Product Managers Need To Learn Faster Ways To Reach New Customers

Just in case you have been living at your desk for the past couple of years and hadn’t noticed, Toyota launched a new line of cars a few years ago called Scion. Now we all know the Toyota brand - in fact many of you probably own a Camry because it’s the most popular car in the world. However, it’s a bit on the boring side.

So what’s a major world class car company to do when they want to reach out and capture the hearts and minds of the Generation Y drivers who were not currently sitting behind the wheel of a Toyota? Simple: do the unexpected.

As product managers we are often proud of all of the customers that have selected our product. However, deep in our dark hearts we yearn to be selected by all those other buyers who have not yet picked us to go to the dance with them. We often find ourselves in the same situation that Toyota did: trying to make our product appeal to a whole new segment of customers.

Rob Walker has written a book called Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are in which he did a lot of studying of just what makes us buy things and he’s made some amazing discoveries. One of the things that he learned is that Toyota figured out that in order to market their new car to their Generation Y target audience, the brand’s “meaning” was more important than the product’s functionality. Can anyone say “iPhone”?

In this highly connected age we’ve started to believe that our customers have become immune to just about any type of communication that we can come up with. What Toyota’s product marketing team discovered was that this was not true. In fact, the pitch-free guerrilla marketing that Toyota engaged in to promote the Scion line actually seemed to be welcomed by their potential customers. Toyota advertised the Scion in small artsy magazines and stayed away from the mainstream ones. They hosted dance parties and gave out Scion CDs and magazines.

What Walker has found out is that the 21st Century “new consumer” is basically all made up. Oh, and this is really starting to screw up product managers. However we do live in changing times and you are going to have to be changing the ways in which you appeal to your customers.

No matter what product you are responsible for, you are going to have to start to emphasize the meaning of the product first and the functionality second (sorry about that feature lovers). Today’s buyers want to feel as though they are part of something bigger than themselves (”I’m a Mac”).

This goes hand-in-hand with Walker’s other finding which shows that successful brands often build their eventual mass audience by cobbling together much smaller ones.

There is a great deal for product mangers to learn here even if you are not selling to Generation Y consumers. You need to realize that the world has changed and it’s now time to think differently about your customers. They never were nameless, shapeless blobs who mindlessly did or did not select your product. They have always been thinking, caring people for whom your product solved a specific problem. Now you’ve got to understand how THEY want to be reached…

Have you ever used any guerrilla marketing to promote your product? Did it work as well as you were hoping? Will you ever use this technique again? How did your management feel about you doing this? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking…

Technorati Tags: brand management, customer, customers, guerrilla marketing, new products, product, product management, product manager, product marketing, Scion, Toyota

Product Managers Need A Job Map To Understand Their Products

A job map identifies what your customers are TRYING to get done at every step of a task while they are using your product. This differs from process mapping which simply defines only what the customer is actually doing at each step - a subtle, but important distinction.

Product managers who take the time to map out every step of the job that their customers are performing while using their products can create job maps for their products. These maps can then help them to discover what features their customers really want and thus provide a way to truly differentiate their product.

If you want to create a job map for your product, you need to keep in mind that you are not interested in finding out HOW a customer performs a particular job. Doing so would only provide you with a map of their existing solutions and activities.

Instead, your goal should be to find out what your customer is trying to use your product to get done while executing a job. What is really important is understanding what must happen at each point in the job in order for your customer to feel that the job has been successfully completed.

Here are the first four steps of creating a job map for your product:

1. The first thing that you need to determine is what aspects of completing the job does your customer have to define before starting the job in order to move forward? This step will include the following sub-steps: determine their objectives, plan what approach they want to take, determining what needed resources are both necessary and available in order to get the job done, and finally selecting those needed resources. A product manager can use this step of creating a job map to look for new ways to help your customers better understand what their objectives are, making the planning of resources less complex, and just reducing the amount of planning effort and time that is required.
2. The next step in building a job map is to clearly identify what inputs or items that your customer must locate in order to perform the job? Don’t overlook anything here: inputs can be both tangible (a physical computer) or intangible (the requirements that define what software does). A product manager can can investigate how intangible inputs can be simplified by making the required inputs easier to get, more available, or even better, just getting rid of the need for them altogether. Intangible inputs can also be streamlined by automating the retrieval of requirements, or providing tools to check inputs for correctness.
3. Documenting how your customer must prepare all of the required inputs (and any required environments) for the job is also an important part of the job map. This is basically how the customer sets up and organizing required materials for the job. A product manager must look very carefully at these tasks. Creating ways to make setup less difficult may very well have a dramatic positive impact on how your customer views your product. Technical products that require information to be fed to them, can be improved by having the product support more ways to organize, integrate, and format the information.
4. Each step in a job map may consume valuable resources or cost money or time. That is why the next step is to understand what a customer needs to confirm is correct before they proceed with a job in order to ensure that they will have a successful outcome. This can include such activities as making sure that inputs have been properly prepared, making sure that they have enough of everything that they will need, making sure that they have the proper priorities for how they want to execute the job. Product mangers need to realize that this part of completing the job is especially important. Delay can creep into the customer’s life here and often time delay results in additional expense or risk. New features that permit a customer to more easily determine that they are ready to move to the next step would be considered valuable by the customer. If this type of confirmation was actually made a part of a previous step, then that would save your customer even more time and effort.

