Product Managers Need To Work With Sales To Find Golden Customers

As the CEO of your product, at the end of the day you are the one who is responsible for it being a success. Not the sales team, not the developers, not the CEO. You. This is one of the HUGE differences between a project manger and a product manger. Project managers can complete their tasks, make sure that everything is checked off, and then have an immense feeling of satisfaction. A product manger doesn’t get to feel this way unless his/her product is a commercial (or internal) success. At too many companies, the process for making a product a success are way to complex and appear to have been designed by a project manger: they are littered with lots of steps and dozens of milestones. Making a product a success is actually a relatively simple process and a product manager can make it so if you follow the following three steps.

In a nutshell, making your product a success comes down to doing three things correctly: improving the quality of the prospects that your sales teams generate, improving the presentations about your product that are given to potential customers, and increasing the number of potential customers that your sales teams call on. In order to simplify the life of a product manger, improvements need to simultaneously be made in all three of these areas. Now here’s how to do that:

• Improve The Quality Of The Prospects That Your Sales Teams Generate: Help your sales teams out by getting existing customers to provide referrals to new customers. Hey, the job of selling any product let alone your product is a difficult task. When a salesperson shows up on a new customer’s doorstep, do you think that that potential customer is happy to see them? No. However, if you can get existing customers to open the door for your sales team then the prospect’s guard will be down and your salesperson will actually have a fighting chance of getting them interested in your product.
  Direct your sales teams to only meet with decision makers. You know better than anyone else what kind of job title is going to be required to shell out the cash needed to buy your product. Tell you sales teams what to look for. This will help your sales teams make the best use of their time - if they can’t get access to the right person, they’ll know to move on to the next prospect.
  Guide your sales team toward the big buyers and away from the little buyers. Every deal takes about the same amount of time to close and if it turns out that a prospect does not have much money to spend, then in reality they are a poor fit for your product. Remember that just a few big deals is much better than a whole bunch of little deals.
• Improve The Presentations About Your Product That Are Given To Potential Customers: Help your sales teams out by equipping them with the material that they need for multiple meetings with a potential customer. Rarely will a deal be closed on the first meeting so you are going to have to teach your sales teams about the flow of the conversation as it relates to your product. A key part of this is to help them identify goals for the first and second meetings. If possible, as a product manger you should practice with your sales teams in order to ensure that they aren’t repeating themselves due to nervousness nor are they bringing up objections before the customer does.
• Increasing The Number Of Potential Customers That Your Sales Teams Call On: You are the CEO of your product. It’s up to you to guide your sales teams towards the right potential customers and then let them work their magic. Ensure that your sales teams are only meeting with decision makers - meeting with anyone else will allow your team to be identified as a salesperson instead of potential business partners. Have your sales teams take charge of their schedules. Have them agree to meet with a prospective customer at whatever time works best for the customer and then call back later to move it to a time/date that works best for your sales team. This way they can pack more customer contact into a given day. This is how they will eventually end up selling more of your product.

Finally, make sure that the sales teams that are selling your products are out of the office during prime working hours. If they are in the office, then they are not in front of a customer selling your product and this is bad for both of you. All though this may seem like a lot of sales work for a product manger to do, remember that you are the only one in your company that will ultimately be judged by how successful your product is. You need to be able to do it all…!

How much interaction with your sales teams do you have today? Do you help them qualify leads so that they are only working with high potential customers? Have you spent time with them coaching them how to give presentations on your products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customers, potential customers, presentations, product manager, prospects, qualifying, Sales

Product Managers Need To Take Advantage Of The Current Recession

Psst - don’t look now, but it sorta looks like all of the economies in the world are all tanking at the same time. If you are a product manager, this sure does not look good for your career. I view a product manager as being the CEO of your product and so at the end of the day no matter what the economy is doing you are responsible for making sure that your  product is a success. Hmm, if only someone had 7 suggestions for what a product manager should be doing RIGHT NOW…!

