THE NEW RULES OF PRODUCT MARKETING

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1 THE NEW RULES OF PRODUCT MARKETING DAVID KEITH DANIELS The Transformation of Product Marketing from Tactical Sales Support to a Strategic Powerhouse

2 THE NEW RULES OF PRODUCT MARKETING The Transformation of Product Marketing from Tactical Sales Support to a Strategic Powerhouse By David Keith Daniels Copyright 2018 by BrainKraft LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

3 THE EVOLUTION OF PRODUCT MARKETING Once upon a time, there were product managers. They spent all their time with the development team building exciting new products to solve market problems. As their products grew, the demands on their time grew as well. But the amount of time they had to address those extra demands were confined to a 24 hour day. They were helping the sales team, they were helping the customer support team, they were helping the marketing communications team. As the company grew the product manager s ability to be everywhere became impossible. Enter product marketing. Product marketing managers were hired to relieve product managers of the extraneous activities that were keeping them from building more exciting new products. The new product marketing managers did all the things the product managers didn t have time to do: competitive analysis, sales enablement, writing articles and blog posts, working with the marketing communications team, and be a resource for the sales team to help with sales calls. And this list could change at a moment s notice. Product marketing managers (and their managers) got used to this mode of operating. It became a reactive, tactical function. A steady flow of deliverables and activities. So tactical, in fact, that the performance of a surprising number of product marketing managers is measured by the number of leads they generate.

4 SEPARATING THE ROLES OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT FROM PRODUCT MARKETING Product management and product marketing form a team, each with distinct roles and responsibilities. They exist in a symbiotic relationship. The easiest way to think about the distinction is to consider there are three categories of products in the product development pipeline. The first category of product is called a Current Product. As the name implies, a Current Product is a product your organization is selling today.

5 The second category of product is a Next Product. A Next Product is one that is soon to be released and will be available to sell. It could be a new product or a major version of an existing product. The third category of product is called a Future Product. A Future Product is one that won t be available to sell for some time. It s in the product development pipeline. It s the kind of product that drives future revenue growth. With the backdrop of the three types of products, it s easy to see how to separate the roles and responsibilities of product management and product marketing. <<IMAGE: Current Products, New Products, Future Products>> Product marketing has a responsibility for Current Products and Next Products. They are products that are selling now or will be selling soon. Product Management has responsibility for Next Products and Future Products. They are the products are selling soon and products that are selling beyond the current fiscal year. Where they overlap is with Next Products. A product launch turns a Next Product into a Current Product. And you are off to the races trying to generate revenue with it. Product Management focuses on identifying new problems to solve and planning exciting new products to address those problems. The handoff from Product Management to Product Marketing is after a product is launched and available for sale. That frees up time for Product Management focus on Future Products. Future Products become Next Products, and Next Products become Current Products.

6 THE NEW RULES OF PRODUCT MARKETING Today s product marketing manager has evolved into a strategic force. In the past, Product Marketing s primary role was to offload day-to-day, tactical activities from Product Management. This enabled product managers to focus their time finding new problems to solve in the market. The old rules of product marketing are no longer effective. They focused too heavily on generating a high volume of leads (of dubious quality), and on tactical sales support. The old rules meant product marketing managers were effectively secretaries for the sales team, doing whatever they asked. It made it difficult for executive management to fully understand the value Product Marketing was delivering. And that diminished the value of product marketing managers. Product Marketing has evolved to be more strategic, and more focused on market insights. The kind of market insights that drive more attention, accelerate product adoption and cultivate armies of customer advocates. Forward-thinking organizations have given Product Marketing important responsibilities in market sizing, market segmentation, value proposition development, mastering the competitive landscape, empowering the sales team, and in some cases pricing. Many of those responsibilities were once the exclusive domain of Product Management. Today product marketing managers, need to follow the new rules of product marketing to be successful.

7 PRODUCT LAUNCHES DELIVER RESULTS NOT DELIVERABLES Product Marketing has taken the lead in launching products. There is a shift away from a deliverables-driven approach, to one that drives business objectives. In the new rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers are Chief Marketing Officers of their products. They look at the big picture and consider how best to achieve the goals of the business first. Then they look at how a product launch supports those goals. In the old rules of Product Marketing, a product launch consisted of a building a sales presentation, doing a press release, updating the website, doing some rudimentary sales enablement activities, and generating leads. The result was more tactical demands on product marketing (and product management) only exacerbating the situation. In the new rules of Product Marketing, a product launch is a strategic marketing campaign. It s not just a date on the calendar. It has clear objectives, there is a strategy to achieve the objectives, there are a set of tactics to support the strategy, and there is a way to measure progress.

8 DRIVES PRODUCT ADOPTION The primary focus of a product marketing manager is to drive product adoption. Especially if your organization has a growth objective. Sometimes the primary emphasis is on customer retention, in situations of a mature product with little growth potential. Adoption is a state where a customer has gone beyond buying a product and has implemented it into their daily routine. It has become part of how they do things day in and day out. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers are experts in their buyers and how they make a buying decision. They have a laser focus on what it takes to get a customer from attention to action, to acquisition, and adoption. In the old rules of Product Marketing, a product marketing manager s contribution to product adoption was generating leads and building sales tools. They assumed it was the sales team s responsibility to do the rest, and they would wait until a salesperson asked for help. It was a tactical endless loop. In the old rules of Product Marketing, the value of a product marketing manager was based on the volume (not the quality) of sales leads generated. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers define buyer personas in great detail and have buyer s journey decision maps that model the life cycle of a buyer's initial purchase, a renewal, and an add-on purchase. They use this knowledge to drive product adoption, not pray that it happens. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, the value of a product marketing manager is based on the contribution toward achieving business goals.

