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 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