By Pushpa Chandrashekaraiah

Pat provided very good guidance on how to manage an Intellectual Property Portfolio. He specializes in product innovation and owns 15 patents. He discussed Product Managers’ role in identifying and initiating patent applications within organizations.

PMs’ role
The first question he asked SVPMA attendees was whether any PMs have patents. There were a number of people that owned patents as PMs, so, he easily made a point that patents are not limited to engineers and PhDs.

Pat mentioned that most of the product managers focus on checking off the items from the roadmap, but spend limited time on reviewing the achievements. It’s PMs responsibility to secure IP and facilitate innovation!

What is an invention? a) new to the world, and b) not obvious.

There are 3 ways of protecting your IP – copyright, trademark and patent. When information is published, it automatically becomes a copyright. However, there may be a conflict of copyright ownership when more than one source publishes similar content at the same time. Then, the first publication gets an automatic copyright. The rule applies to patents as well.

Patent or Trade Secret?
This should be the first question to ask before applying for a patent. Coca Cola kept their formula a secret, a very smart decision. Otherwise, they had to share their formula with the world.
However, there is a high risk in not patenting your invention; there will usually be a high litigation for costly inventions.

Companies like Microsoft, Twitter and Face Book, did not pay attention to patents while their brand grew very fast. If they do not patent their inventions now, it would be difficult to win the war. On the bright side, cloud based technology is not easy to reverse engineer unlike desktop based software.

Two things for PMs to keep in mind while applying for a patent – 1) Utility Patent – New uses for previous inventions can be patented, which is usually overlooked by PMs. 2) Design Patent – May not be a good idea to patent your User Interface in software companies.

He referenced several case studies and details of patent application. Please see his slide deck on Meeting Archives.

Last thing to be proud of as Silicon Valley residents – South Bay has the highest patents approved and East Bay including SF stands 3rd in the list.

Pushpa Chandrashekaraiah, Principal Product Manager at RSA. With 12 years of PM and engineering experience, she has successfully launched several enterprise products. Her interest is in big data enterprise market and security. She can be contacted at: pushpa_nc@yahoo.com, http://www.linkedin.com/in/pushpa

By Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting

Over the last 20 years I have noticed the same cycle play out time and time again. Organizations of all sizes continue to undervalue the product management function until they face a moment of crisis. Typically this takes the form of a change of control, difficulty scaling, and an almost endless variety of other possible combinations.

This situation is understandable in organizations that are migrating from start-up mode to a mid-sized organization as the CEO or founder was likely playing the role up until this point in the company’s evolution. However, it’s less understandable in organizations that have successfully achieved scale. Yet, it’s clear that organizations of all sizes continue to struggle effectively implementing successful product management organizations that truly drive value let alone implement a sustainable system that stands the test of time.

Clearly part of the problem is the lack of effective training for product managers. Normally product manager training tends to focus on a particular element of the process – for instance strategic planning or requirements development – rather than understanding how all the various pieces fit together into a working whole.

Another factor is the lack of academic training for undergraduates. This is not a solution in and of itself but what it would do is to help overcome one of the largest challenges – getting new product managers to utilize a common lexicon to describe what product management is and what it does.

Today, all the players in an organization tend to see product management from their own vantage, not unlike the fictional blind men who all touch an elephant only to describe the animal based upon the part they’re directly interacting with. This lack of agreement about the entire entity impedes successful implementation and contributes to its lack of sustainability.

The problem is further compounded by frequent, and in some cases, severe understaffing of the function, the continued comingling of product and product management, lack of fundamental product management tools, and effective leadership.

Ironically, none of these problems are insurmountable and all of these challenges can be overcome. Well rounded product management professionals can make a tangible difference and significantly improve the performance of underperforming organizations.

But at the end of the day, what is it about the product management function that leads organizations to underappreciate it until they find themselves in a situation where they desperately need it?

One of the conclusions that I have come to is that organizations diminish their product management organizations without intending to do so. In fact, I think there is a common indicator that acts as a red flag signaling that organizations have undermined their own success.

The key indicator that I’m referring to is a lack of connectivity between the tactical product roadmap (typically a 12 month view of prioritized and planned release activities) and the company’s business goals and objectives. Product management organizations that lack a coherent product strategy that effectively links the company’s business strategy to the day-to-day tactical activities often find themselves in the situation of reduced responsibility and perceived organizational value. This change from championing market needs to owning functional requirements portends the type of under appreciation that has become so common and contributes to the eventual crisis that many organizations face as they lose sight of the markets they serve.

So if your organization is headed down this path beware the red flag that crosses organizations of all sizes. A lack of a coherent product strategy often portends a looming crisis to come – your organization might be living on borrowed time and your moment to shine may be just around the corner.

Greg Geracie is the author of Take Charge Product Management©, the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge (ProdBOK), and the leader of this initiative. Greg is an Adjunct Professor at DePaul University and the President of Actuation Consulting a global leader in product management training, consulting, and advisory services to some of the world’s most successful organizations.