This is not all that there is to creating a job map for your product! There are four more steps, but we’ll cover them next time.

Do you know what your customers’ objectives are when they start a job using your product? Do you keep a list of the inputs that they need to use your product to complete a job? Does your product make it easy for a customer to prepare the inputs that it will need? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: confirm, customer, customers, define, features, job map, locate, new product, prepare, product design, product management, product manager

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

Being A Product Manger For A Service Requires Different Skills

It’s hard enough to be a product manager for a “real” product, just imagine how hard this job gets when your company decides to switch over and start to offer service products. You’d think that a flexible product manager could just quickly adjust and that there would be no real difference between managing “hard” products and “service” products. Umm, you’d be wrong.

When your company makes the big decision to move over and start offering service products, your life as a product manager will change big time. There are four key success factors that you will need to make sure that you take care of in order to ensure that you will be a successful product manager for services:

1. Make The Company Understand That It’s Already A Service Company: Once your company has decided to start offering service products, you may find that you are already doing this. Instead of inventing new products, perhaps all you have to do is to start charging for things that you are already doing. As a product manager, your first step here will be to work with your customers to make sure that they are aware of the value of your existing services. You’ve got to be careful here: when you suddenly switch a service from being free to now charging for it, you’ve got to make sure that you clearly define the value of the service to both the customer and your internal management. The larger your company is, the better the chances are that you already have services hidden somewhere in how you are currently doing business. One of the best ways to uncover what you already have is to take a look at customer bills - often different parts of the company bill for different items and some may already be billing for services.
2. Transform Your Back Office To Support Services: Product managers know just how important stable internal processes are to  your ability to deliver products consistently. Bad news: when you start to offer service products you are going to find that customer requests to have the service customized to meet their particular needs will have a dramatically bad impact on your cost of delivering the product. In order to solve this problem, there are three things that you can do: (1) build a flexible platform for delivering your services and meeting customer needs, (2) monitor the cost of each of your delivery processes in order to spot the most costly, (3) use new technology to implement process improvements as soon as possible. What all of this means is that the product manger needs to stay on top of how service products are being delivered.
3. Update Your Sales Teams: This may be the most important thing that you do - find a way to transform your sales force that is comfortable selling “real” products into one that can sell service products. One of the most difficult points to get across will be the simple fact that service products take a lot longer to sell and the actual process of selling them is both more complex and strategic. As a product manager it’s not your responsibility to make the sales teams change; however, how well they manage the transformation will determine how successful your product is. Understand that more often than not, a significant number of your current sales teams will end up leaving the company and will be replaced by new salespeople who better understand how to sell services.
4. Focus On How Your Customers Do Their Work: Since a service product is really designed to be used by a customer to make their business run more smoothly, a good product manager now needs to shift his/her focus away from how he/she is delivering the service and start to think about how the customer is going to use the service. This is an important difference from how “hard” product companies operate - they normally focus on things like how much the product is used and how many of a given product a customer is using. A service product is really designed to solve a problem for your customer. This means that the correct way to measure it’s value is to see if it is really solving that problem.  Be careful, as a product manger you may find that you have a lack of expertise to determine how to use your product to solve the customer’s problems better. This may be a great time to bring in a consultant.

Is your company thinking about starting to offer service products? Do you feel that you are ready as a product manger to take charge of these products? Is your sales team up to the task of switching over to selling services from “hard” products? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, new product development, new products, product management, product manager, product managing, project management, Sales

A Service Product Is Different From Other Types Of Products

Pick up just about any Product Management book, thumb through it, and you’ll quickly come to realize that most thinking about how to be a successful product manger is based on real products. Things that you can touch and feel. Things that people somewhere in the world manufacture. Even if you are responsible for a software product, there is almost always a set of CDs/DVDs that you deliver to the customer. It’s a bit weak, but you can still touch this product. So what’s a product manger to do when you CAN’T touch the product - because it’s a service. How does this change the product management game?