Good news - I do. As the CEO of your product you are going to have stand up and take charge even as everyone else in your company may be ducking in order to avoid attracting attention and getting laid off. At this time you can’t afford to be quiet - if your product fails, you’ll be gone so you may as well go out swinging. If you are willing to work to make your product a success no matter what, then this list of 7 things that you should be doing is just what the economic doctor ordered:

1. Get Offensive: No, I’m not talking about working (more) four-letter words into your everyday vocabulary. Rather, I’m suggesting that you realize that during a recession other product mangers are going to be playing defense. They are going to be trying to hang on to the customers that they have because they fear losing them and they’re going to not be spending enough time pursuing new customer opportunities. That means that that this recession is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you to build market share for your product. Work with your sales team and make sure that they are leaving no rock unturned right now in order to find new potential customers.
2. Incent Your Customers: Once again, no - don’t get them angry; instead, get them motivated to try/buy your product. If ever there was a time to roll out a marketing program that is designed to get those customers who might be sitting on the fence eager to use your product, then this is the time to do it.
3. Don’t Travel: Within your company, the bean counters are going to be keeping their beady little eyes posted in order to find ways to reduce costs. If you are hopping on a plane every week to go “gather requirements” from customers, all of a sudden you are going to find yourself wearing a nice bright set of concentric circles on you back when it comes time to reduce staff. Instead, use the full power of the 21st Century to reach out and contact both existing customers and new ones that your sales team has found. Although we are often tempted to use email for everything, don’t forget to pick up the phone and start calling!
4. Get Creative: … with your marketing. One of my favorite quotes from the master marketeer, P.T. Barnum is “Without promotion, something terrible happens … NOTHING!” We’re not talking about a big iPhone launch ad campaign here, but rather a whole series of small marketing efforts that can have a big combined effect. Things like free trials of your product, special discounts, or even using the web to set up a customer portal to provide access to special information and support. Doing an online survey can be a great way to collect valuable customer information while reminding your customers that you are still here.
5. Talk To Me Baby: How many times have you been told that an existing customer is 5x cheaper to sell to than getting a new customer? Well, now is the time to put that knowledge into action. Use your existing customers to help drive your product’s innovation direction. Collecting this type of information from customers who have already selected your product will allow you to make the product even better which will help capture more market share during the recession.
6. Retrain Sales: We product managers know our products inside and out. How well does your sales team know your product? Probably not as well as you do. Use the recession to take the time to bring your sales teams up to speed on what they need to know: new features, planned features, competative info, etc. Once you’ve got them pumped up, there will be no stopping them from selling more of your product.
7. Work Smarter: When times are good, we all have a tendency to focus on ourselves and try to meet our own objectives. During hard times, we need to instead look at our customers and try to figure out what we need to do to better met their objectives. This may be as simple as adjusting the hours that you work in order to better match your customer and to ensure that you’ll be there if they need to call you directly. Little things like this can make all the difference in ensuring that your product is a success even during a recession.

How is your product doing during this recession? Do you feel that your sales teams are out working hard enough to sell it? Have you done anything creative to help the company sell more of your products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: brand management, discount, marketing, marketing management, product manager, product marketing, promotion, recession, Sales

Product Managers Need To Be Involved In Making Complex Sales Happen

As a commenter to one of my posting on this blog reminded me the other day, we Product Managers are really the CEOs of our product. This means that our ultimate responsibility is to make the product a success. Depending on your product and depending on your customer, you may occasionally find yourself in the middle of a complex sale. Hopefully you’ve got a great sales team working at your company; however, even the best sales team is going to have to reach out to the Product Manger to handle a complex sale. Let’s talk about what you are going to have to do to help “land the big one”…

I guess the first thing that we should all agree on is the simple fact that a complex sale is much different than a normal sale of your product. This type of sale is going to require extra preparation on your part, it will probably require a longer selling cycle, and will, of course, require more effort on your part to make it happen. I’ve found that complex sales are pretty easy to identify. There is never just one decision maker, rather the product selection process is often spread across multiple departments and may  require several levels of executive authority in order to get the deal approved. Nobody said that this was going to be easy!

Making a complex sale happen is really the responsibility of your sales team. However, as the CEO of your product, you care and you have a critical role to play. Here are the three things that a Product Manger needs to do in order to help make a complex sale happen:

1. Understand What The Real Business Issues Are: Since you are the Product Manger, you should fully understand what business problems your product can solve. Using this knowledge  you need to learn what the customer’s current situation is and determine if there is a match. If there is, then you’re going to have to explain this to the sales team in words that they can then use when they are talking with the customer.
2. Find Out Who ALL The Decision Makers Are: Every company is different and so this question will have a different answer every time. Your sales team may get too wrapped up and focus too much on their point of contact within the company. We all know that, especially for IT products, the ultimate decision maker may have had very little input to the product discussion; however, they are the go-to person that the buyer will double check with before making a decision. It is ultimately your responsibility to keep your eyes open and guide your sales team to talk with ALL of the decision makers.
3. Determine What Criteria Will Be Used To Make A Product Selection: Is there a specific business result that the customer is hoping that your product will create? If you can figure out what criteria will be driving the customer’s decision making process, then that is where you can equip your sales teams to spend their time showing how your product is better than all of the competition.