Panel discussion moderated by Delyn Simons, VP, Developer Platform at Mashery with:

• Daniel Jacobson, Director of Engineering API, Netflix,
• DeVaris Brown, API Product Manager and Evangelist, Zendesk,
• Rich Manalang, Developer Advocate, Atlassian
• Sam Ramji, Vice President, Strategy, Apigee.

 By Cindy F. Solomon

Delyn Simons created the Mashery API Network, an open data commons of RESTful APIs and an ecosystem of 200,000 web and mobile applications developers. She invited the panel to discuss advantages and pitfalls of APIs, issues working with standards, and secrets on how to get changes to interfaces that allow meeting implementation roadmaps. She opened with the mainstreaming of APIs by big brands and the ProgrammableWeb directory of 8000 APIs indicating the incredible pace of growth in the open API movement.

Fueling this hockey stick growth are 3 trends;

• consumerization of IT BYOD (bring your own device) – people rather lose their wallet than their phone these days
• changing mindset from corporate IT to consumerized IT – From Products to Platform thinking via Jeff Bezos of Amazon
• Developers are in the driver’s seat – Developers are changing the rules of the game in every industry – beyond technology

Delyn discussed the entire API landscape of strategic partners, public developers, product and support information, commerce, services and “dark APIs” which are found inside organizations, within groups of trading partners, within products, or represent enterprise APIs which the outside world may not know about.

Daniel Jacobson is director of API engineering at Netflix. Before that he created the NPR API which is now the centerpiece of NPR’s digital distribution strategy, transforming NPR’s ability to reach its audience on a wide range of platforms. He’s co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide and a frequent contributor to ProgrammableWeb and the Netflix Tech Blog.

The Netflix API strategy is in the critical path of the Netflix streaming service. Through this program, Netflix’s user base has grown tremendously, resulting in API growth from under one billion requests per month to more than one billion requests per day, in one year.

APIs accelerated partnerships since at Netflix for 800 devices. Daniel said the breadth of devices creates a problem for the one-size-fits-all API solutions. Netflix had persisted on the one-size-fits-all REST model for quite a while, but given their scale, it become increasingly obvious that their REST API, while very capable of handling the requests from devices in a generic way, was optimized for none of them. The granularity allows the API to support a large number of known and unknown developers because it sets the rules for how to interface with the data, and also forces all of the developers to adhere to those rules. Each device potentially has to work a little harder (or sometimes a lot harder) to get the data needed to create great user experiences because devices are different from each other. Daniel said public APIs are waning in popularity and business opportunity. He maintains that the internal use case is the wave of the future. At Netflix there are 50 distributed engineering teams each building their own service with their own modes and unique designs. Each team exposes various services to other teams and they all consume each others’ APIs.

DeVaris Brown is the API Product Manager and Evangelist for Zendesk. DeVaris growth hacks sales with his API by broadcasting via Yammer.  Zendesk’s mission is to enable businesses to offer great customer support so Zendesk encourages API consumers to build experiences on top of the API that give better experiences for their end users and is not concerned if some functionality of their agent interface is replicated by their customers. This increases consumer loyalty. The agent interface and all of the mobile apps are built on top of the Zendesk API, so they need to make sure that it’s performant and expressive. Zendesk developed a tool for documenting automatically as part of the code process because they wanted developers to document their intent and remove waste. The code documentation, called “double doc”, tool is free.  Zendesk has bi-weekly API deployments and transitioned to an external API to handle scale and deliver flexibility to use internally.

Rich Manalang leads Atlassian’s Developer Relations team. Atlassian has a 125K customer base, an ecosystem of 1500 add-ons in the marketplace, but it’s still a relatively small developer community. Atlassian has a plug-in model that lets developers create their own REST APIs and share them so developers can contribute APIs and deploy them via SDK.

Sam Ramji is Vice President of strategy at Apigee. In his article, The Building Blocks for a Successful API Strategy, he wrote about how both strategy and execution must come together. He said that every Saas product needs an API. They are critical items in the product suite – it’s a customer acquisition cost (CAC) since APIs dominate churn and become bound to code. He suggests designing API’s and the whole development program for near zero costs in order to scale.

APIs enable more apps faster. APIs are in fact lines of business in their own right – and companies have to manage them as such. The API business is a contract with developers who join the ecosystem. If you change the API, it breaks their products. When versioning APIs, don’t change the security model and don’t extend the resources model – clarify versioning support with the developer community. Always maintain a culture of responsibility, standards and quality at the top that will filter down through every employee. Create a developer experience team with real people to look at the API, provide internal customers to give feedback and be consistent. The new default is share first, then benefit. Embrace curation, observe what people do with your API, and hope to get incrementally less wrong over time. Embrace openness by design.

