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Product Marketing in Agile Environments #2

July 5, 2017 //
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In a previous post I introduced a mini-series offering thoughts and experience on how to do product marketing in an environment where agile software development creates a sea of small releases rather than a desert with a few major milestones affording you time to circle the wagons.

My first thought is that you should stay true to the principles of what you’re trying to do. Faced with a barrage of product enhancements and releases of all sizes and shapes, you have to prioritise in terms of your audience, your audience segments, and their personas.

What is most important to them? What will attract their customers and keep them loyal? What does your enhancement or release do to help them help their customers? Answering these questions should drive what you devote to building a story about, and, perhaps more importantly, what you choose not to focus on.

When you wear this special lens which focuses on what their customers care about, you can develop messaging which helps your customer solve these problems or capitalise on these opportunities. It’s never about your products’ features and functions, unless they uniquely guide your customers to an understanding of how you can solve their real problem, which is sometimes not the problem they think they have.

Don’t get bogged down in the iterations of your solution, get bogged down in why your customers should care about where you’re heading.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Product Marketing in Agile Environments #1

July 3, 2017 //
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I thought it worthwhile to do a short series on product marketing in an agile environment.

Many product marketers are used to gearing up to perhaps 3 major releases a year. They have runway, they can plan with an end goal in mind, and they have time to align the resources and get the detail right.

When faced with an agile software development methodology, however, they find the traditional approach more difficult, since the cadence is now ‘sprints’ every two weeks and a release every three weeks, or something of that order. It requires a different approach.

First, however, some definitions are probably in order. By product marketing I mean the process of influencing customers to buy – and enabling sales people to sell – business-to-business products. Agile software development is the process of developing software in iterations and a bit at a time, allowing for flexibility and course correction on the way, rather than traditionally going from a start to a finish line in one big go. Noice that I’m not talking about agile marketing, which is essentially doing marketing activities in a way that borrows from agile software development.

What tends to happen to marketers not used to agile are the following symptoms:

  • You’re not sure what you’ll be getting in the end product
  • You’re not sure when you’ll be getting it (stifle your sniggers if you can make that argument for traditional development…)
  • Stuff happens and the product is out there before you’re ready or before you even know about it

What product marketers generally prefer is a small number of large meaty releases that they can get their teeth into. With agile you can sometimes feel you’re faced with a roadmap littered with lots of small releases, all vying for attention.

It’s against this background that I thought the subject warranted a mini-series. Stay tuned if this is your bag. If not, feel free to click away…

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Automating the Mess

May 24, 2017 //
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Software can help us improve our productivity and automate our operations, which in turn can feed better revenues and increase profitability. Many of us feel strongly that automating B2B processes are the way to go. Removing manual tasks helps people focus on the areas where they can really add value.

With new software coming in, it’s easy to forget that you’re not actually buying software, you’re buying change. This is where the problems start, because you need to manage change. It’s not something we humans are particularly good at it. It’s why 70% of change programs fail.

With any kind of change program, you also need to change your processes. Before you start the change, you need to audit, improve and tweak your processes. Then, with the new processes in place and properly embedded, you can bring in the new software, the change.

If you don’t do this, you’re simply spending money and automating the mess, the current mess you have.

And that’s probably worse than doing nothing at all.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Technology

The Lost Productivity of Negligible Roadworks

April 19, 2017 //
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When I’m in the UK, one of my colleagues and I travel to the office from different ends of a major motorway. I go north, he goes south, and then we reverse our journeys to go home at the end of the day.

His journey is invariably more snarled up than mine. A daily commute that regularly turns sour is a major source of mental ill-being in my opinion.

The other day I was returning to the office from an event and using the length of motorway my colleague uses, which is unusual for me. There was a stretch of roadworks on the motorway. It was about 20 miles in length and had a restricted speed limit of 50 miles an hour, with narrowed driving lanes and more traffic cones than you get grains of sand on a mile-wide beach.

The total amount of ‘road work’ activity on this 20-mile stretch, in mid-afternoon on a mid-week day? None. Not a single vehicle or worker. Zero activity.

This is the lost productivity of negligible roadworks. It’s the cumulative time lost for thousands of travellers, not to mention the increase in annoyance and frustration – increased enough for me to pen this blog 2 weeks after the fact – coming from having to drive at reduced speed for the guts of half an hour.

Who suffers? As usual, the individual. The private citizen, who is a customer of the infrastructure by virtue of having paid their road tax, and a bunch of other taxes besides.

 

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Categories Customers, General, Planning

Finish!

April 14, 2017 //
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How many new things, initiatives, projects, behaviours have you started and abandoned? How many worthy departures without a destination?

All of us have things we started and didn’t get finished. We left it and it went to waste, or it became overgrown or out of date and we couldn’t re-use, regenerate or recycle it.

We might have learned something, and that’s good, but we’ve lost something too. Time, for sure, our nerve maybe, something else.

There’s a cure for this. Finish! Finish something! Get it done! Start small, with a small project you know you can complete if you re-prioritise and apply yourself. Then finish something else small, then something else after that.

Get that finishing feeling. Be a finisher, a closer.