Remember, one of the things that the customer is going to want you to really, really understand is just exactly what he is trying to accomplish. If you and your sales teams can do this then you’ll be able to win more complex sales than the other Product Mangers out there.

Would you say that most of your sales are complex or not complex sales? When they are complex sales, does your sales team come looking for help from you? Do you find that the customer has a whole collection of people on their side who will make the final product selection? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: complex sales, customer, deal, deals, IT Product manager, new product, new products, product manager, Sales

Product Managers Need To Help Solve Sales Problems

As product managers, we are ultimately the source of all knowledge about our products: why it was created, what it does today, and what it will be able to do tomorrow. That being said, we often become part of a sales team when the sales rep has the relationship with the customer, but doesn’t understand the product all that well. This means that we can run into so-called “problem sales” for our products. As awkward as it may feel, this is the time for a product manager to rise to the occasion and help the sales team out. Umm, ok - so now what do you do?

What are some of the problems that you can encounter as a member-of-convenience of the sales team? Here is a common situation that product manager find themselves in :

1. The potential buyer really has a need for your product, they have the budget to buy it, and they have been granted the authority to make the purchase.
2. Your product / service is the perfect fit for their problem.
3. And yet, the buyer does not seem to be willing to make the purchase.

When The Customer Is The Problem: If the customer appears to be dragging their feet, there may be more going on than anyone on your side knows. Big changes like an impending acquisition or money troubles within the customer (like when Wall Street turns upside down!) can cause any sale of your product to slow down or even come to a complete stop. Interestingly enough, the better the relationship between your sales rep and the customer the more likely the customer will be hesitant to pass bad news (”we’re not going to buy your product”) on to them. In these cases, it’s important to develop another contact withing the customer’s organization that you can talk with. If the primary decision maker doesn’t want to disapoint your sales rep, then this secondary source might be able to provide you with the straight scoop.

When Your Sales Rep Is The Problem: If the customer is unwilling to buy, then the core reason for this is that they simply just don’t understand how your product will meet their needs. This means that your sales rep has not been successful in communicating the value of your product to the customer. In order to fix this problem, more discussions with your customer are required. You need to uncover what their pain points are and then you need to be able to relate your product’s features to solving those pain points. Congratulations - if you can do this then you are now a salesperson!

When Your Sales Rep’s Boss Is The Problem: This is a tricky problem for product managers to diagnose. What you might not realize is that Sales Managers are often former star sales people. This means that they were good at selling; however, they may not be good at managing other sales persons (gosh product managers: does this sound similar to what goes on in our world?) Ultimately, the solution to this problem is to have a sit down with the sales rep and his/her boss. I find it easier to blame the product - it’s too complex, it’s too new, whatever and by doing this it allows the sales manager to feel better about the mess that they may have caused. Generally, they have just confused the situation. As Product Manger you can step in and offer to talk with the customer to work out all of the “complicated features” of the product. More often then not, the sales manager will be thrilled to have someone clean up their mess. Make sure that you take the sales rep along with you when you talk with the customer so that they can swoop in and close the deal after you’ve got everything cleared up.

So how many times have you found yourself as an unofficial member of a sales team? Were you ready to play this role or did you feel like a duck out of water? Who had caused the problem that you were having with the customer: the customer, the sales rep, or the sales manager? How did you solve it? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, product manager, Sales, sales manager, sales rep

RFPs have to be carefully evaluated before you spend time on them

One of the unique things about being a product manager is that we wear many hats during a given day. The sales hat is one that we can find ourselves wearing a lot if our product is new, technical, or just basically foreign to our sales teams. As we find ourselves in unfamiliar sales territory, one of the jobs that keeps coming up over and over is how best to deal with a Request For Proposal (RFP) from a customer.

Responding to an RFP can take a great deal of time, energy, and effort. That’s why it is so maddening when you find out weeks or even months later that some other company won the opportunity or that your proposal was never seriously considered because the customer just used it to drive down the other guy’s prices. Arrrgh!