Cindy F. Solomon hosts weekly Global Product Management Talk broadcasts http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prodmgmttalk and Startup Product events sfproducttalks.com Follow @ProdMgmtTalk and @StartupProduct

by Michael Cannon

Every company wants a great value proposition, the proverbial magic bullet that gets you in the door and gets you an order. The trouble is that most value propositions are more like blank or copper bullets. They don’t perform well. And because they don’t perform, they reduce the effectiveness of all your sales and marketing investments, sapping your company’s strength and competitiveness.

There is a lot of market research to support this assertion, such as this example from Miller Heiman’s Sales Best Practice Study: “Over 65% of sales leaders feel they’re losing business because they don’t have a compelling value proposition.”

The Problem with Value Propositions

The underlying problem with value propositions is that  they are often used  for all sales and marketing efforts: to create interest in your company, to convince a prospect to meet with you, to convince a prospect to change from the status quo to a new solution, to convince a prospect to buy from you, etc.

Upon closer analysis, it’s easy to see why most value propositions are ineffective and hard to remember. Even a simple web search returns no clear consensus on the definition of a value proposition. For example,

“Identify and satisfy a need that your target market possesses”

“A clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets by using your products or services”

“A clear and succinct statement that outlines to potential clients and stakeholders your company’s unique value-creating features”

“A statement summarizing the customer segment, competitor targets and the core differentiation of one’s product from the offerings of the competition”

The definitions are all over the map and thus open to wide interpretation. So when you talk with your sales organization, a value proposition tends to be whatever needs to be said to advance the sales process. When you talk to the marketing organization, the value proposition tends to be a positioning statement for the company or for a product.

Value Proposition and Persuasive Messaging Defined

We advocate defining a value proposition as a one- or two-line description of the target customer, the value they would receive by doing business with your company, and what your company provides. Done well, a value prop answers the question: “Why should I consider doing business with your company?” For example:

“We partner with ultrasound healthcare providers to achieve the maximum equipment up time, the lowest total cost of ownership, plus the greatest sonographer satisfaction, by delivering the highest-quality support.”

Defining a value proposition in this way allows you to clearly differentiate it from a positioning statement, and from persuasive messaging–the silver bullet your marketing and sales teams need in order to create and win more business.

Unlike a value proposition, persuasive messaging provides a clear, relevant, differentiated, and provable answer to each of your buyers’ primary buying questions, for each customer messaging category. For example, the primary buying questions for your products and services category are some combination of:

• “Why should I consider your product?” for demand creation
• “Why should I meet with you?” for meeting creation
• “Why should I change from the status quo to a new solution?” for opportunity creation
• “Why should I buy this new solution from your company instead of your competitors?” for order creation
• “Why should I buy now?” for urgency creation

 Persuasive messaging is the silver bullet your sales and marketing teamsneed to win more business

Compare this to what most companies are doing today. They attempt to create one value proposition that answers all the possible buying questions related to each of their products and services. The approach does not work. For example, the answer to “why change?” is vastly different than the answer to “why buy from your firm?” The result is that, instead of providing the customer and sales team with a magic bullet, they end up providing a blank or copper bullet at best.

Differentiating your value proposition from your persuasive messaging enables both to work in concert. You can have a high-level value prop for the company that generates interest and multiple persuasive messages for each of the products and services you offer.

This change in how you communicate with prospective customers will help you generate more meetings, sales opportunities, and orders. Companies that successfully distinguish between their value proposition and their persuasive messaging experience an increase in sales of 10% to 15% or more.

A3 Solutions is one such company. A3 was in a classic David-vs-Goliath struggle: a smaller company with better technology confronting larger competitors with bigger balance sheets. Here’s how they explain the results of implementing great sales messaging:

“In three months, our sales pipeline has doubled in size, and our close rate is up by 150%,” according to Stuart Ratner, Chief Operating Officer. “We went from just another vendor communicating features and benefits to the preferred vendor communicating profound business value… and the shift occurred virtually overnight.” A3’s CEO Robert Lautt adds: “Our ‘Why Buys?’ are so strong that we effectively fence off the competition. Bottom line is we’re now a much more market-driven company.”

Implement persuasive messaging into your customer communications — content and sales conversation — and experience these results yourself.

 Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned marketing and sales effectiveness expert, best-selling author, speaker and an authority on enabling B2B companies to engage customers with the most influential communications. For more information, visit www.silverbulletgroup.com

 By Michael Cannon

In part One; we reviewed the 4 biggest obstacles to improving marketing effectiveness and the solution to the first three root-cause issues including:

• Poor visibility into the true cost of ineffective customer communication
• Lack of clear differentiation among messaging, content, and tactics.
• Inaccurate model of the categories, styles, and types of messaging required for market success.

Part 2 takes us through 4-9:

4) Misguided priority setting. Messaging is not seen as the only item that has the greatest impact on the effectiveness of all your customer communications (content and sales conversations). Additionally, marketing teams are rewarded for the quantity of content produced to launch and support products, rather than the effectiveness of content, i.e., how well does it support the buyer’s decision process and the sales team’s ability to support that process?

