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Promoting Leadership Principles in Product Management

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Arm the Messenger: Helping Your Team Talk Business

Guest post by Allison Rice

Imagine you are at a networking event with several of your employees, enjoying an appetizer and mingling with other small business types, when suddenly you overhear one of your own team members struggling to explain what, exactly, your business does and how you do it. Would you be embarrassed? Of course you would.

But scenarios like this don’t have to happen. Instead, you can arm your team with the information necessary to talk about your business in the outside world. After all, word of mouth is the best advertisement for any business — and happy team members who can readily discuss how the company works are a sure sign of success.

Find out how much everyone knows

First, find out where your team stands in terms of discussing business affairs. Arrange a meeting with the entire company, from college interns to managers and partners, and give everyone a simple worksheet of questions to answer. Don’t tell them before the meeting what the meeting will be about or you won’t get a true picture of how much training is needed.

What should everyone know?

The worksheet should include questions that you would want your team to be able to answer in a variety of business situations. Whether an employee is attending a networking function or encouraging a new client to consider your product, he or she should be able to speak candidly about what your company offers and have a general idea about everyday processes. The classic questions of who, what, when, where, how and why make a good starting point. For example:

What Does the Company Offer?

This question seems simple enough, but often employees and managers don’t have a clear answer. Narrow it down to specifics with the following hints:

  • Is it considered to be a product or service?
  • What makes the product or service unique?
  • What kind of competition exists in the market, both locally and nationally, for this product or service?
  • Does your company include “perks” or benefits with its products or services? (For example: a hair salon offers a 10-minute scalp massage with each wash and haircut.)

Who Might Benefit From What the Company Offers?

Understanding the demographics of the company’s product or service is also important. Make sure your team knows about the qualities of your ideal client, such as:

  • The company’s target age range
  • Target educational and/or economic status
  • Gender, if applicable

How Does Your Company Deliver?

How your company delivers a marketing message, or navigates today’s economy, is important. What do your employees know about your marketing efforts?

  • Mass Media: Does your company use television, radio or live events to deliver a message?
  • Websites: How does your company’s website work? Is it possible to purchase your product or service on the web?
  • Social Media: What social media tactics does your company use?
  • “Old School” Methods: Does your company send out brochures and/or fliers, hang posters or mail newsletters?

Why Has Your Company Thrived?

The “why” portion is a chance to share the philosophy of your company: its history and its current mission. While you might not think people will ask about these matters, this is important information that each employee and business owner should have.

Where Can Someone Get More Information?

This should be a no-brainer, but make sure everyone on the team is aware of all the different places a potential client can find out more, such as:

  • The company’s website or email address
  • The company’s storefront(s)
  • The company’s contact information

When is the Best Time to Get in Touch?

Answering this question could be as easy as relaying the business hours, but, if you have a website that offers purchasing, a client would need to know that the product or service is available any time.

Follow up the worksheet session

After you give your team the worksheet and let them fill it out, you’ll be able to see how much, or how little, everyone knows. You’ll also be able to notice any similarities in the answers. If the answers are not similar at all, that means there’s more training to be done. Sharing the same company information is important. If you find that your team didn’t respond in the way you wanted, it might be time to schedule a training session or two and get everyone on the same page.

Remember, every single employee within the company is likely to be delivering your message to the outside world at some point, so it’s important to figure out what the message should be and make sure it’s understood by everyone.

Allison Rice is the Marketing Director for Amsterdam Printing (www.amsterdamprinting.com), a leading provider of promotional marketing pens and other promotional products to grow your business and thank customers. Allison regularly contributes to the Promo & Marketing Wall blog, where she provides actionable business tips.

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The Product Management Perspective: Product managers play a key role in ‘arming’ the company with product messaging, especially in answering questions about what the company offers. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone in the company knows what your product will do for your customers. Take advantage of every opportunity to share the value of your product and get your coworkers excited about how it helps your customers.


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Three Ways to Get Your Team Excited About a Boring Product

Guest post by Guy Ascher

It’s hard to get amped up about selling razor blades, but somehow Dollar Shave Club has pulled it off. It’s one of the most successful new startup companies and it sells items that most people couldn’t give two hoots about. The secret is in the marketing. If you sell a boring product – toilet paper, pens, razors, water bottles, fishing supplies – you need to figure out a way to excite your employees. If they’re not excited, they can’t sell your company. If they can’t sell your company, you’re going to be out of business in short-order.

