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The key to getting more customers for your product lies in fulfilling your promise

We’re going to kick it old school this time around and take a look at one of the key skills that every product manager should be good at, but all too often we’ve been working so hard that we’ve neglected this task: turning prospects into actual paying customers. If you can’t already list this skill on your product manager resume, then when we are done here you’ll be able to…

The Wrong Way To Do It: AIDA

After all of my years of being a product manager, I have come to one blindingly obvious conclusion about my customers that shapes everything that I do. My customers don’t buy my product. Rather they buy what my product can do for them.

This means that every account manager that I end up working with needs to have the same goal that I do: how can I motivate a prospect to get them to become a customer? Yeah, yeah – we product managers can talk all day about this feature or that feature of our product, but if we do we are forgetting something that should have been listed on everyone’s product manager job description: product management will always be an emotional job because our customers will always buy based on emotions, not logic.

Oh sure, after their gut has told them what product to select they’ll come back around and build a fancy logic framework to support their emotion-based decision, but it will all be a lie. Armed with this knowledge, what is a product manager to do?

When it comes to the strategic management of prospects, it turns out that our brothers and sisters in the Sales profession have known about this emotionally-guided decision making process for a long time. They’ve developed a framework for guiding prospects and turning them into customers that we should all be following today (you are, aren’t you?) in every piece of product-related material that we produce.

Ask any business development manager and they’ll tell you that the traditional process of generating customers starts by getting their attention. Next you want to generate interest in them (sometimes referred to as creating arousal). This is followed by sparking desire for your product or service. Finally, it all wraps up with a call for action – what steps do you want the prospect to take in order to become a customer? The whole process is referred to as AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action).

The problem with the AIDA approach is that things are left pretty wide open for interpretation as to exactly how to go about doing it. What’s the real difference between awareness and desire? You get my point – nice acronym, but tough to put into practice in the real-world.

The Right Way To Do It: Promise & Proof

I’ve got some good news for you. It turns out that there’s a better way to go about turning your prospects into customers. Business consultant Herman Holtz identified a two-step process that achieves the same goals.

His process consisted of the following two steps: making promise to your customer and then providing the proof that you’ll be able to deliver on that promise to them. Perhaps an example would help to make this system clearer.

A current TV show, Bar Rescue, deals with a consultant visiting failing bars and helping them to win more customers and become profitable again. The show’s star, Jon Taffer, has a very interesting way of looking at just exactly what product a restaurant is selling. He believes that a restaurant is selling human reactions: if you don’t react to a plate of food then the restaurant has failed. If you smile, then the restaurant has succeeded.

This is exactly where the promise / proof technique comes in to play. The key to this approach is exactly what we’ve been talking about: people will buy your product not because of what it is, but rather because of what they can do with it. They don’t want to own it – they want to enjoy what they can do with it.

So what are you offering to your customers in all of those brochures, web sites, flyers, etc. that you spend your time making? Is it the product and a price? Nope, in reality your offer to your prospect is the benefit that you say that your product can deliver. Your prospect wants to know how they can gain the benefit that you are promising them that your product will deliver.

Ultimately it’s all going to come down to the proof that you’ll be able to deliver. Your prospects are going to need to see proof that your product can deliver on the promise that you are making. This means that you need to use certifications, testimonials, reviews, logical arguments, authoritative statements, and guarantees to turn your prospects into customers.

What All Of This Means For You

Taking a quick look around the product management ecosystem, you can find a lot of suggestions for how product managers can get their products noticed by potential customers (a.k.a prospects). What’s been missing is how product managers can help to turn those prospects into paying customers.

Traditionally product managers have been taught to use the following four steps in order to attract prospects and turn them into customers: attention, interest, desire, and action (AIDA). The problem with this approach is that it has always been rather unclear how to actually go about doing it.

I’m proposing that product managers adopt a new approach: promise and proof. This is much simpler and immediately gets to the point. This approach requires a product manager to crawl into a customer’s mind and really understand what promise they view the product as delivering. Once this is understood, the next step is to provide the almost-customer with the proof that they need in order to commit to selecting your product.