Before we dive in to this discussion too far, let’s take just a moment and ask the question “why sell services in the first place?” If you work for a company that has traditionally sold “hard goods” - things that you can touch, then one of your biggest product manger worries is that your product will eventually become a commodity. When that happens, the only thing that will matter to the customer is your price and I’m going to bet that you probably don’t have the lowest price out there.  Most firms see selling services as a way to make their hard products unique - provide them with a competitive advantage. The challenge here is that all too often, companies that enter the service space end up struggling to make money - it’s not as easy as it looks.

So why is it so hard to start selling services instead of hard goods? A couple of researchers from Europe, Dr. Werner Reinartz and Dr. Wolfgang Ulaga spent some time looking into this and wrote up their findings in the Harvard Business Review. One of the interesting things that they found was that the back-office automation of services that are complex turned out to be much more difficult than anyone though that they would be. The tendency of customers to want service offerings to be customized for them meant that there really was very little knowledge that could be leveraged across customers.

Another big problem was with the sales teams. They had spent years developing relationships with low-level purchasing staff who were authorized to buy small quantities of hard goods. Once you started talking about selling a service that the whole company could use, the price tag went up dramatically and the sales teams needed to be talking with purchasers who were much higher in the food chain.

Finally, actual knowledge about the new service always seemed to come from “outside” - contractors, consultants, etc. This meant that it was both difficult and time consuming to answer customer’s questions. Clearly all of these challenges made it look like the move to selling services is a real pain in the neck. So why even bother?

The answer to that question is simple: once you get beyond the product differentiation issue, it’s all about the money. As an example, one group of companies that the good Dr.’s studied was able to get 50% of their sales from services and on those sales they were able to get 8x margins over their hard product sales. That’s just too much money to walk away from.

It turns out that there are four steps that hold the key to successfully transforming your product line from a hard goods product line to a services product line. Of course, we’ll cover each of those four steps, in detail, next time.

Are you currently a product manager who is responsible for “hard” products or services or both? How do you feel about your current sales teams: could they sell services if they had to or would a lot of retraining be called for? Do you know what you would have to differently if you were responsible for services instead of “hard” goods? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, new product, new product development, new products, product development, product management, product manager, product marketing

Product Managers Need To Prepare To Meet With Customers

So much has been written about how important it is to get in front of your (potential) customer that I am almost hesitant to add to the pile. However, in reviewing what’s out there, nobody really seems to have spent the time to lay out step-by-step what a product manger needs to do before and during a meeting with a customer. Well good news, today that changes!

In my world, a product manager would never be able to meet with a customer without having a sales rep along for the ride. This is actually quite ok. I consider the sales rep to be my wingman and look forward to meeting with customers. Since we live in busy times I always expect the customer to be busy and for us to end up having less time with them than was planned. What this all leads to is that the key to a successful customer meeting is to prepare, prepare, prepare.

The best way to prepare to meet with a customer is to get your questions in order. By this I mean that you need to come up with roughly 10 different questions that if you can get the customer to answer during your time together then you’ll have the opportunity to collect the real type of product information that you need to improve your product. One of the reasons that you need to have a list of questions is that it will help you to shut up. Yes, you heard me right - the reason that a product manager visits a customer is to learn more about the customer’s needs. The more talking that you do, the less opportunity the customer will have to tell you what they want. Having good questions means that you can be actively listening to see if the customer is answering one of your questions instead of talking too much.

The world of sales has been doing this for a long time and they are actually quite good at it. One trick that they use is to come up with two different ways to ask each question. This allows them to re-ask the question if the customer really does not provide an answer the first time around.

Finally, you need to understand that you are not the only product manager in the world. There are a lot of them out there and they are also probably trying to get in to see your customer. If you were able to get an appointment, then they will probably be able to do the same. This means that you need to come up with a way to make your time together more memorable than anyone else’s.

The best way that I’ve found to do this is to provide the customer with information that they can’t get anywhere else. This can include late-breaking info about their competition or their customers that you pulled out of today’s paper or off of the web. Alternatively, it could be some obscure feature of your product that would appeal to them or maybe even an update on your release schedule. Just make sure that it is important information to them.

When was the last time that you got to meet with one of your customers? Who did the talking while you were there: you, them, or your sales rep? Did you come away from the meeting with new product information that you could use? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: customer, IT Product manager, new product development, new products, product development, product development process, product manager, product managers jobs, product managing, Sales, software product manager

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.

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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