do you find most valuable?

Vendors do, of course, need to do all the usual things like webinars, trade shows, datasheets, whitepapers, analyst briefings, etc. But I actually find the most valuable ones are opportunities to speak with fellow CIOs whether it’s on the golf course or in customer reference calls. I never turn down “lunch and learns” and events where I can have quality time with a peer. Remember the absolutely best thing for a CIO is word of mouth from another CIO. That’s why I have agreed to be an SAP customer reference. It helps them but it also helps me as I get to speak with peer CIOs. I like to ask colleagues “so how’s this working in your own shop” and “how did you solve this issue?”

How does a vendor get you to be a customer reference?

Well I have to be a happy customer first. Then they need to provide an opportunity to speak with other CIOs. You know, we CIOs are actually a very talkative bunch. Just get us together, let us react to your product roadmap, and facilitate questions. That’s it. I’m also a member of a CIO group called the Office of the CIO, and this group meets monthly share experiences etc. I’m happy to share more about this wonderful organization.

How important are analysts like Gartner Group, Forrester, and IDC to your in purchase decision?

Not very. I find that they do not have the hands on experience that we do. Of courses vendors do need to cultivate a relationship with them to keep their product visibility up.

Tell me a memorable story of a particular buying process?

Well I’m afraid my more recent experiences have not been too pleasant. I was recently working with a vendor in the iSCSI SAN market. They sent nice people seemingly very interested in our business. They tried hard to understand our needs, my urgency, and working within a tight budget. They helped me identify the right solution which I then bought. That’s when the frustration began. The vendor shipped us off to a completely separate business unit and even farmed out the implementation to a third party company. It got worse from there. The third party botched up implementation. I tried calling the sales rep but he was onto the next kill. I had to escalate up the flagpole to the VP sales to get the original pre-sales team back in here to straighten out the implementation. Ironically, I would’ve bought more if hadn’t been for the poor handoffs and transitions. This is why I feel strongly that vendors really ought to have at least one person stay in contact with the customer from purchase through to deployment.

So have you ever had a great buying experience?

Yes. My best purchases are with Dell for servers. We simply order what we want, they ship it out, and we plug it into the rack and it works. The best purchases are actually the ones that have no involvement with the supplier. The minute it requires vendor involvement and a system integrator then things gets convoluted and more chances for things to go wrong.

Who’s involved the purchasing process?

My team defines the technology roadmap. We identify, select, and negotiate with vendors. I take the contract to the CFO to ensure the contract has acceptable terms and risk. Then it goes to the CEO for signoff before purchasing cuts a purchase order.

How do you justify a purchase?

I justify purchases based on how it would increase or maintain our revenues. I look at the impact to revenue with and without this purchase. How does it reduce operations costs both capital and operating expenses? How does this mitigate risks? I look at risks such as PCI compliance, credit card theft, and especially risk of downtime affecting orders.

Copyright (c) 2009 Sridhar Ramanathan