Now that you have this understanding of the role that a product manager has in turning prospects into customers, you need to go out there and do it. No, you are not in sales, but you are part of the team that is responsible for making sure that your product is a success. Good luck!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How much “proof” do you think that potential customers need in order to be convinced to buy your product?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You’d think that we’d all know how to market our products simply because we get marketed to every single day. It turns out that this is not the case simply because there are a lot of different components that go into successfully marketing a product. Although you’d think that this kind of activity would be part of everyone’s product manager job description , it turns out that picking which component is the most important is where most product managers go wrong…

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How Well Do You Know Your Product's Customers?

I find myself telling the product managers that I’m working with that they need to understand that one of a product manager’s most important jobs is to give good direction to their sales teams: who will buy your product. You may think that you know the answer, but like the product managers for 5-Hour Energy Shots you might be wrong…

The 5-Hour Energy Shot Customer Surprise

Have you heard about the energy shot products? These are drinks that come with names that would make any product manager who has ever done branding become instantly envious: “6 Hour Power”, “Nitro2Go”, “ZipFizz” and of course, the market leader “5 Hour Energy”.

These products are loaded with caffeine stimulants and a bunch of other stuff (vitamins and herbs). The promise is that they will allow the drinker to stay alert for hours after drinking one.

As a product manager, who do you think that the audience for this type of product would be? Just on a gut level, you’d think that probably students and people who work long hours (think truckers and police) would make up your target customers. You’d be right, sort of.

For you see, it turns out that the brand managers at all of these energy booster shot products seem to have overlooked a very large and important market: senior citizens.

How You Can Make Sure That You Are Not Surprised

What’s happened is that they have just recently come to realize that all of those Baby Boomers who are starting to get close to retirement age don’t want to slow down.

The brand mangers didn’t really do any big market study to find this out. Rather stories started to get back to them. It was little things, like big spikes in sales when the product just happened to be located right next to a product that senior citizens were buying (like wrinkle cream) in a store like Costco it would sell out.

Once they started to realize that there might be something here, they started to use a proven communication channel, the American Association of Retired People (AARP) to reach this demographic. They ran ads in their magazines and attended their trade shows and handed out products.

Clearly, the energy shot brand managers had a huge potential market sitting right under their noses for a long time before they realized that it was there. How can you prevent this from happening to your product?

The key is to keep your eyes open and take a look at the sales of your product – the sales people will only care about making the sale, you need to care about how much was sold and who bought it.

It turns out that if there is a dip in sales of your product, that can tell you a lot also. You have some assumptions about how much of your product will be sold and to whom it will be sold. If that’s not happening, then you need to take a closer look and find out where your thinking went wrong.

What All Of This Means For You

As product and brand managers, we are responsible for identifying who we are going to sell our products to. The energy shot product mangers thought that they had done a good job of doing this, however, their market came back and told them that they had overlooked a very large segment.

In the case of the energy shot product, the senior citizen market had a huge need for their product – they don’t want to slow down and they view the product as being able to help them keep going. Once the product managers realized that this market existed, they were able to adjust their marketing and start to address it.

As product managers we need to make sure that we are not overlooking large segments of untapped customers for our products. Carefully looking at who is buying our products and making sure that we investigate unexpected peaks and dips can reveal untapped customer segments. That should give you something to think about the next time you are chugging one of those energy shots!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Who do you think is responsible for identifying new markets for your product?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If there was such a thing as a standard product manager job description, then you’d think that it would contain the phrase “… be responsible for developing products that solve problems and sell well…” The product managers over at Dell recently had a fantastic opportunity to create a tablet product that would take over the world. How come they missed the mark…?

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It Turns Out That We May All Be Selling Our Products To Grandparents…

Who is the customer for your product? Maybe a better question is how old is your target customer? It turns out that they may be much older than any of us have realized – America’s grandparents are becoming the dominate consumer force (and this relates to business to business transactions also). Is your product ready?

Just The Facts Please – The Arrival Of The Grandparents

So how did the people that we’re selling our products to get so old all of a sudden? Well, it turns out that this has been going on for quite some time. Ever since 2000 the spending levels by grandparents has grown by a whopping 7.6% per year. This is almost double the annual overall consumer growth rate!

The web site Grandparents.com recently did a study of this group of U.S. consumers. They discovered that the group contains more than 70M members and that unlike the grandparents that came before them, they are both better educated and spend more.

