Archives for category: Marketing
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The First B2B Product Launch Process Step

January 27, 2016 //
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OK, so you’ve seen the signed-off roadmap, or heard about the launch, or perhaps you’re already involved in the earlier steps of the product management lifecycle. Regardless of your personal situation, the first step in the B2B product launch process is this – check your facts.

Sounds obvious doesn’t it? It is, but not everyone does it. Here are some facts you want to consider before anything else:

  • Who’s on the launch team? Who’s the executive sponsor? Who’ll work on the project day-to-day? Who’s project managing the launch? You need a good project manager with good communication skills to stay on track. If it’s you project managing it, great 🙂
  • What are the milestone dates? When will development be done? When will you alpha and / or beta the product? To whom? Work back from when you plan to GA (make the product Generally Available) and build in buffer at every stage
  • How much of the strategy is done? Have you sight of a business case document so you can understand the market analysis, objectives, pricing, positioning, features, benefits etc?
  • What other background documentation is there to help you build a picture? The more there is, the less you need to create, and the less time you need to make with people to interview them for the background, their insight and preferences
  • When’s the launch kick-off call? If one isn’t organised, apply pressure for it

Get armed with these facts and you’ve already won half the battle.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The 7-Step B2B Product Launch Process

January 25, 2016 //
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The product lifecycle can be a complicated beast and varies significantly within industries and regions. Not only that, the roles of people in an organisation who either contribute to or manage the product launch can differ quite markedly too. So, with that preamble done, am I drowning a whole series of process-forming posts before I’ve even started?

Not really, no. While job titles and jobs may vary, there are still some generalities and best practices that work for companies selling stuff – products or services – to other companies.

I see 7 broad stages to the B2B product launch process, and I’ll devote my usual post length – long enough to get your attention but not so long as to distract you from other priorities – to each one of them.

People have written 250-page books on managing the product launch. Then again, they’ve done the same for the B2B marketing process, sales cycle, and customer buying cycle, which are other B2B topics that I have addressed before with a total series length that wouldn’t stretch to a chapter.

But these aren’t text books. They’re the distilled experiences of mistakes I’ve made, lessons I’ve learned and the wisdom of people greater than I. I hope you enjoy them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Personalisation vs Context

January 22, 2016 //
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True personalisation?

True personalisation?

I got this in my Facebook stream the other day. I can’t deny it’s eye-catching. It’s clearly a clever bit of code that allows an advertiser to drop each FB user name into their image.

It’s personalisation of a sort, but is it really personalisation, or is it simply clever code? I suspect the latter.

Context marketing has been around for a while, and is now getting some major attention as marketers get more sophisticated and better at deciding what content they can serve up to whom, when, rather than sending everyone everything.

But this isn’t context marketing, although it’s definitely targeted to me. FB is a hugely growing channel for B2C ecommerce, but as far as I’m concerned, although I’m the right person, it’s not the right content for me and it’s not delivered at the right time.

I still like it though :-).

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Enough to be Dangerous

January 13, 2016 //
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Ah, it’s a terribly fine line sometimes. A coin toss if you will. A little knowledge can be all you need to get you started, get some forward momentum and learn as you go. Sometimes it’s all the time you have, otherwise you miss the boat.

Then again, it’s not coincidental that we use the phrase ‘enough to be dangerous’.

A couple of decades ago, a friend of a friend of mine went to live with a Spanish-speaking family to improve his basic language skills. In his first week there, they went out to dinner together. The daughter was 17. During the course of the conversation something was said to make her blush. He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know the Spanish for embarrassed so took a guess. Worse still, his effort – embarazada – means pregnant. Not good. The father went apoplectic and he had to leave the family shortly thereafter.

Knowing enough cuts both ways. Ask yourself this, do you feel lucky? 🙂

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Team Ethos

January 11, 2016 //
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A well organised, well prepared team will always beat a disorganised, unprepared team with a few stellar players. We’ve all seen it, from amateur teams all the way through to the elite professional levels. The world-beating teams are there because of their painstaking approach to preparation, strategy and execution, and having stellar players doesn’t hurt.

I was recently watching the BBC annual sports love-in called Sports Personality of the Year. It’s not really about personality as such, although you do get the odd winner with personality, like cyclist Bradley Wiggins a few years ago. Last year’s winner was tennis player Andy Murray, who freely admits he’s a touch short-changed on the charisma front and who gets tagged a lot with the d-words: dogged, dour, determined.

Except that Andy Murray beat out the other 11 finalists – who were all world champions and world number ones – to take the crown.  Andy is at the time of writing world number 2 but won no grand slams or the end of year bash last year. He won it principally because Great Britain won the Davis Cup for the first time in about a thousand years. As a side note, thank goodness it’s a Britain thing, because England would be in the bottom tier if the 3 nations competed separately.