Solution: Reset your priorities. Acknowledge that messaging is “the fuel” on which your marketing and sales engines run. Then reprioritize and renegotiate deliverables with stakeholders so that you have the resources and time needed to produce more persuasive messaging and more influential content. It’s far better to produce fewer, more effective pieces of content than the other way around, as is the norm today.

5) Erroneous business model for allocating sales and marketing resources. A large percentage of the channel readiness work needed to enable the channel (field sales, inside sales, customer service, and channel partners) to successfully sell the value of the company’s products and services is not clearly defined across the marketing and channel organizations. The impact is that the resources required to complete the channel readiness work are not allocated correctly, or are underfunded. Studies indicate that 15-20% of the channel readiness work is done by the channel, one rep at a time and one deal at a time, as the high-level descriptive messaging is translated into persuasive messaging/conversations. From a business-model perspective, wouldn’t it be more effective to have Marketing do more of this work and then leverage it over your entire channel organization? The answer is an obvious yes, but tasking Marketing to do more of the channel readiness work, even if it wants to, will have limited success. 

Most marketing organizations are already resource-constrained and unable to fulfill many of their commitments. The business model restricts the reallocation and reprioritization of sales and marketing resources needed to increase performance.

Solution: Gain a clear understanding of how much time and effort your channel invests into re-creating messaging and collateral — and why they do it — and calculate the dollar value of the work. Then create a channel-readiness model that defines the customer communication (messaging and content) needed to support the buy cycle, from lead generation to retention, and agree on which stakeholder is responsible for creating each deliverable. Combine this work with the ideas above, and you will have a much better business model for correctly allocating sales and marketing resources to drive greater market success.

6) Ineffective new product development process or commercialization process. In addition to fixing the business model, the new product development process (NPDP) must be revised. The NPDP in most companies focuses on how to bring new products and capabilities to market quickly. While these capabilities are typically wanted by the target customer, they are often not highly aligned with solving meaningful customer business problems and, in particular, the ones that the customer would be willing to pay money to get. Additionally, the NPDP produces mostly high-level descriptive messaging and content, resulting in less-effective channel readiness tools and slower customer adoption.

About 50% of all new products end up failing.

Solution: For greater market success, reframe the product-development process into a customer-development process. You can move in this direction by integrating persuasive messaging and Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Life Cycle into the NPDP, starting at product definition. Combine this work with #5 above and you will have a much more effective process for bringing successful new products to market.

7) Lack of method and skills to create the most persuasive messaging. Addressing the systemic issues above is necessary to increase customer relevancy, but it’s not enough. This is because, as a whole, the marketing profession does not have a repeatable process for “how to” create highly persuasive messaging. The research referenced above clearly supports this observation. What’s been missing up until recently are objective criteria to evaluate messaging effectiveness prior to testing or launch and a methodology to create highly persuasive messaging. It’s a significant gap in Marketing’s tool kit.

Solution: Use the criteria above to assess the effectiveness of your current content and deliverables. If there is a meaningful gap, then create an internal core competency around persuasive messaging. The fastest and most cost-effective way to do this is by hiring a firm that has expertise in enabling organizations to successfully define, create, and deploy the most persuasive messaging, and engage customers with the most influential communications (content and conversations). If the skill set was easy to develop with your current resources, many of the problems discussed in this article would not exist.

8) Poor alignment around the definition, rating, hand-off, follow-up, and reporting of leads. There must be a Dilbert cartoon for this infamous pain point between Marketing and Sales. Marketing complains that it produces lots of leads but Sales does not follow up. Sales complains that the leads are mostly suspect, and thus useless, and/or too time-consuming to chase.

Solution: Create a sales and marketing effectiveness task force and empower it to create a solution around these items. Stop treating lead generation as a one-off campaign, and start treating it as part of the customer-development business process. Then automate the business processes with a marketing automation platform, and use persuasive messaging as the secret ingredient to achieve the best demand-generation results.

9) Limited sales experience. Some believe that marketing professionals will always struggle to be relevant to customers because most have little-to-no sales experience. They lack fundamental knowledge of what customers need (messaging and content) to make a good buying decision and what Sales needs (messaging, sales support training, and sales tools) to enable the customer to make a good buying decision.

Solution: While having a policy to hire more marketing professionals with sales experience and/or to rotate marketing professionals into Sales, or visa versa, makes sense, it’s often a time-consuming and expensive long-term solution. By implementing one or more of the ideas in this article, you can cost-effectively enable Marketing to understand what its internal and external customers really need to be more successful and how to give it to them.

Use these 9 strategies to make your marketing more effective – to create greater competitive differentiation, and to be a driving force behind faster revenue growth.

 Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned marketing and sales effectiveness expert, best-selling author, speaker and an authority on enabling B2B companies to engage customers with the most influential communications. For more information visit www.silverbulletgroup.com

By Lisa Rathjens

Greg has over 20 successful years in the product manager sphere in a wide range of industries, at companies like Cisco, Schlage Lock, JD Powers, Nissan, Plantronics, and K2 Skis.  He is passionate about helping companies improve product quality and success through customer research. His presentation addressed following four steps: why collect feedback, planning and preparing to gather feedback, how to gather the data, and types of research to consider. 

Using colorful examples from his time at Cisco, K2, and Schlage, Greg relayed the “why” of gathering direct customer feedback, whether the customers are existing or prospective. Of course, it is important to gather customer feedback to know what product to build, but you also need to gather it to know how to sell that product. Gathering the right kind of feedback will help you understand the features and functionality your customers want, and it will help marketing and sales teams create more effective, targeted messaging. Greg cited “Winning at New Products” by Robert Cooper that claims the “#1 cause of new product failure is insufficient or faulty marketing research”. While many high tech companies are at their core engineering driven, they also need to be market and customer driven in order to sustain and build on initial product success.

In discussing the importance of preparation and planning before gathering customer feedback, Greg summed this up in a three-word admonition: “Do your homework!” This means asking the right questions, listening carefully to customer input, and reading between the lines. Customers will often provide only hints of what they want, and you will need to work to dig out the real needs, even if it seems wrong to you initially.

To design an optimal customer feedback process in your company, Greg identified nine required steps. The process starts with (1) selling the benefits of gathering customer feedback to your internal org, including engineering, senior management, and other stakeholders. This will help you in many ways, not just avoiding “poor” product design but also leap-frogging the competition, increasing “share of wallet,” and increasing customer loyalty.  Next, you need to be sure your product has (2) an executive sponsor who is customer-focused as well as (3) champions and customer evangelists across the organization, in all the stakeholder teams. These allies will be invaluable when product schedules get tight or budgets become constrained, and customer-requested features may be at risk.

When determining what feedback to gather, you need to (4) look at the entire customer lifecycle, starting from when your customer becomes aware of your product all the way past purchase, to service and support calls. Selecting a targeted customer panel to gather feedback can be very helpful, but you will also benefit from a well-crafted survey of a much broader customer group, to be sure that you get feedback from all the actual users of the product. Further, before the product is even built, you need to (5) get involved in the requirements definition, to be sure to bake the customer perspective into the PRD, MRD, betas, field trials, etc. Be sure to consider not just customers, but (6) anyone who interacts with the customer, such as partners, sales, marketing, and services teams. 

Assessing the process and drilling down on the pain points is easier when all the stakeholders have agreed to (7) a predefined set of goals and metrics, which are customer-defined. These should be realistic, and should benchmark the competition. Greg challenged the group that (8) some portion of compensation should ultimately be tied to customer feedback and a satisfaction metric. Finally, a successful customer feedback process needs to include a final step that (9) closes the loop both externally with customers and internally with the execs. Let the customers know what actions you are taking based on their input, and let the execs know how you measure and track the results.

When designing your customer feedback research project, there are numerous considerations, determined by your product, target market, and customers. The methodology you choose, the sample size of your customer group, the wording of the questions, the method of delivery – all these and more will influence the success and value of the feedback you gather. Only use small focus groups to collect qualitative data, such as establishing terminology, setting goals, testing major features with important customers, etc. Then validate that data by collecting quantitative feedback, always using a large group of customers that provides a broad cross-section of your target market across geographies and segments. The type of information you gather will vary, depending on if your product is new or existing, how and by whom it will be used, and the profile of the customers across geographies, business segments, etc. Key to your success will be focusing less on the product itself, and more on the customer need that the product is intended to fill.

In conclusion, Greg reiterated that the customer must be at the top of the hierarchy in any product planning. If you do your homework, listen to the customer, and keep all product stakeholders focused on your customer’s needs above all else, then your product will be a success.

Lisa Rathjens has spent the last 15+ years in the midst of the explosion in mobile computing, working at Palm and then Motorola.  She focuses on designing and building products and services that encourage and enable developers to build apps that delight and surprise, and that people love to use. She is currently looking for her next great adventure, and can be reached at: lrathjens@yahoo.com and http://www.linkedin.com/in/lrathjens .

By Michael Cannon 

The question, “what do we need to do to make Marketing more effective?” has been a topic of discussion in articles and books for decades. The most recent reincarnation of this topic resides under the banner of sales and marketing alignment. And, while there are many good ideas for “what to do”, true improvement remains minimal, according to over a decade of research.

The problem is that we are asking the wrong question. Instead, we need to focus on the systemic, root-cause issues: “Why is it so difficult to increase marketing effectiveness?” Understanding “why” yields a more useful answer to “what do we need to do?”

Before answering these questions, let’s clarify some terms. The word “customer” includes both Marketing’s internal customers, such as field sales, inside sales, sales operations, and field marketing,
and its external customers, such as the end users, channel partners, market and financial analysts, and investors. The word “marketing” includes the product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing teams.