9 MASTERS THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE There are two ways to gain knowledge about competitors. One is to be tactical and react to each competitor you become aware of. The second is to be strategic, building a picture of the competitive landscape. And then providing an early warning system to identify new potential competitors before your sales team encounters them in the field. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers know their direct competitors and they know the alternatives their customers could choose. They know the strengths and the weakness of each competitor, including the weakness in their strength. And they keep an eye on potential competitors that could be threats in the future. In the Old Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers responded to competitive situations as they occurred. It was driven by salespeople trying to win a deal but up against a competitor. A salesperson would contact a product marketing manager eager to get anything they could about a competitor in question. In the Old Rules, product marketing managers were reactive. Inevitably, little information existed about the competitor and the product marketing manager would drop what they were doing to conduct quick (and not very deep) competitive research. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers have a program in place to identify information about competitors. They use a set of tools to develop a competitive landscape, identify customer alternatives, develop deep insight about each competitor, and keep the information up to date. This insight is packaged so it s easily consumed by the sales team, product management, and the management team. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers are proactive about the competition.

10 IDENTIFIES MARKET TRENDS In a purely tactic role, there is little time for product marketing managers to conduct market research. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers play a pivotal role in evaluating and refining the definition of market segments. In the Old Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers were told which market segments to target, without supporting facts or evidence. Their mission was to build sales tools and generate leads. Under the Old Rules, product marketing managers knew very little about the market segments they served and the buyer personas in those market segments. That limited their ability to understand what was working and what wasn t. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers obsess over learning their buyers and why they buy. They conduct research on buyers to develop Buyer Personas. They identify and document the steps, triggers, and needs in a Buyer s Journey Decision Map. They have methods to evaluate a set of possible target market segments to determine the best fit for the organization. The evaluation of market segments captures characteristics that are important to the goals of the business.

11 DEVELOPS A CLEAR VALUE PROPOSITION Developing a clear value proposition is paramount to effective marketing communications. Without it, market-facing messages are unclear. Sales tools are ineffective. Leaving you with confused buyers. And one thing is for certain, a confused buyer doesn t buy. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers develop deep knowledge about their buyers. And they use that knowledge to develop a value proposition that connects with buyers. In the Old Rules of Product Marketing, developing a value proposition involved filling out a template. The value proposition had little value. The value in the template emphasized product features, not customer needs. In the Old Rules, developing a value proposition was a guessing game. Product marketing would guess, try, guess, and try until they found something that worked. But they didn t understand why it worked (or didn t work). In the New Rules of Product marketing, product marketing managers know their buyers so well they craft value propositions that resonate quickly with buyers. They understand that building a value proposition means more than addressing basic problems and needs. It gets into buyer behavior and how buyers think.

12 EMPOWERS THE SALES TEAM Sales enablement is a hot topic today, mostly fueled by sales leaders who are disappointed with the state of their sales team s readiness. They try to overcome the deficiencies through automated tools. Tools work great when they re the right tool for the job, and they have the right elements to be successful. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers leverage their market knowledge to deliver information that helps their sales teams find and engage the best sales prospects. In the Old Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing managers reacted to what salespeople wanted, not what was needed to be successful. In the Old Rules, sales enablement was giving the sales team a set of sales tools, a demo of the product, and wasting their time. It routinely resulted in complaints by the sales team that they aren t getting what they need from Product Marketing to be successful. In the New Rules of Product marketing, product marketing managers are the insights machine. They are a trusted source that empowers the entire sales team, not just individual salespeople.

13 IS A PLAYER IN PRICING Pricing is a multi-faceted activity in an organization. The key to effective pricing is to understand a buyer s willingness to pay. That s right in the sweet spot of product marketing. In the New Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing are key advisors for pricing because they have keen insights into a buyers willingness to pay. They obsess over understanding their buyers better than the buyers know themselves. In the Old Rules of Product Marketing, product marketing had no involvement in pricing. Some other part of the organization provided a price list and product marketing implemented it. In the Old Rules, Product Marketing wasn t even consulted on pricing discussions. In the New Rules of Product marketing, product marketing managers have evidence of their buyer s willingness to pay. Enough to know their pain and how to quantify the impact of the pain. Product marketing managers know how urgent the problem is and can use that information to drive product pricing decisions. A STRATEGIC ROLE Product Marketing has evolved into a strategic role, no longer relegated to generating leads and building slides. The Product Marketing role focuses on driving revenue for Current Products and Next Products. They leave the heavy lifting of Future Products to Product Management. For more information on how BrainKraft can help your team embrace the New Rules of Product Marketing. Contact us at Follow us on Become a member of the BrainKraft Tribe - link goes here.