So look, as excited as all of us generally are when we first see an RFP, we really need to understand its background. Your company’s sales rep for that account needs to have asked some critical questions. Is this RFP just being issued so that the customer can do some price shopping before going back to their current vendor and beating them up on price? Or (even worse) is this just a company process that they need to go through and they really have no intention of leaving their current vendor? These are the types of questions that you need answers to BEFORE you start pulling all-nighters to create a response.

If you know your product’s competition well, than you can save yourself a great deal of grief. If the customer has already effectively selected one of your competitors and this proposal is just for show, then there is a good chance that the proposal was written with your competition’s products in mind and it will quickly show through in the questions that they are asking. Don’t forget your old friend Uncle Google: do a scan of past customer press releases and see if they’ve awarded contracts to your competition in the past. If so, then re-read the proposal to see if it is slanted towards that competitor.

The best way to make sure that you only spend your time working on RFPs that represent real opportunities is to develop a “Go / No-Go” checklist. This is a checklist that you fill out for each RFP before you start working on it. The checklist can contain questions like “Does the RFP align with my product offering or my competition’s product offering?”, “What is the dollar value of this opportunity?”, “What is our relationship with this customer?”, etc. Once you have all of the answers to these questions, then you can decide if it’s worthwhile to respond to an RFP.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Life is strange and sometimes RFPs arrive in the mail (postal and “e”) out of the blue. STOP! Before you spend even a minute working on that RFP you or your sales team need to do some digging and find out why your firm got a copy of it. Make some calls to the company that sent it to you and find out why. Trust me on this - responding to blind RFPs rarely ever results in a sale of your product.  Good questions to ask include “How did you hear about my company?”, “How many vendors have you asked to respond to this RFP?”, “What is the decision making process that you will use to evaluate responses?”, “How will you narrow down the list of potential vendors?”, and “What are your next steps?”.

If you decided to go ahead and respond to an RFP, then it’s time for you to do some research. After all of the product information has been provided, there is one final critical section that too many product mangers skip over: the request for references. You need to understand why that request is there: the customer is trying to validate their decision. The more closely matched to the customer that your references are, then the better position your response will be in. Simple things like providing a CIO as a reference if it’s the CIO that is driving the RFP, or providing a firm that is as large or larger as the customer as a reference in order to show that your product works well with companies that are the customer’s size.

One last thing: if you don’t win the RFP, then by all means call the customer and ask why. The selection process is all over and done with by now and so often times their defensive shields are down at this point and you might get an honest answer if you ask the question nicely.

Have you ever spent a great deal of time responding to an RFP that turned out to be a waste of time? Looking back, was there a red flag that should have told you that this wasn’t going to work out? Have you ever decided to not reply to an RFP - why did you make that decision? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, IT Product manager, new products, product manager, request for proposal, RFP, Sales

At the end of the day, the whole purpose of any IT product is for it to be a success. In the commercial side of the house, this means that it needs to be bought by customers and therefore more often than not, you need sales people. What strange creatures they are indeed!

In order for your IT product to be a success, you need to learn how to work with the folks in sales. Despite what TV and the movies tell us, not all sales folks are like WKRP’s Herb Tarlick. Instead, they are almost the complete opposite of IT staff: outgoing, people orientated, not always good with details, multitaskers, and often befuddled by technology (but quite good with anything that they need to sell with — like cell phones). All too often, IT Product Managers are tempted to stand with the rest of the IT crowd and laugh at them. However, you really don’t want to do this — you desperately need their support for your product to be a success.

So what’s an IT product manager to do? Simple: spend some time and learn to understand this beast known as sales people. One of the best ways to start is to attend a company-wide sales meeting. These are incredible events and they can be real eye openers. What you will discover is that a sales meeting is actually a recharging event for sales folks. Engineers look with amazement as sales people hand out awards to themselves and tell each other how great the company’s products are and how weak the competition is. What we don’t understand is just how lonely a sales job can be. IT folks get a chance to recharge every day when we interact with our peers — we all acknowledge each other’s skills and get respect for this. Sales people on the other hand spend their days being told “No” and having their products labeled as too expensive or not having the right set of features. A company sales meeting is how they recharge.

Realizing just how difficult a sales job can be means that an IT Product manager can change how you interact with sales. If you provide them with material and facts that they can just pick up and use with customers (no reformatting or rewording needed) then you’ve made their life easier. If you listen to what they have to say about your product and if you show them that their feedback is being worked into the product, then you’ll win a friend for life.

Getting the sales team to be on your side is the first step in being the IT Product manager for your company’s most successful product ever…