Winners don’t always finish first, but they do finish.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Overselling vs Underselling

April 12, 2017 //
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Are you an overseller or an underseller? Is your default position overselling or underselling? I’m talking about either in a sales or a non-sales environment.

I’m generalising now, but I find that business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions are generally overselling.

‘Your table will be ready in a few minutes.’

‘I’ll have that fixed for you in a couple of moments.’

‘She should be back to you in a day or 2.’

It’s vague, intimate, approximate, and unreliable. The stakes aren’t too high, that’s why.

Business-to-business (B2B), however, is different, or should be. You want to under-promise, and undersell, so that you can overdeliver, and delight, your much-higher-stakes customer.

You find people are oversellers and undersellers too. Me, I’m always trying to be underselling. I try not to overpromise. I try to deliver early. I try to deliver more. Other people are not undersellers:

‘I’ll be back to the car in a couple of minutes.’

‘I’ll meet you there at midday.’

I’ll have it for you tomorrow.’

If you sell the dream, and the dream doesn’t appear when it should, you create disappointment, a phantom version of what you promised. When you let someone down, even in a microscopically small way, you create a microscopically small phantom.

The question is: do you care?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Another View

April 5, 2017 //
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If you’re in an industry where you’re creating, writing or building something yourself, and it’s pretty much a lone pursuit, then you can be super productive and get through a lot. No interruptions, no challenges of collaboration around communication, preferences, priorities and preferred ways of working.

Then again, there’s one thing that will benefit your output.

Another view.

No matter how good you think something else is, it will always benefit from another view. If it’s someone whom you respect and whose opinion and experience you value, then they’re bound to bring up something you hadn’t considered. It’s someone whose opinion you don’t respect, then it’s still valuable. You can choose to ignore it.

Of course, this works well when you’re showing something in a fairly developed stage and your second opinion is not having to make too much of a logical or creative leap to see where you’re going with it.

The view of another gives you a different perspective on what you’re trying to do. And getting your head away from your own perspective and towards the perspective of your customer, client, audience or dearly beloved is always a good thing.

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Categories Communication, Marketing, Planning

Get Into It

April 3, 2017 //
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Most of us procrastinate to some degree. Whether it’s a big work project, a domestic chore or a niggling thing we need to get done, we find reasons to put it off.

We’ll start it at the top of the hour, we tell ourselves, or maybe the next day, because we won’t get it done today, even though we often don’t know how long it will take. That new fitness, diet or health regime, we’ll get that rolling Monday, or perhaps the first of the month. You know, make a clean start and all that.

And then that imposed deadline comes and goes and the tiny little switch that blocks out the feeling of serenity kicks in.

I think I know the antidote to procrastination. Get into it. Just get into it!

Once you get into it, you’re fine. You’re always fine. It’s usually not as bad or as time-consuming as you imagined it would be. Thinking about the thing grew in your head until it was bigger than the thing itself.

Make a start. Get into it. Dip in and see what’s involved, see what bits you can break off and get done. And then you’re away.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Work Back

March 24, 2017 //
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You’re busy. Super busy. We get that, we all are, or most of us anyway. You work in a business large enough where there are teams, cross-department projects, interdependencies, contingencies, the usual array of complex, human interactions.

You have a full plate of things to do, stuff is coming at coming at you from all sides, and is continuing to do so. Some of it can’t be both urgent and important. You simply can’t get to it all, can you?

Although it’s tempting to put the blinkers on and focus on one thing at a time, you can’t let people down and you can’t leave everything until the last minute, or it won’t get done. So what do you do?

2 things. First, you need to quickly triage every project in which you have a part to play, or where you need something to happen, or where people are relying on you for something. Second, you need to work back.

Yes, work back. Think about the end point, then figure out how long it’s going to take to get to the end point, then work back and figure out when you need to start something, or ask someone to start something. It’s no use putting off the creation of an important piece of collateral for an event until 2 days before the event. It probably takes a week to produce this kind of thing, so delegate it out and brief somebody now, so that they’ve the time to get it done for you. Failing to work back means that you have to ask someone to do the impossible, to pull something out of the fire for you because you didn’t triage – or quick plan – properly.

Get into the knack of working back. It will help you go forward.

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Categories Communication, General, Planning

Rarely What You Expect

February 22, 2017 //
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Things in business or life rarely turn out exactly as you thought they would. They’re rarely what you expect.

The other day I was working on a customer project that relied on two third party companies for help. My experiences of dealing with the two companies, and the opinions I formed about them, led me to the following conclusion. One company – let’s call it company A – was going to help me out and it was going to be a fruitful exercise. The other – which you’ve probably guessed is company B – probably wasn’t going to oblige too much.

As it turned out I was completely, 180 degrees, wrong. A didn’t go anywhere and B was superb.

It reminded me that even though you can go into things with a positive frame of mind, hoping that all engagements will work out for you, you can often get your assumptions wrong. While it’s great to act on a hunch in the absence of anything solid to go on, we have to check our facts where possible, speak to people and see things through. I’m sure there have been many times when I’ve said to myself, ‘why didn’t I get to this before, why didn’t I speak to them sooner?’ Is that true for you too? If so, it’s probably because things are rarely what you expect.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales
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