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Teach Your Sales Teams How To Get In Their Customer's Heads...

Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you are at it, buy a lot of my product. If only we could really tell our potential customers this then life would be so much simpler. However, try this little verbal outburst just once and then you’ll have a chance to sit back and spend some time polishing your resume as you look for your next product manager job.

If you really want people to buy more of your product, then do what I’ve done – learn how to read minds…

How Most Product Mangers Equip Sales To Sell

In a recent poll that I took, I asked product mangers how they learned to do their job. 50% of the answers were for “on-the-job-training”. Clearly most of us are just winging it. Since we don’t really have any deep philosophy behind most of our product management actions, this explains why most of us are doing such a poor job of equipping the sales teams to sell our products.

If you need a sound bite for what we’re doing, then it would be the “pitch & pray” technique. This is where we teach the sales teams about the value of our product and then have them go out and pitch it to customers, over and over again. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t.

Moving To The Scientific Approach To Selling Your Product

Not all product managers are stuck at this very basic level of supporting the sales teams. Some of us have seen the errors of our ways and have managed to crawl our way up to the next level: scientific selling support.

This is where we’ve done some research (with or without the sales team) in order to find out just how the customer goes about making buying decisions – what is their buying process.

This approach generally brings in many more sales than the old way of just pitching the product’s value to as many customers as possible. However, there is one problem: not all customers are rational.

The scientific approach of matching your product to the customer’s buying process doesn’t work in the roughly 33% of all customers who are not guided by rational decisions. Oh, oh – what to do now?

Top Of The Pyramid: The 3 C’s Approach

There is a better way to equip your sales teams to sell your products. I’ve only bumped into a handful of product managers during my career who have been able to achieve this level of collaboration with their sales teams, but the success that they have been able to achieve has always served as a goal for me to shoot for.

At the top of the product selling technique pyramid are the product mangers who show the sales teams how they can Collaborate with Customers to Create new products. The thinking here is that a potential customer needs more than just your product to solve their problems. If you can teach your sales teams that your potential customers simply don’t know what they don’t know and that they need to help the customers to understand the big picture of a solution and how your product can fit into an overall solution, then you’ll be able to make even more sales.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers are the CEO of your product. In your company, you are the one person who is most heavily invested in the success of your product. In order for the product to be successful, your sales teams are going to have to know how to sell it.

All too often product mangers do the minimum amount of work to get the sales teams set up to sell their product: they just outline the product’s benefits. What we need to do is to take the extra steps that will make our sales teams even more successful. This means starting by taking the time to study and understand our potential customer’s buying habits and patterns. Once we know these, then we can help our sales teams match them.

Finally, we can work with sales to help them start to collaborate more closely with the customer. Once they are able to do this, then they’ll be able to open the doors to both more sales and to larger sales.

Now that you know what you have to do, get out there and help your sales teams sell more!

Do you think that your sales team could ever get beyond the “pitch & pray” technique for selling 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 you were going fishing, how much luck catching fish do you think that you would have if you didn’t use any bait on your hook? Sure, there are probably some either dumb or near-sighted fish that might still bite, but you’re going to be doing a lot of sitting around waiting. Is it possible that as a product manger you are fishing for customers for your product without bait?

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Product Success Depends On How Well You Manage Your Sales Team...

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.

Walking A Very Careful Line

For those of you who may be thinking “All right, now I’ve got permission to go in there and tell the sales folks how they really should be selling my product!” I’ve got one word for you – don’t.

Sales people are a very different beast from product mangers and because of this difference, there is always the possibility of conflict when we interact. Our motivations are different (your product is probably only one of many that they have to sell), our timelines are different (you are thinking about the next version of your product and they are thinking about the approaching end of the current fiscal quarter), etc.

The salespeople at your company already have a boss – they don’t need you to be another one. However, you have a vested interest in their success in selling your product. This means that you’re going to have to get clever here.

The Three Keys To Getting Sales To Sell More Of Your Product

In order to start to mange the sales teams that are responsible for selling your product you are going to have to find ways to work with the sales department without making it look like you are trying to tell them how to do their jobs.

