Effective Product Marketing
Ever have one of those days where things feel like they fit into place? Well, I’ve had several of the last couple of weeks. And it’s all thanks to product marketing.
I don’t pretend that I’m a marketing guy. Yeah, I get the concepts. I understand the fundamentals well enough to converse and help out with strategic activities, but it’s not my bread and butter. Now, if you are lucky enough to get solid marketing folks into your organization, and your organization is software, I encourage you to read up on the interaction between product marketing management and product management.
Let me help by saying this: they are not the same thing. Software product manager’s, unless they are explicitly focused on marketing, should not try to take the reigns here.
Wikipedia has a great article on product marketing, even with a section explaining this. The biggest favor you can do for yourself it to get folks on board with the idea that product marketing plays the biggest role in gathering the feedback.
Yeah, I get it. I wrote a pretty up-front article on Sales running development. Now, I still believe that this is a bad idea, with a couple of lightweight exceptions. Those lightweight exceptions, funny enough, roll right into providing market feedback.
This is where it becomes so clear where MRDs and PRDs start factoring in. Marketing takes the lead on the marketing requirements document, while product management takes the lead on the product requirements document, with each group meeting somewhere in the middle to ensure the key components of each thing remain clear.
At least, that’s how I see it. And it’s become quite clear to me how valuable solid product marketing efforts are.
ack/nak: quick exercise
An amazing post over at ack/nak. Go read — especially if you are in the throes of competitive analysis, or are even looking for a solid place to start.
Or even help build some fun relationships with Sales folks. Good times will be had by all.
Bob, does the “tasty beverage” portion of the exercise include beers and/or mixed cocktails?
Locating Market Data
I have been spending a bunch of time heads-down, analyzing market data. This is a key part in any PM’s life, and this magical data can really come from anywhere. Here are a few of my favorite sources:
- Sales pipeline
- Support
- Win / Loss
I thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts on each of these different areas that can lead a PM to helping create a better product. But first, I want to get something out of the way: gathering market data is NOT (I repeat) NOT, a one-time process, or something that happens once every six months. You should be devoting at least some fixed percentage of your time each week to doing market research.
Remember, a PM serves as the proxy between the company and its customers / market. No questions asked.
OK, with that out of the way, on to the post.
Sales Pipeline
The sales pipeline is filled with wonderful little tidbits you can pull out. Generally, dividing a pipeline into broad strokes (beginning, middle, end type stuff) is the easiest way to go. This should give a good picture of where many of the deals are - whe combined with win / loss, this should present some strong collective feedback.
Support
Within our organization, support and QA both work within product management. I did this very deliberately: 1) support gets ingrained into them how to turn support inquiries / client deployments into helpful defect reports and feature enhancements without really having to get services involved. The second (the QA part) - it’s easier to keep a tighter lock on release cycles.
Each week, support produces a quick report giving key metrics about what clients are looking for. However, a PM does not have to turn these into requirements - as mentioned already, support is trained to do that themselves.
Win / Loss
Another key element to getting PM involved in the sales cycle — gathering win / loss data. I usually do this by setting up a custom form on the opportunity / lead list within the CRM system in use. This type of thing should be kept short and sweet. You don’t want to get crap from Sales directors / VPs that you are wasting their reps time filling out forms.
There are other channels where market data is gathered that I’ll pick up in another post. These are the core areas I’m using now, along with your typical prospect interviews. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the job; especially when it starts being a tangible effort that has a positive effect on the product development lifecycle.
CES Closeout
Well, all in all, CES was a very good show. There were a ton of super-cool people that made it over to our booth. Short of the annoying Slingbox demos that were happening right behind us every 1/2 hour on the dot with some actor, it was amazing. I’m still trying to figure out who the hell that guy was — I went looking for him at the end of the last day, but he was nowhere to be found; I had some MusicIP mints to give him and congratulate him on not actually dying after giving the same schtick for the 1,234th time.
I’m glad we are home though. It was quite a journey.
OK, not back to regularly scheduled product mgmt blogging…I swear.
Calling for More Discussions
There was a ton more press that came through the booth today during our session at CES.
To be honest, I’m a little sad it’s our last day. I’ve had a ton of fun talking to a bunch of super-cool and really interesting folks. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the looks on their faces when they really get what we’re doing. The eyes light up and you can see them thinking, “cool!”
In some cases, it takes a little bit more to get them to arrive at the notion. But that’s alright — we all have a pretty airtight positioning statement we’ve all been using. It seems to be working well:
“Digital music identification & recommendation.”
4 words. 5 if you count the “and” in there. Pretty neat.
The title of this post relates a little bit to wanting more to get some more interesting folks to come by. There are a lot of people either departing this evening or tomorrow morning and all throughout the day.
But, we will all be in the booth through the end of the day tomorrow, talking to anyone that wants to find out new ways they can change the way they listen to music, and change the way their customers discover music. If you’re still around Las Vegas, come on by!