The Great Britain team also won the team award as well.

A good team trumps good individuals. It’s the same in business, and especially in sales and marketing. All the more reason for us to stay focused on preparation, strategy and execution.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Workflow – Work Slow

January 6, 2016 //
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Sometimes, when you’re too busy to see the work for the trees, it’s difficult to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyse if you could be doing it better.

Process is so important to what we’re doing. You have to get the right steps in place and then make sure you’re doing the steps in the right order.

When I was much younger I was staying in my Uncle’s pub for a while and I was washing his car. After a few minutes he came out and said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I’m washing the wheels,’ I replied. You see, the wheels are the fiddly filthy bits that I wanted to get out of the way first.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but now the water’s filthy for washing everything else. Start with the windows and glass first, then go from the top of the car down to the bottom. And start again with clean water.’

Process. You have to get the order right, and you have to do the right things too.

Workflow, as the name suggests, is about the flow of work, the process you go through. If you don’t get the workflow as good as it can be, you work slow, or you work poorly.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Me in Engagement

January 4, 2016 //
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You hear the word ‘engagement’ all the time in business. ‘How will we engage on this deal?’ ‘We’ve got to get the customer engagement right,’ and so on.

It’s an unhelpful word to my mind. It’s not a customer-centric or friendly word. It’s all about ‘me’.

There’s a ‘me’ in engagement and it’s my view that the word makes us think on our terms and not on our customers’ terms. I don’t feel like I have the problem correctly framed nor the priorities right when I’m using the word engagement.

We engage our enemies in battle, because it’s about us and we want to win. We don’t engage (with) our customers, we want them to win.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Stay Positive

December 23, 2015 //
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In business and in life it’s important to listen to sporting leaders. Those at the top of their game tend to have a whole support system to help them be the best they can be, among which is usually the professional psychologist.

That’s why you always hear them saying things like ‘we’re taking it one game – or shot – at a time, we’re not getting ahead of ourselves, we’re staying in the moment, we’re staying positive.’ Being positive is a conscious, current thing.

These people understand the power of the human mind, and the things it can do when it’s harnessed in the right way. Why risk unleashing its negative forces when you can benefit from the positive forces, forces that affect in you in a good way?

Fear and safety have a lot to do with the negative side of the human spirit. All the more reason, then, to stay positive, look on the bright side, consider the upside and banish fear and comfortable mediocrity.

Stay positive. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

OSX EL Capitan and the Preview App

December 18, 2015 //
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Every organisation at some point gets too big and hulking, loses touch with what made it great and is forced into a radical rethink or imminent decline. Sometimes it’s a series of points that when added together tip the see-saw.

That moment has come, I think, for Apple with the release of its 2015 operating system, OSX El Capitan. As a company that competes on product leadership, it was never that great at staying close to customers. It got away with this because its stuff was so well designed, so intuitive and so damned beautiful. You didn’t need a manual.

El Capitan has been a bit different, though. Stuff hasn’t worked properly and fixes haven’t been forthcoming. Since I put EL Capitan on the machine that’s created this post, the default application for reading pdf documents – Preview – opens them as completely blank, most of the time.

Lots of us have complained via the discussion boards and so far, most unusually, no fix has been announced or even acknowledged. It’s not the only problem either.

Is Apple losing its touch? Or is it symbolic of the decline of laptops and computers in favour of mobile? After all, Apple is now a mobile phone company. Either way, there’s something rotten in the state of California.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Strategy

Accountability and Responsibility

December 11, 2015 //
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A long time ago I had a very able guy working for me in our marketing team. He was the only guy I had interviewed who took notes during the interview, which is what I used to do. It makes the interviewer feel like what you’re saying is worth preserving. It was important to the person who wanted to work for you, important enough for them to want to refer back to.

He used to talk about the perils of being saddled with a role or project that you were accountable for, but not responsible for.

Put simply, when you’re accountable but not responsible, you’re not in charge but you get the flak when something goes wrong. It’s all downside and no upside. You don’t have control. When the project goes poorly you’re the one that gets blamed. When it goes well, the person responsible takes the plaudits.

This is a tough situation, and it usually happens when you’re in an organisation that tends to be more closed than open, more political than altruistic. The corporate culture is not quite right.

My advice in this situation is to draw the attention to your superior of the various outcome probabilities, including failure, beforehand, and why you’re not in a position to influence it otherwise. Then your boss has the information and they have to make a decision. And the decision they make will tell you a lot about your future there.

The guy I mentioned went on to do great things. Not surprising, really.

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Categories General, Marketing, Strategy
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