Last week we saw an example of what happens when the product management team sneaks out at night and uses its inside voice to the market. It looks a lot like conversations about redesigned packaging. In case you are wondering, your customers and prospects do not care that you redesigned the packaging, despite what happened in the focus group.
Speaking of focus groups, my buddy Alex had a fun experience recently at his focus testing firm’s offices. As he was arriving with the marketing team for an evening of bad food and feedback about a website makeover, who should be coming out but a director from product management. It seems his team had spent the afternoon with a disappointing plate of sandwiches and, you guessed it, a bunch of customers giving feedback about the next round of product updates.
Alex was sad because the product management team had taken up all the free parking spots behind the building; Alex should have been sad because his lack of alignment with product marketing is not helpful. We know we’re supposed to play nicely with sales, and many of us go to conferences for days on end to learn how to do that. When was the last time you worried about your alignment with product management or product development and the marketing team? Here’s why you need to worry.
Product Management Talks to Customers Too
We all know that sales and service teams talk to customers, and good marketers know to keep an ear out for interesting stuff that comes from those conversations. What makes the conversations with product management different, and possibly better, is they are not driven out of a transaction. More often than not, they’re aspirational and, done well, highly collaborative.
I have a friend who works in a B2B technology company that has started using rapid prototyping to create minimum viable products they can trot out to customers for a little bit of a look. Even though she is rarely invited to the focus groups (the alignment thing takes time), she does get a look at the notes and video and pulls from them all kinds of great data around how to communicate features and benefits, which screen shots to use in the creative, and key value propositions. She has been meaning to invite the product managers to her focus groups – she’s sort passive-aggressive that way.
Marketing Can Prevent Product Management Dumbness
One of the (lately many) fun things about working in a country that is not the United States is watching the bewilderment of some American product managers when they discover that other markets behave differently and have rules they ought to know about. In Canada, for example, we have a third of the market that speaks French, and we have different laws about privacy, banking and health care, to name a few.
This is where product managers can look for a bit of help from local marketers before they just dump their product into the warehouse and leave. Not so long ago, for example, a logistics software company almost released its delivery scheduler module into Canada, the UK and the Netherlands, quite forgetting to check whether the public holidays might be a bit different than they are in America (they are). A sharp-eyed intern noticed Veteran’s Day in a screen shot as she was packing up the brochures to send to sales. Checking in with local marketers and, through them, local users would have saved a great deal of time and a boatload of money.
Here’s what else local marketers know about that can help product management:
- Pricing
- Competition
- Distribution
- Regulations
- Local culture
- Market conditions
If you are wondering what it looks like when this goes horribly wrong, Target Canada is a wonderful example.
Product Management is Loaded with SMEs
We’ve looked at the power of subject matter experts (SMEs) before, and the ways in which crafty marketers can use them for world domination. We have our Hermit Crab SMEs, who are wonderful for reviewing marketing materials and moderating online discussions. The Wind-Up Evangelists are terrific for public events where the audience might have some domain expertise. Of course, marketing can never have enough Demo Dudes for trade shows and sales launches, and we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t make friends with the Irritated Overlords who run the whole show.
For product management, this offers some good opportunities to get out of their agile scrums and go talk to real people in real places without any one-way glass in the middle of things.
Marketing (Mostly) Understands the Buyer Journey
Good product managers know a lot about the user experience. They create use cases, study eye patterns, monitor all kinds of customer forums and call centre reports and warranty claims and downtime summaries. What many don’t have a lot of visibility into is the buyer journey. Understanding the path from awareness to actually handing over some money can make both the product and the selling process much easier for everyone involved.
My friend Catherine has managed, after years of stalking the VP of product management, to get a small online demo built for the website. Until now, the only way a prospect for her health practice management application could actually see the thing in action, was to sign an NDA and have a sales person walk them through an in-person demonstration.
After much yelling, her company can now qualify leads at the top of the funnel by letting visitors play with a few variables to see what the reporting will look like. She’s working on getting a more in-depth online demo built for the mid-funnel, so the Sales Squirrels can take people through it on the phone or by chat.
A good view on why people do or don’t buy the product and the many causes of falling out of the funnel, can and should form part of the market sensing the product management team is doing anyway.
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