This is a large group. The grandparent group is larger than either the Hispanic or African-American populations in the U.S.

How much do they spend you may be asking. Well, according to the study they are currently spending more that US$100B on entertainment alone. This includes everything from vehicles (boats and bikes) to gear (cameras and tents).

It’s not just entertainment that this group is spending on. They are also doing a lot of traveling. This is evidenced by the simple fact that they spend US$77B on all things travel related: tickets, hotels, food, etc.

Taken all together, the grandparent group is a huge purchasing group. They spend a total of US$2 Trillion every year on goods and services. Just to put this into perspective, that is 1/3 of overall U.S. consumer spending by just one group of consumers.

Ultimately how much the grandparents have to spend is determined by how much money they have. It appears as though they have a great deal. In houses that were lead by 55-64 year olds their average net worth was US$254,000. This is the highest value of any current age group.

What You Need To Do With Your Product To Sell To Grandparents

Not all products that we manage will be sold to grandparents. However, we need to understand that grandparents are probably somewhere there in the equation. Even if the initial purchasers of our products are not grandparents themselves, then there’s a good chance that they are serving grandparents using our products.

There are a number of different things that we can do that will make it easier to sell our products to this enormous group of consumers. One of the most important things to understand is that these customers don’t feel as old as they are. This means that you need to make sure that you don’t use words or images that convey the idea that they are old or infirm.

On top of doing this, you should make sure that your marketing efforts are doing the things that you should already be doing. This means that you need to make sure that the message that your product is conveying is honest. You want your potential customers to view your product as being authentic.

As always, you are going to want to show your customers the benefits of your product. The trick here however is that you are going to want to do this in a way that is ageless. If you can make sure that you are sending your marketing messages to the right people, then you’ll be able to successfully tap into the largest group of potential customers for your product that’s out there!

What All Of This Means To You

The people that we sell our products to have been gradually been becoming older. Now as a generation the people controlling the purse strings of 1/3 of consumer spending overall are a part of the grandparent generation.

Product managers need to realize that our customer base may have become older on us. We’re going to have to adjust how we market our products to appeal to this segment – and make sure to not upset them!

Much of what we should be doing as Product Managers should help us appeal to this customer demographic. If we are honest with our customers, focus our marketing efforts on our product’s benefits and stay away from calling our customers old then our products will be successful.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think is the best way to make your marketing timeless?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

That there Internet is a powerful tool in the hands of your potential customers. You probably vary the price of your product over time – lowering it when you want to boost sales or when you have a new version that you are getting ready to introduce. Well guess what, your customers have figured out what you are doing and they are using the Internet to tell everyone else about it. What’s a product manager to do?

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Sometimes Your Crazy Customers Are The Most Valuable Ones

Just who are you hoping that will buy your product? Sane, rational people who you’d be more than willing to invite over to your place for dinner? Or perhaps stark raving mad folks whom you’d probably cross to the other side of the street were you to encounter them in public? I’m guessing that you’d probably pick the sane folks, but maybe you’d be wrong…

What Makes A Customer A “Crazy Customer”?

With a little luck, your product already has a lot of customers. Not all of these customers can be considered to be “crazy customers”. But some of them most defiantly are.

Just what makes a customer a crazy customer can vary from product to product, but the consumer researcher Dr. Andreas Eisingerich has identified the following characteristics that they all seem to share:

• They personally identify with your product and gain some meaning in their life from it.
• They are willing to defend your product against attacks that show up in the media or from competitors.
• They describe your product as being “part of the family”.
• They display extreme behavior in relation to your product (think about waiting in line for days when new models to become available).
• They believe that “… buying cheap is expensive” and will continue to buy your product even if it is not the most inexpensive.

Why Crazy Customers Are The Ones That You Want To Have

Dr. Eisingerich’s research shows that only about 5% of your customers will turn out to be crazy customers. However, this small group of customer is good to have on your side.

First off, they are very loyal to your product. No matter what changes that you make to your product they will be the ones who stick with it. They are also willing to speak up and defend your product when others attack it.

These are also the customers who have the resources needed to buy your product. More often than not they turn out to be between 30 and 45 years old and make more money then the national average for where they live.

Finally, they are willing to add value to your product. They will convince others to use your product and they will often come up with novel ways to incorporate your product in other parts of their life.