The first key that you will need in order to be able to do this is to get access to your company’s sales tracking application. Every company has one of these and if you ask the right people, as a product manager you should be able to gain access to it. Once you are in, you will be able to track how sales of your product are going by sales person, by region, by time period, and potentially even by country.

After looking up some sales numbers for your product, you may be tempted to go running off to sales and start to show off your new-found knowledge by telling them what they are doing wrong in regards to selling your product Once again – don’t.

You need to realize that sales tracking applications always have at best partial data. The story that they tell is not always correct. If you do see a downward trend for your product’s sales, then perhaps scheduling a lunch with a salesperson in order to find out what is really going on would be a correct next step (you pay for lunch!)

The Importance Of Sales Metrics

The next key that you will need in order to start managing your sales team is sales metrics. The worst thing that can happen is for your sales teams to set their goals for your product without any input from you. A lot of different factors can cause things to change: weather patterns, time of year, market conditions, etc. The factors that affect your product are unique and only apply to your product. You need to work with them to set the sales metrics for your product

Take the time to identify the metrics that will affect your product’s sales and then share them with your sales teams. Make sure that they know what metrics will impact how they can go about doing their job.

Hands-On Coaching

How did your sales force learn about your product? Did you have a big product launch, throw some product brochures at them and then tell them to go out and sell it? Great – what kind of success can you really expect from that?

As part of your product manger responsibility you are going to have to take the time to develop an on going coaching program for your sales teams. The tone of these coaching sessions is going to be very important. You are not part of the sales department so you need to make sure that you don’t come across as sounding as though you are trying to tell them “how to sell”.

Instead, what you are going to have to do is to talk to the sales teams in a supportive manner that recognizes the challenges that they have and offers them information that will help them to succeed. You are a provider of product and market information, not a sales trainer!

What All Of This Means To You

As a product manager you are effectively the CEO of your product. As part of being the CEO it is your responsibility to make sure that the company’s sales teams do a good job of selling your product.

Although you don’t work in the sales department, managing the sales team that is selling your product is something that you have to do. The trick to this is doing it in a way that motivates the sales team to sell more of your product without coming across as being condescending.

You have three keys that can unlock the sales team to your message: the company’s sales tracking application, sales metrics, and hands-on coaching that you provide. Each of these keys will provide you with additional insight into the sales process and will help you to make your product be even more successful.

What is the one thing that you could do to get your sales team to sell more of your product(s)?

Click here to get automatic updates when
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

Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you are at it, buy a lot of my product. If only we could really tell our potential customers this then life would be so much simpler. However, try this little verbal outburst just once and then you’ll have a chance to sit back and spend some time polishing your resume as you look for your next product manager job.

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It's Time For Product Managers To Diversify

It seems almost like an impossible challenge: find ways to constantly make your product(s) both more popular (more sales) and more profitable (better prices). When confronted with this challenge, it’s all too easy for product managers to shrug, throw up their hands, and then focus instead on rolling out the next product or version of an existing product. However, if you are going to survive, then this is a problem that you are going to have to find a way to solve.

It’s All About Diversifying

It turns out that the key to survival is to broaden your product’s appeal to new markets while increasing your profitability among existing customers. Now these are fine words, but exactly how to do them is the challenge that product managers face.

Knowing who your current customers are is the right place to start. Once you have a list of who has bought your product in the past, you can start to do some segmentation. More often than not most of your existing customers will have something in common: company size, customers that they are going after, type of products that they sell, etc. Once you know what these characteristics are you can start to identify potential customers who occupy segments that are similar but different.

Three Ways To Diversify And Boost Profitability

In order for a product manager’s product to be a success, it needs to generate a profit when it gets sold and it needs to get sold as much as possible. Here are three thoughts on how to make both of these things happen.

• Cut back on extra services that aren’t boosting the bottom line: this can be a painful and difficult thing for product managers to do. Over time we keep adding additional services to our products in order to keep them competitive. Over time we lose sight of whether these services are why our customer is buying our product. Often they no longer influence the buying decision and yet they are still costing us money to provide them. It’s time to drop them now.