Tell A Story About Your Product

One of the best ways to breathe life into a boring product is to give it a story. It doesn’t always work, but most products do have one. Maybe your company started out of your parent’s basement. You were tinkering with your bedroom fan, and you figured out how to get those blades to spin 30 per cent faster.

You blew up a few test fans in the process but, at the end of the day, you had yourself the coolest room in the whole house. Later on, you decided to see if you could create massive fans for other people that would replace expensive air conditioning units. After several years – success.

Sound like a silly story? Maybe it is, but it’s the kind of thing really does exist out there. By the way, there is a company out there with an interesting fan story – it’s called “Big Ass Fans.” They make industrial and residential fan units that are unlike any other fan you can buy. Are employees excited about selling the company? You bet they are.

Create An Emotional Experience

Part of selling involves getting your prospects emotionally committed to your marketing message. If your prospects aren’t invested, they won’t care what you have to say. Creating an emotional experience can be tough, but one of the best ways to pull it off is to personalize your marketing messages.

Use surveys as a barrier to your email list. Make users fill out a short survey. Why? So you can provide customized advice about their problem. Most people are comfortable with answering a few questions, especially if the payoff is personalized service. No one wants to be “just another number.”

Another way to connect emotionally with your audience is to use high-quality video. Try to communicate your message with music and stunning visuals. Usually, this will win out over an obvious sales pitch. For example, the “embrace life” promotion is an ad that shows the benefits of wearing your seat belt.

The visuals are stunning and, even though there’s no dialog in the video, the message is crystal-clear.

Create a Personality For Your Company

How do you create a personality surrounding your company when you sell something as boring as contact lenses? The same way Apple creates its personality when selling something as “boring” as a computer. In the 1980s, no one used computers the way they do now. Apple was a key player in getting the marketplace excited about a hunk of metal, some plastic, and a keyboard.

The same can be said of Zappos. Who gets excited about shoes? These people do. Find something that you can use as a point of differentiation. Maybe you offer premium-quality products that are visually stunning. Maybe you have the best customer service in the world – and can prove it.

Whatever your angle, create a personality or “gimmick” surrounding your products and your company. It’ll make it a lot easier for our employees to get jazzed up about something that’s otherwise not very exciting.

Guy Ascher studied Marketing at the University of Newcastle in the UK. After years of working for marketing firms in Manchester, London and then eventually New York, he moved on to consulting small businesses on a their marketing needs. His articles focus on helping smaller businesses compete with well-established brands using new techniques or technology.

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The Product Management Perspective: The key to making your product exciting is to make sure it’s the best product in the market. Focusing on sound product management principles will help you focus on this goal.


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Five must-read blogs

Today’s post focuses on five blogs that have been great resources for me. These blogs and their authors have not only shaped my thinking but also inspired me to dig deeper and work harder. These are great blogs and I highly recommend you click through and spend some time learning from their authors.

Leadership: One of my favorite leadership blogs is Art Petty’s Management Excellence blog. Art writes about all things leadership, and he does a great job of explaining key points in a practical way.

Purpose: One of the most positive people I know is Dr. Paul Jenkins (“Dr. Paul”). His Parental Power courses are second to none, and his Live on Purpose podcast is a source of constant inspiration to help you evaluate and improve your life.

Product Management: If you want to learn about product management and understand it from a leader’s perspective, you need to read Jim Holland’s PM Tribe blog. Jim does a great job explaining principles in a way that’s easy to understand and apply to your situation.  Full disclosure: I worked for Jim in the past and consider him a mentor for life.

Product Marketing: April Dunford specializes in introducing new technology to the market. Her Rocket Watcher blog covers key aspects of taking products to market, both in startups and in large companies. Here wit and humor make it fun and a must-read for anyone interested in marketing.

New (to me): One of the newer blogs I’ve come across recently is We Move Together by Michael Hurley. The tagline is Thoughts and Observations on Leadership & Teamwork. From what I’ve read so far I’m impressed with Michael’s ability to tell stories in a way that inspires you to improve.