What Do Product Managers Need To Do For Crazy Customers

Sadly, studies show that 82% of product managers have not spent any time thinking about how they can leverage their crazy customers to make their products more successful. In fact, only 8% of product managers are currently targeting these customers. Looks like it’s time for you to get on board.

Let Crazy Customers Own Your Product: Taking the time to set up opportunities for your customers to create communities around your product is a great way to allow your crazy customers to come together and interact. Allowing them to make suggestions and even customize the look & feel of your product can get them to feel as though they are involved in the product creation process

Ask For Input From Your Crazy Customers: Product managers are always looking for suggestions on where to take their products next. Since crazy customers use your product so extensively, they can be a great source of input on what new features you should be considering.

Capture Crazy Customer’s Stories: What can convince more people to buy your product will be the stories of how others use it and what problems it has solved for them. Asking your crazy customers to share their stories with you can provide a rich set of material for communicating with future potential customers.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers want as many customers for their product as possible. Along with regular customers come the crazy customers. Product managers have to make a decision here: to ignore the crazy ones or to adjust their marketing efforts to address this group.

Finding ways to meet the needs of your crazy customers can yield great benefits for your product. They can attract new customers and they can provide you with great inputs for new features and marketing stories.

The one thing that you don’t want to do is to ignore your crazy customers. You’ve worked hard enough to create a product that has attracted them, now make sure that you find ways to get your crazy customers to share their devotion to your product with others…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you could lose control of your product if you let “crazy customers” have too much say in it?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Perhaps just for a moment we can consider the day-to-day activities of any product manager as being engaged in a sort of race. Collectively we are all running and trying to move out in front of the product managers at the firms that our company is competing with. In this type of analogy, the product manager is running out in front of everyone else and is showing the company which way to go. But how does the product manager know where to go?

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Customer Loyalty Is What Makes A Product Successful

Imagine for a moment that you were in the business of building walls. Every day you’d get up go build part of a wall and then go home. What if every day when you returned, all of the work that you had done the previous day had been undone? How would you ever get that wall built?

Product managers who create products that don’t generate customer loyalty find themselves in a situation where every day is like their first day: they have to go out and win every customer for the first time. This is crazy. What you need to do is to find out how to generate loyalty in your customers so that they sell themselves next time it comes to buying your product…

Loyalty Is All About Your Program

The key to a good loyalty program is to have many different layers. Product managers know that customers who have bought from you and are now part of your product’s loyalty program will want to move up to the next level if you do this correctly.

In my experience, a product loyalty program needs to have two parts to it: one part that rewards your customers based on how much they’ve bought from you and another that rewards them for how long they’ve been your customer.

I like to track how much a customer spends over a 12-month period in order to determine which level of my product’s loyalty program they belong in. At the same time, I like to have another loyalty program running that customers can only get included in after they’ve purchased from me over the past 5 years.

Loyalty Is About Being Remembered

So what should your customers get for being part of your product’s loyalty program? Well, that can be very dependent on just exactly what kind of product you are selling. However, there are some basic rules that ever product manager needs to follow.

Every member of your product’s loyalty program needs to get an annual letter from you, the product manager. You need to thank them for being a customer and let them know what changes are coming up for your product.

During the course of a year, you need to reach out to your loyalty program members at least four times. Depending on what your product is, you need to find ways to provide your loyalty program members with things that they will value. Informational reports, refrigerator magnets, etc.

Don’t forget the holidays. I personally believe that sending out Christmas cards is a waste of time and money – everyone else does that. I much prefer (for U.S. based customers) to send out Thanksgiving cards. They are unexpected and will actually be read by your customers.

Loyalty Is Not Slick, It’s Personal

Contacting your product’s loyalty program members is important, but what is even more important is HOW you contact them. This is the area where I’ve seen the most product managers fall down.

All too often we can get caught up in how something that our customers are going to see looks. We want it to be a slick and catchy as possible. This is where we start to cause problems.

It has been my experience that communicating with your loyalty program members using plain and relatively simple methods (postal mail, email, web sites) seems to work the best.

What you’ve got to remember here is that you are working on cultivating a relationship with your repeat buying customers. You’re not trying to sell them on your product again, rather you are trying to make them feel like they are a part of your family.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers who don’t set up a customer loyalty program for their products are crazy. You want to make your existing customers feel special and have them take the initiative to maintain the relationship with your product.