The 4 Biggest Obstacles to Improving Marketing Effectiveness

 When you peel the onion back on marketing effectiveness, what you find is that the obstacles are focused primarily on four categories of marketing content:

1. Customer-facing collateral (company website, brochures, videos, etc.)
2. Demand generation (advertising, events, etc.)
3. Internal-facing sales tools (competitive analysis, sales opportunity overviews, etc.)
4. Sales support training (product, competitive, sales enablement, etc.)

 When you peel down to another layer, what you see is that it’s often not the content that’s the problem but rather the messaging in the content — or more specifically, the lack of effective messaging: the messaging is focused on what your product does and how it works instead of being focused on how the customer can more successfully achieve their business objectives using your product.

Proof that most customer communication (messaging, content, and sales conversations) is ineffective can be seen year after year in numerous research reports such as the one from which this excerpt was taken: 

62% of buyers said that content is either not relevant or not useful. Buyers said they want shorter buying cycles, but the lack of relevant information to educate them, and all other influencers, is slowing things down.”

IDC, 2012 Sales Enablement Strategy: Content is King So Why Does Sales Feel Like a Jester?

Now let’s get back to the question of “why.” Below are the top nine root-cause issues that make it so difficult to improve marketing effectiveness and some practical ways to make meaningful improvements:

1) Poor visibility into the true cost of ineffective customer communication. SBG research indicates that the true cost of ineffective customer communication is between 10% and 20% of a company’s annual revenue. In the U.S. alone, B2B companies lose hundreds of billions of dollars annually to ineffective customer communication. There is no line item in the P&L for this cost. Ineffective customer communication cost is hidden in the company’s business model in the form of higher discounting, lower win rates, and slower revenue and market share growth. It’s hidden in Sales’ (field, inside, field marketing, sales operations) and the channel partners’ budgets as the 15-20% of their time spent trying to close the gap between what they need to effectively do their job, and what Marketing produces.

 Solution: Gain visibility into the true cost of ineffective customer communication by conducting assessments such as a Sales/Channel Time Usage Study, a Collateral and Sales Tools Gap Analysis, and targeted customer surveys. 

2) Lack of clear differentiation among messaging, content, and tactics. Messaging is a summary answer to the prospective customer’s primary and secondary buying questions – the key points that must be communicated to convince a person to engage and buy. Messaging is integrated into content via copywriting and the creative process and integrated into sales conversations by way of the communicator. The less effective the messaging, the less effective the content and conversations. It’s that simple. 

Separating messaging from content enables you to make the content much more effective. For Marketing, content can be landing pages, collateral, whitepapers, websites, and presentations. For Sales, content also includes competitive briefings, ROI calculators, call guides, and sales support training such as product or sales opportunity training. These “content tools” are then presented to the customer via various tactics. For Marketing, the tactics can be campaigns, seminars, trade shows, etc. For Sales, the tactics can be sales conversations, emails, and voicemails.

Solution: Create a customer engagement model with a common vocabulary for the go-to-market components that Marketing creates and that Marketing’s customers need or use. 

3) Inaccurate model of the categories, styles, and types of messaging required for market success. When you look at the types of conversations we need to have with prospective end-user customers, they quickly break down into five, as defined by the buyer’s primary buying questions: 

• “Why should I consider your product?” for demand creation
• “Why should I meet with you?” for meeting creation
• “Why should I change from the status quo to a new solution?” for opportunity creation
• “Why should I buy this new solution from your company instead of your competitors?” for order creation
• “Why should I buy now?” for urgency creation 

The problem is that most companies are using descriptive messaging to answer the prospective customer’s primary buying questions — and it’s not working. This style of messaging or communication is not effective, as the research referenced above indicates.

As you see in this customer communications model, the product messaging category describes what the product does, what’s included, how it works, and what some of its key benefits are. It’s all the typical “content” in a product brochure. What it does not provide is a persuasive answer to the prospective customer’s primary buying questions. What’s missing, as you can see from the map, is an entire style of messaging called “persuasive messaging”. This missing style is designed to provide highly persuasive, i.e., clear, relevant, differentiated, and provable, answers to the prospective customer’s “why” questions. Persuasive messaging enables the highly influential conversation that both Marketing and Sales need to have with customers. 

Marketing needs to integrate both descriptive messaging
and persuasive messaging into its content in order to be more relevant to customers. 

Solution: Use the sample customer messaging model as a reference, and create a company customer messaging model that’s aligned with Marketing and Marketing’s customers, too. Then create the required messaging and integrate it into your content. The result is a framework that gets all stakeholders on the same page, prior to the development of your messaging and go-to-market content.

In Part Two, we will explore how to overcome 5 more root-cause issues that decrease Marketing effectiveness, including:

• Misguided priority setting
• Erroneous business model for allocating sales and marketing resources
• Ineffective new product development process or commercialization process
• Lack of method and skills to create the most persuasive messaging
• Poor alignment around the definition, rating, hand-off, follow-up, and reporting of leads
• Limited sales experience

Check in at the  SVPMA website next week for the Part 2 of this Featured Article!

 Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned marketing and sales effectiveness expert, best-selling author, speaker and an authority on enabling B2B companies to engage customers with the most influential communications. For more information visit www.silverbulletgroup.com.

by Dan Galatin

Dan Roam, Founder and President of Digital Roam Inc., presented at the February 6^th meeting of the SVPMA.  Dan discussed and demonstrated how we can quickly and easily visualize the essentials of any problem we need to solve, no matter how complex, by following a few simple guidelines.

Dan contended that we can say more by using fewer words and more pictures.  We can break seemingly complex problems down into simpler, more manageable visual components, which are more convincing and compelling than traditional verbal communications.  Even something as complex as the design of the Boeing 787 has been communicated pictorially across production teams spread across 15 countries.  It’s also common for successful authors like J.K. Rowling and Joseph Heller to visually “map” out their books to keep track of complex plotlines.  In business, the person at the whiteboard drawing pictures is usually the one running the meeting.

Seventy-five percent of all our neurons are focused on processing vision.  Whoever best describes a problem is the one most likely to solve it.  In other words, whoever draws the best picture gets the funding!  The Laffer curve (literally drawn on the back of a napkin) became the foundation of supply-side economics largely because its visual simplicity appealed to Ronald Reagan.  Over millions of years, the human brain has evolved so that the left brain focuses on analyzing details and the right brain focuses on the “big picture.”  Traditionally, intelligence is considered almost exclusively to consist of “left-brain” functionality.  Mr. Roam argues that we need to also develop the other part of our cognition.  Even our memories are stored as images.

Our visual processing consists of six different pathways that allow us to make sense of a complex world.  You can visually represent any idea using a combination of six elements that correspond to these pathways:

1. Who and What: the physical objects that make up the idea
2. How Much: the quantities involved, represented visually – for example, in a bar chart or pie chart
3. Where: the distances between objects, represented by a map or a schematic diagram depicting spatial relationships
4. When: the relationship of the objects in time, represented by a timeline
5. How: a description of how all the objects interact, represented by a flowchart that maps out cause and effect
6. Why: the underlying rule or moral that describes what we have learned, represented by a “visual equation”

Dan urged the audience to use this technique the next time they need to break down a complex problem into its constituent parts.

Dan Galatin has over 20 years of combined experience in product management and software engineering.  He is currently a Senior Product Manager at Keynote Systems and can be contacted at dgalatin@yahoo.com.

By Greg Geracie

As a follow-on to my “Focusing on the End User: Product Management and User Experience” featured article, the conversation continues with Rich Gunther, president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) and Sean Van Tyne co-author of the Customer Experience Revolution. You can read part one here.

 Why did you choose to contribute to the ProdBOK effort?

(Rich Gunther) As president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), I feel it’s important that my organization collaborates with professional organizations that represent other disciplines within the product and service development space. Since we do work so frequently with product management, contributing to their body of knowledge effort seemed to be a natural fit. We hope to get input into our own User Experience body of knowledge from those behind the ProdBOK effort.

(Sean Van Tyne) I see experience design as an important part of the product management and marketing lifecycle process. I hope that my contribution has brought some clarity to what experience design means in the context of ProdBOK.

 What do you think the ideal working relationship between user experience professionals and product managers should be?

(Sean Van Tyne) That can vary based on many factors. For example, a small organization in a new market may partner with an experience design firm to help them with their experience research and design needs while a large organization in a mature market may have a large, dedicated experience design department. If experience is important to an organization’s market success – like Apple or Disney – then they may have a Chief Experience Officer. If experience isn’t as important – like embedded technology – then they may not have experience design at all or a small department that reports into Product Management or other department. Some product managers may do some or all of their product’s experience design or work with a consultant or professional in another department. What is “ideal” is what makes the most sense based on the organization’s experience design strategy and goals.

(Rich Gunther) If you can envision an activity where a cross-functional team is defining a feature to be added to a product, I see there being an iterative workflow whereby the product manager says “we need to support such-and-such”. The user experience professional picks that strawman up and defines a task-flow and proposed design for it.  After a checkpoint with the product manager to make sure it will fit the bill, they’ll also likely have a checkpoint with development to make sure their proposal is technically feasible. Finally, before implementation, the product manager and user experience professional will collaborate in some user research, taking the design for the proposed feature and putting it in front of some representative users. Those users will offer commentary on both the market fit of the feature as well as its usability. After a prototype is developed, the product will be tested again to ensure that the final user interaction fits user expectations. Finally, product managers and technical writers can collaborate to develop documentation and marketing materials for the feature.

 Any final thoughts?

(Sean Van Tyne) I look forward to seeing the ProdBOK getting out there and helping to bring clarity to the product management and marketing profession.

(Rich Gunther) Thank you for the opportunity to contribute and we at UXPA look forward to future collaborations!