These are just five of many that have made a big impact on my life. Please leave a comment and share the blogs you like and the authors who have inspired you.

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The Product Management Perspective: There are many great resources for learning about product management and improving your skills. The key is spending some time each day learning and networking with other PMs, marketers and dev gurus.


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The power of the right product (or service)

What is the most important role in a company? That question has been debated endlessly, and as the idiom goes, the “jury is still out.”

If you think about this question not from the perspective of the role, but from the perspective of the outcome, you start to shape opinions that at least get you closer to the answer. Successful companies sell the right products and/or services to their markets. Think about how having the right product (or service) affects every part of your business:

  • Sales: The sales team has no problem convincing prospective customers to buy. When prospects learn about the benefits they will buy right away. The sales team’s job is straight forward.
  • Marketing: Getting the message out about your company’s offerings is easy because the products meet the needs of the target market. The marketing team does not have to worry about perfuming the pig and can concentrate messaging greatness.
  • Accounting: The CFO’s job is easy; he or she can focus on investing for the future and not have to worry about making the quarter or how many employees to lay off.
  • HR: Hiring great people is easy because of the reputation of the company.
  • Engineering: The architects and developers love coming to work every day. They continue to release high-quality products and love every minute of it.
  • CEO: The happiest person in the company is the CEO. He or she understands the value that comes with the power of the right product (or service).
  • etc.: Every function in the company runs smoothly.
Which role is responsible for the right product? It varies from one company to another, and depends on the size of the company and the type of business. In today’s technology-rich companies the role of getting the right products (and yes, services) falls to Product Management.

If you don’t have product managers in your company, get them. If you have them, treat them well. If you are an executive, put your best leaders on the product management team, build it out, empower the people on the team to do great things. You will benefit every other part of your organization by putting your money and your confidence behind the product management team.

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The Product Management Perspective: Product managers, do you agree with my take on the importance of your role? Does your management understand the value you can bring? If they do…excellent! Keep moving forward. If not, send them a link to this post and start educating them about the power of the right products and services.


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Before its time

My good friend Saeed wrote a great post on why Product Management is everything! He makes this claim based on a Harvard Business Review article written in 1991 by Regis McKenna called Marketing is Everything. Saeed does a great job describing how the claims McKenna made, about marketing, really pointed to product management; specifically technology-based product management. The only problem was, McKenna did not know about product management or have a good catch-phrase to describe it at the time. After several quotes from the article and well-thought-out supporting commentary, Saeed asserts the following:

It should be clear where McKenna was heading with this. This new type of Marketing–that understands technology, the market, customer needs, and the competition; that works with partners, suppliers, vendors as well as customers; that integrates the customers into the development process to produce superior products and services–is what we today call Product Management.

Whether he intended it to be so or not, what Regis McKenna, one of the luminaries of high-tech marketing was saying, was that the critical function that companies must adopt to thrive in the market is Product Management.

It’s enjoyable to see how the discipline of product management has evolved, and good to know its importance was understood before its time. So what’s the new discipline evolving today that doesn’t yet have a name?


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Marketing and the Olympics

I, like many of you I’m sure, have been both captivated and distracted by the 2008 Summer Olympics. I’ve found it difficult during the past several days to focus during my “prime” blogging time because of all the great athletic events going on Beijing (check out this clever video clip for proper pronunciation). There’s just nothing like Olympic competition.

I’ve been trying to find a good way to relate the Olympic games to leadership and product management. I was pleased to find a post on Hubspot by Colleen Coyne — 8 Marketing Tips from an Olympic Gold Medalist. Colleen won a gold medal in the 1998 games and is now an inbound marketing consultant. She compares the work involved in successful marketing with the work it takes to train for Olympic events; she applies eight specific tips she learned while training for her event to marketing. She gives the following tips:

  1. Don’t train harder, train smarter
  2. Success is a decision
  3. Plan the work
  4. Work the plan
  5. Be in position to be in position
  6. Nobody cares what you want, they care what you do
  7. Hang out with & watch the pros
  8. If you are not getting better, you’re getting worse.

I recommend you read Colleen’s post to get the full content of her comparisons.