There are many ways to set up and run a product loyalty program. Keep in mind that the quality of the program will be determine by the number of membership levels that it has, what you provide your members with, and how you contact them.

Instead of having to keep re-selling your existing customers over and over again, a loyalty program allows you to make them part of your family. Think back to your childhood: isn’t it always easier to sell to family members?

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How many levels do you think that a product loyalty program should have?

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Product managers are responsible for making a lot of decisions about our products while they are being developed; however, one of the most important decisions has to be if we are going to team with another company to develop a product. It’s the classic “Batman” (he’s got a sidekick names Robin) vs “The Lone Ranger” type of decision. Which way should you go?

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Customers Who Love Your Product Are The Ones That You Want To Have

Why are you doing things the hard way?

How do you measure success for your product? For most product managers this comes down to one number: the number of customers that their product has. However, in today’s tough economy, this type of thinking might just be a bit shortsighted. Instead of thinking of all of your product’s customers as being a bunch of people that your product is dating, maybe it’s time to start to think about what it’s going to take to make your customers fall in love with your product…

The Benefits Of Taking The Long-Term View

Ultimately it’s going to be up to your sales team to make the sale. However, as the product manager you are ultimately responsible for getting your product ready to go on a date with the potential customer. Just as in real life dating, if you just throw your product out there in front of a prospective customer, who knows what’s going to happen (but it’s probably not going to be good!)

What should you be doing instead? The first thing that you want to be doing is to set your product up so that it can get a second date with the potential customer. How are you going to do this? Simple, you are going to have to work with your sales teams and teach them how to listen to what the customer is saying. Instead of loading them up with product facts, you need to take the time to teach them what to listen for — just what customer problems does your product solve?

In order to make sure that the relationship goes on beyond the first date, you need to make sure that the first contact that a potential customer has with your product (sales call, brochure, web site) doesn’t come across like a “sales call” type of conversation. Instead, what you want to do is to start to build a relationship with them – show them that your expertise (and your product) can help them solve their problems.

The Right Way To Get A Customer To Partner With Your Product

Dating advice has always been freely available and yet still so many people find that they struggle to do it correctly. The same thing can be said about product mangers who are looking for ways for their products to get into relationships with new customers.

Although every customer is different, it turns out that there are five steps that a product manager can take in order to turn a customer date into a real relationship:

1. Research and understand a customer’s needs: Just like you wouldn’t go on a date without having first done some research on who you are dating, a product manager needs to learn as much as you can about each potential customer. Knowing what their business is and what their needs are will be the key to having a successful date.
2. Be willing to partner with a customer and become a resource: anyone can go on a date with a customer – there’s no commitment there. If you want it to turn into something more, then you’re going to have to make your company a resource that the potential customer can use as a resource.
3. Become a product success teacher: nobody ever said that a potential customer is going to know how to date your product either. Although a suitor might think that they know how to use your product to solve their business problems, they probably don’t know all of the ins and outs. This is where a product manager can add value.
4. Have faith that your product is #1: at all times you have to be your product’s biggest booster. Sure a potential customer may be thinking about dating other products, but you need to keep them focused on developing an exclusive relationship with your product.
5. Be positive: you would be amazed at just how important your own attitude is to the success of any relationship that a potential customer might be thinking about developing with your product. If you think highly of your product then it shows and this can make it easier for a suitor to commit.

What All Of This Means For You

Sure customers are nice to have, but getting your product into as many long-term relationships as you can is even better. Having a lot of potential customers date your product is good, but as a product manager you need to find ways to turn these dates into real relationships / sales.

To make this happen you will have work with the sales team and teach them to become good listeners. What you want to do is to position your company as a resource for a potential customer and your product as a solution to their business needs.

Nobody ever said that this customer / product matchmaking thing was going to be easy. However, if you can do it successfully then you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made the world just a little bit better for at least one customer.

Question For You: what do you think is the best way to get your sales teams to talk less and listen more?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what’s the most exciting thing that you did last week? I have no idea what your answer might be, but I’m willing to bet good money that going to the grocery store was not high on your list. Over in France the product mangers at a company called Chronodrive have figured out a way to solve this problem. What makes their solution unique is that it actually works unlike so many other attempts in the past (can anyone say “Pets.com”?) Would you like to know what they did?

