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 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

King Solomon Had The #1 Skill That Product Managers Need

Yes, I will tell you what this skill is; however, do you think that you can guess it before I do? I’m sure that you can come up with the standard list of leadership skills that every product manager has (or at least should have): able to deal with pressure, able to lead people, vision, positive attitude, creativity, etc. However, those would all be good to have, but none of them would be the #1 skill that a product manager needs to have. Give up? The answer is … judgment.

The ability to make good decisions is the #1 skill that any product manager needs to have because making decisions is such a large part of what we do each and every day. Two well known business thinkers / authors also agree with me: Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis. Noel and Warren say that judgment can be broken up into three different sets of skills: picking who will be on your team (people), picking what challenges you take on (strategy), and picking what to do when tough times hit (crisis decisions).

People, people, people. Decisions about which people a product manger is going to interact with and have on his / her team are THE most important decisions that they will ever make. Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe Jack Welsh who said that the thing that he failed at the most during his storied career was moving too slowly in making people judgments even when he had all of the data that he needed. Tichy reports that when he’s giving speeches he’ll ask the audience what the worse judgment that they every made was and invariably about 75% of the people will say that they were about people. If a product manager can get the right people on his / her team, then they have solved more than half of the problem.

Next comes what product strategy a product manger wants to pursue. In our world, more often than not this comes down to picking what types of customers we want to go after with our products. Our sales teams are all too often filled with salespeople who will happily go after every customer that they can get a meeting with. However, this is a great way to waste time until all of the money is gone. Picking the right customers from the get-go and going after them aggressively is what a good product manager makes happen.

Bad things happen and a product manager who is ready for them is a product manager who has real-world survival skills. When the whole world seems to have flipped upside down (like when the stock market drops 700 points in a single day!), a product manager who can remain calm and still make good decisions is worth his/her weight in gold. Now this ability is probably as much an art as it is a science; however, at the end of the day it always requires that the product manger know all of the available facts about the situation. To put it simply, the ability to collect the facts is one of the simple secrets behind a product manager’s ability to make good judgments.

How good of a job of making judgements do you think that you do? Do you feel that people, strategy, or crisis decision making is your strongest skill? Have you ever made a bad people judgement? What was the result of this judgement? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Technorati Tags: marketing management, product management, product manager, product manager jobs, product marketing, 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