• Favor Groups Over Individuals: when you start to focus on your product’s bottom line, you quickly realize that it’s always better to have more customers than fewer customers. This will serve to insulate you when market downturns occur. To make this happen, sell a single product or service to a group of people for a lower price instead of one higher priced product / service to just a single customer. This may require some product redesign, but it will be worth it in the long run.

• Maximize Free Advertising: If you are going to increase your customer base, then the word is going to have to get out about your product. In this era of the social network, one sales fact remains true – people believe what their friends tell them. The group approach enhances word-of-mouth advertising. The more satisfied customers you have, the more free advertising you’ll get.

Final Thoughts

Increasing the number of customers that your product has while at the same time boosting your product’s profitability is possible to do. The trick is to diversify your customer base while trimming costs at the same time. I’m not saying that this is easy to do, but if you can find a way to do it for your product, then you will have found out how great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

Questions For You

Does your product get sold to one basic type of customer? Are you taking any steps to diversity your customer base? Have you looked at the services that you are including with your product? Can any of them be dripped without hurting sales? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Economic downturns don’t last forever, but boy-oh-boy do they hurt while they are happening! I’m not sure about your products, but my the customer that I’ve been consulting with are all scrambling to find ways to make their products easier for their customers to buy. Would you be interested in some tips on how to go about doing this?

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Post tags: advertising, Bottom Line, business, current customers, customer base, customers, free, new markets, product, product manager, profitability, Sales, services, social network

Products That Are Licensed And Not Sold Can Cause Problems

[Note: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. I am not giving out any legal advice in this posting. Should you need legal advice, please contact a lawyer in your town.]

In this crazy mixed-up world that we live in, it’s the words that can often trip us up. For those of us who’s products are software products, often our products come with some carefully chosen words that inform our customers that we have not “sold” them our product, but rather we have “licensed” it to them. What’s the difference?

What’s The Difference Between A Sale And A License

In order to sort things out, we need to turn to an expert. In this case, we’ll reach out for guidance to Pamela Samuelson who is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the School of Law.

In a recent issue of The Communications of the ACM, Samuelson pointed out that currently there is no clear cut court ruling that spells out if it’s legal to purchase a product that comes with a license statement and then turn around and resell it (which is generally what companies who use a license are trying to prevent in the first place).

What Past Cases Tell Us

Just like those lawyers on TV do, Samuelson uses prior cases to attempt to show where things stand today on this issue. In a case called “Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc.” a judge ruled that Mr. Vernor could sell some copies of AutoCAD that he had bought from a company on eBay.

The reason that the judge said that he could do this is because what is called the first sale rule. What this rule says is that copyright owners do control the first sale of their product (one hop); however after they make that sale, they can’t prevent that person from reselling the product (n+1 hops).

What’s The Difference Between A License & A Sale

Judges in different cases have really done their homework. In trying to determine if a product that was sold with a license was “licensed” or “sold”, they’ve take a look at the transaction. Specifically, the law defines ownership as meaning that the owner has a right to an unlimited duration of possession.

In past cases, this has been found to be the way things were. Additionally, the judges have found that the firms doing the selling have had no interest in having the products returned to them.

Final Thoughts

All of the cases in which this has been an issue are still working their way through the legal system. However, if you are a product manager who’s product comes with a restrictive license, you need to be prepared just in case the courts rule that your customers can resell your product.

The solution to this problem is, as always, a simple one.  If your product comes with a tight relationship with you, then customers will always want to buy your product directly from you. This is how great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

Questions For You

Do you currently manage a product that you license to your customers instead of selling it to them? Why do you do it this way? Have you ever had problems with your customers reselling your product? What did you do about it? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Not to get too doom and gloom on you or anything, but how is your product doing these days? Sales a bit down? Sales fallen off a cliff? Desperate times call for desperate measures and I’m willing to bet that you are starting to get some pressure from upstairs / sales to start slashing your product’s price...

P.S.: Free subscriptions to the brand-new The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available.

It’s your product, it’s your career.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AutoCAD, AutoDesk, brand management, court, customer, customer relationship, judge, license, Pamela Samuelson, product, product management, product manager, products, sale, Sales

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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…

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