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Now AT&T Product Managers Need To Slow Down Their Customers

Now AT&T Product Managers Need To Slow Down Their Customers

AT&T’s iPhone Problem

Who among us product managers has not heard about Apple’s iPhone product and its incredible retail success? Currently in the U.S. there is only one wireless service provider on who’s network these highly desirable phones work: AT&T’s. You’d think that that was a good thing from an AT&T product manager’s point of view, right? Well it turns out that the old saying “too much of a good thing is bad” truly applies in this case…

It turns out that the iPhone, while it’s a great phone to use, is a terrible phone to have running on your network. A recent story in the New York Times reported that AT&T’s reputation is taking a severe beating because of the connectivity problems that iPhone users have been having. What makes this ironic, is that it turns out that the problem isn’t really AT&T’s but rather how the iPhone was designed!

No matter, AT&T needs to do something and do it quickly. One of the issues that they know that they have to deal with is the problem of customers who love their iPhones just a little bit too much – the heavy data users. To deal with this problem, AT&T is planning on taking steps to curtail excessive data usage by these iPhone customers.

From a product manager point-of-view, these users are responsible for much of the growth in wireless data traffic on the AT&T network as well as perceptions of problems with the network. In order to deal with the issue of customers using too much of the available bandwidth to send and receive data from their iPhones, AT&T is thinking about introducing what they are calling “incentives” that they hope will encourage customers to cut back on their iPhone data usage.

Just to show how much of a problem the iPhones are causing, a recent study revealed that the average iPhone user consumes five to seven times more data on a monthly basis than an average AT&T subscriber who mainly uses their handset for phone calls. Clearly the AT&T product managers have their work cut out for them!

Possible Solutions

What’s a product manager to do? The trick here is that AT&T loves to have subscribers. In fact, the more subscribers that they can get to join every month, the better they are doing as a business. The problem is that some of these subscribers are degrading the quality of service for the remaining users and people might start unsubscribing because of this.

If we take a look in an AT&T product manager’s bag of tricks, the solution that we’ll almost immediately stumble across is of course usage based pricing. The way that AT&T has their product pricing structured right now, it’s almost encouraging iPhone users to send and receive as much data as possible. iPhone users are only required to pay $30 a month for the right to send and receive an unlimited amount of data.

As the AT&T product managers consider their options, they need to be careful that whatever they decide to do they don’t end up punishing the majority of their users for the actions of a few data intensive users. They could start to ration data like they do for talk minutes and once a user exceeds their monthly allotment amount of data that can be sent or received, then they would start to pay an additional fee.

A more controversial solution is for the AT&T product managers to take things into their own hands and when they detect a heavy data user, they could start to slow down (“throttle”) an iPhone user’s connection if their usage is hurting the network access for nearby users.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we are always taught that the more that our customers use our products, the better life will be for us. Clearly, the AT&T product managers have run into an exception to this rule. Their next steps have to be taken carefully.

Two levers that they can pull include changing the subscription pricing to encourage the behavior that they want or changing the way that the product works to restrict heavy data user’s access. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

No matter which option they select, the AT&T product managers need to do something. Nobody ever said that being a product manager was going to be easy and this is a classic example of why product managers are so valuable…

What do you think that the AT&T Product Managers should do in order to minimize abusive iPhone data users?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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What Batman Customer Wouldn't Want You As His Robin?

As product managers, one of the things that we enjoy doing the most is sitting back and counting the number of customers that our product has. Although this is great fun to do, it’s not really what we should be doing with our time. Customers are great to have, but it turns out that what we should really be doing is looking for ways to turn them into something much more valuable: partners.

What’s Up With This Partner Thing?

If you have really been doing your job as a product manager, then you’ve already gone through your product’s existing customers and “fired” those customers that were costing you more than you were making from them. What you are left with is (hopefully) a collection of traditionally good customers. Now you’ve got to get ready to make the next step.

What you’ve got to do is to find ways to collaborate with your customers. Sorry you self-centered product managers, this collaboration isn’t about you, rather it’s all about finding ways to help your product’s customers become more profitable.