 Greg Geracie is the president of Actuation Consulting, author of Take Charge Product Management©, the Editor-in-Chief of The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge (ProdBOK), and the leader of this initiative. ProdBOK is an industry-wide effort to standardize the practice of product management sponsored by the Association of International Product Management and Marketing (AIPMM).

 By Michael Cannon

We have all seen the research reports from IDG, AMA, etc. that say about 50% of our customer communications, content and sales conversations, are not relevant to their needs, and that over 50% of the content Marketing produces is not relevant to the field/channel sales teams. It’s exceedingly difficult to be successful, i.e., to launch, sell, and manage products with great market share and profits, with such a large ball and chain strapped around the Marketing and Sales teams’ proverbial ankle.

The problem starts with a typical product launch plan. It contains a list of content deliverables such as a presentation deck, product brochure, whitepaper, application notes, etc. While these are needed, what’s often absent are the categories, styles, and types of messaging required for market success. The result, as the research indicates, is that most of the customer communications (content and conversations) are company/product-centric and descriptive. What’s missing is content that is customer-centric and persuasive.

The solution is to create the right messaging first, and then deploy it into your go-to-market content, such as collateral, campaigns, sales tools, and Sales/Channel support training, and employ it in the conversations that Sales has with customers.

Use this five-step process to help you implement more influential customer communications:

1. Establish messaging as a separate deliverable. Messaging is a summary answer to the prospective customer’s primary and secondary buying questions, a.k.a. the key points that must be communicated in order to convince a person to engage/buy. Messaging is integrated into content via the copyrighting/creative process and integrated into sales conversations via the communicator. Content is the actual words you use, both written and oral, along with support visuals, to persuade a person to do business with your firm. Content can be delivered in the form of documents, audio, and video.

2. Determine the right categories,styles, and types of customer messaging needed for market success. The two messaging styles are descriptive and persuasive. The categories of messaging can include: Company, Solution, Platform, Product, and Market Segment/Role messaging.

As an example, descriptive product messaging is the typical “what and how” content in a product brochure. It answers the customer’s secondary buying questions, such as:

• What does the product do?
• How does it work?
• What features are included/optional?
• What are the key benefits?

Persuasive product messaging is the “why” content. It provides clear, relevant, differentiated, provable, business language answers to the customer’s primary buying questions, a.k.a. persuasive messaging types, such as:

• “Why should I consider your product?” for demand creation
• “Why should I meet with you?” for meeting creation
• “Why should I change from the status quo to a new solution?” for opportunity creation
• “Why should I buy this new solution from your company instead of your competitors?” for order creation
• “Why should I buy now?” for urgency creation

 These “why questions” are at the heart of every prospective customer conversation, be it online or off-line, that both Marketing and Sales must persuasively answer in order to convince a person to engage and buy.

3. Create persuasive messaging. The logic structure to create persuasive messaging should follow this outline:

• The top three customer business objectives that are a) important to the customer, b) a good answer to the customer’s buying question, and c) solved by your offering.
• For each customer business objective, the 2-3 key underlying problems that must be improved in order to achieve the business objective.
• For each underlying problem, the capabilities or capability advantages of your offering that improve the underlying problem.
• Proof that your offering includes those capabilities, improves the underlying problems, and achieves the customer’s business objectives.

4. Deploy messaging into content. Once you have created your persuasive messaging, you’re ready to deploy it into your go-to-market content, such as collateral, campaigns, sales tools and sales/channel support training. For example:

• Use each reason statement (customer business objective story line) separately in an advertising/demand-generation campaign. Then drive readers to a landing page with more information and proof that the messaging is true.
• In collateral, create a section called “Three Great Reasons to Replace Your Current Solution or Select Us Over the Competition.”

5. Employ messaging in sales conversations. To ensure consistent customer communication, show the field/channel sales teams how the new messaging and go-to-market content is different from what they normally get, and train them on how to effectively employ it in their sales conversations/process, e.g., create/win more deals by more effectively getting a meeting, qualifying a prospect, selling a solution, setting landmines for the competition, etc.

Yes, creating the right messaging first is more work and you already have too much on your plate. The question you have to ask yourself is: “Would I be more successful if I created less, more relevant and influential go-to-market content, using the ideas above?”

The collective answer from your peers is an unequivocal YES. What they found is that getting the messaging right is truly a silver bullet: It’s the only deliverable that instantly improves the effectiveness of all your customer communications–it enables you to engage customers with more influential content and sales conversations, more consistently, across more touch points. The typical impact is captured in comments like: “We increased our pipeline by over 20% and our win rate by over 10%”, “We were able to take 15% market share from our biggest competitor”, “I now have a lot more credibility with the sales teams and spend less time supporting them too”, “Almost overnight we were able to communicate significant competitive advantage.”

Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned marketing and sales effectiveness expert, best-selling author, speaker and an authority on enabling B2B companies to engage customers with the most influential communications. For more information visit www.silverbulletgroup.com.