Exactly how best to do this is going to depend both on the business that your customer is in and what your product does for them. Collaboration could take the form of using your product to help your customer with their long-term planning, perhaps it can help address issues with their supply chain, etc.

Building A Bigger Box

All of us product managers suffer from a common fault. In our daily lives, the things that we work on can expand to fill all of our available time. This include tasks such as working with product development, creating new product collateral, picking new features, etc. What’s missing from this is interaction with our customers.

The walls that make up our cube / office can easily start to define our world. If we want to start to collaborate with our customers, then we are going to have to push those walls out far enough so that our customers are now inside of our daily lives. It’s only by doing this that we’ll be able to find ways to get closer to our customers.

Can You Say Indispensable?

The difference between a customer and a partner is that you are simply another supplier to a customer whereas when you become a partner, then you have become indispensable. Your sales teams are working hard to make themselves indispensable to your customers, you need to be doing the same for your product.

Hopefully by now you’ve realized that you can’t create this kind of deep relationship with all of your customers. You are going to have to sort the customers that you currently have and select the few that you’d like to move to being partners with.

Developing a partnership with your customers is difficult, maintaining it can be even more challenging. This will require more of your time; however, it’s quite difficult to do this kind of relationship creation and so if you can pull it off, then you will have created a significant competitive advantage for your product.

What All Of This Means For You

Having customers for your product is fantastic. However, savvy product managers realize that just having customers is not enough. Instead, they know that they need to go to the extra effort to turn some of those customers into partners.

In order to create a partner for your product, you need to find ways to collaborate with your customers. This is all about them: how can you and your product help this customer to increase their bottom line?

If you are successful in doing this, then you will have made your product indispensable to your customer / partner and that’s the secret to your long-term success as a product manager.

How many partners do you think that a single product manager could support?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You would think that if your product was the biggest one in it’s market, you’d be sitting pretty as a product manager, right?  Over at the big online payment processor PayPal, their product managers are currently doing quite well. However, they can see the handwriting on the wall and are taking some bold steps to remain #1…

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2010 Is Almost Here -- Do You Know What Your Customers Are Thinking?

2009 is dead, long live 2009. Ok, so it’s not quite dead yet; however, even as your sales teams are running around trying to close the year out on a high note you as a product manager need to start to set your sights on what you’re going to do to get ready for next year. Got a plan?

Uncertainty Rules

No matter what happens with the global economy, things aren’t going to get better overnight. This means that your customers are going to be living in a land of uncertainty next year also.

As a product manager the role that you can play next year is to be a source of both security and calm consistency for your existing and potential customers. You can do this by providing your sales teams with solution facts and industry information that they can share with your customers in order to answer their questions.

Even Less Time Is Available

At your customers, the key people who are required to make the decision to buy your product will have even less time to spend thinking about your product than ever. This means that you’re really going to have to start doing your homework.

Your communication with your sales teams is going to have to become a lot more frequent. You are going to have to start equipping them with new and different things that they are going to be able to share with your potential customers.

Too Much Data, Not Enough Knowledge

Welcome to the 21st Century. Your customers will have access to an almost unlimited amount of data; however, it’s going to be harder than ever for them to get the knowledge that they need.

This means that in your marketing for your product you are going to have to become the source of knowledge for the types of issues that your product solves. That means that 90% of what you send to your customers will have to be fact based knowledge that they can use – not product marketing material. The remaining 10% can be focused on your product.

Short Term Focus Syndrome

As though this wasn’t already a problem, your potential customers are going to be narrowing their focus even more than they already have. You’ll see this as they start to focus on how products that they buy can have a payback within 6 months instead of 12, 18, or even 24 months.

You are not going to be able to change this mindset, that will just have to happen over time. Make the urgencies that your customer is focused on your urgencies. Make sure that your marketing material tells them how your product can help them meet their short-term needs.

Baby, I Need You

Finally, as we move forward, your customer is going to end up needing you even more than they ever have. The only problem is that they don’t know this yet.

Your customers are going to be looking for ways to improve their business, but they just don’t know what they don’t know. They are going to be looking for help in getting a grasp on the “big picture” of the problems that they are facing. If you can help them do this, then they’ll be willing to talk with you about how they can go about solving parts of that problem.

What All Of This Means For You

Even as most companies start to finalize their 2010 budgets, you as a product manger need to get ready to finalize your plans for how you are going to be successful next year. It’s going to be a difficult year once again for your customers and so you are going to have to change how you deal with them.

Realizing that they will never see the world the way that you do, you and your sales teams are going have to be the ones who change in order to see the world the way that they do. More uncertainty, less time, and a short-term focus will all contribute to driving your product actions.

You need to realize that you can become your customer’s trusted source of knowledge. What you are going to have to keep in mind is that this can’t be done overnight. Create a plan now and work the plan as we go into next year and you’ll end up being more successful than you ever have been before.

What is the one thing that you know that you are going to have to do in 2010 in order for your product to be successful?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ah the world of product marketing — it’s where artists dream up brightly colored logos and put together viral YouTube videos that nobody really understands but everyone has to watch and send to their friends. Let’s reign in the magic unicorns that live in marketing and try to come up with a way to measure what we’re getting for what we’re spending. Maybe ROI is the way to go…

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Asda Is About To Make A Terrible Product Management Mistake...

Shopping for groceries is a pain. Being forced to do a grocery store’s job for them is a bigger pain. The U.K. supermarket chain Asda (owned and operated by Wal-Mart) is #2 in their market and they want to be #1. Their product managers have come up with a truly horrible plan to get there.

A Bad Plan From The Start

Sure, product managers everywhere would like to find a way to get closer to our customers. The grocery store business is no exception – it’s hyper-competitive. However, over at Asda they’ve gone too far.

The Adsa product managers believe that they can gain more customer loyalty if they give them more of a voice in how the stores are run. Wait a minute, I don’t really WANT to have to tell Adsa how to run their stores – I just want to shop there and have everything just be right.

One of the things that the product managers are going to do is to give 18,000 of their existing customers access to products before they are launched in the stores. Umm, where I come from we call this a focus group.

Touting this as a new customer outreach program is stretching things just a bit. It’s also not clear if the folks will get these goods for free, or if they’ll just be able to buy them before other people can. How excited can one get over having the ability to buy a new type of cracker before everyone else?

Why is Asda doing this? One of the drivers is that their CEO has publicly stated that he feels that customer loyalty cannot be bought with points or discount vouchers. Once again, what? I don’t know about you, but YES my loyalty to a grocery store can be bought when they offer me discounts based on the products that I actually do buy!

The Thinking Behind A Bad Product Plan

As is the Wal-Mart way, Asda positions itself in its markets as a low cost provider. They spend most of their time advertising their competitive prices. This has not been enough for them to overtake the #1 grocery chain in the U.K. Tesco.

The Asda product managers are hoping that by involving their customers in making decisions about how the company is run, they will be able to build as much loyalty as the other grocery store’s discount programs do. One technique that will be used is to put in web cams so customers can see how the firm runs: one at a local dairy, another at a carrot-processing plant, and yet another at the company’s head office. How incredibly boring will that be?

Just to take the foolishness one step further, Asda will be building what they are calling a “transparent store” where glass brick will replace brick walls and customers will be able to see back into parts of the store that are normally not visible. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think that I want to see how the meat is being cut into steaks or the fish is being de-scaled. Some things are better left to the imagination.

What All Of This Means For You

Don’t make the same mistake with your product that Adsa is getting ready to make with theirs. I predict that this new plan of theirs is going to have a very short shelf life. It is fundamentally flawed.

Yes, I can understand how it started – at an Adsa brainstorming session someone suggested making the company more open and letting the customers dictate how the company was run. Where things went wrong is that they missed the fact that I don’t want to have to tell my grocery store how to do things, instead I want them to understand what my needs are and then shape how they do things to me.

The same goes for your customers. They really don’t care about your product development process or what your product support area looks like (get rid of the web cams!). They don’t want to go to work for your company.

Instead, what they want are the product features that they need even before they know that they need them. They want support that is so good that you fix things before they know that they are broken. What they really want, is for you to do your job product manager.

What is the best way to build customer loyalty for your product?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I don’t care if your product turns lead into gold, if your salespeople don’t go out there and do a good job of selling your product then you won’t be a product manager for long. I’ll agree that you are not running the sales department, in fact you are probably not even part of the sales department; however, your product’s life depends on what that department does with your product so you had better start managing your salespeople…

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