(This article is cross-posted as a guest post at onproductmanagement.net)
Do you work in product marketing? Have you ever tried to explain what you do, to someone who isn’t familiar with product development and management? Ever want to pull your hair out after the conversation? It probably goes like this:
(This article is cross-posted as a guest post at onproductmanagement.net)
As product marketing professionals, we are tasked by senior leadership with understanding the buyer persona and directing the creation of marketing materials that tout the benefits of our product to those specific personas, benefits that solve the buying problems of the market. We are tasked with understanding the voice of the customer. We are tasked with win/loss analysis, competitor analysis, branding and sales psychology. Strategic stuff. Big picture stuff. Important stuff that makes sales more efficient and ultimately brings revenue in the door.
In a recent blog post, Forrester CEO George Colony wrote that CEO’s want better sales forces. As the sales enablement arm of the organization, how do product marketing professionals, ensure that our sales team is effective and ready to sell our new products and have well designed sales tools aligned to the ever-changing sales cycle?
When we are orchestrating our launch, something we often don’t even think about, but is probably the most important launch element, is respecting our launch partners. Within each organization, we have different sets of partners, but universally without respect for the partner’s work effort and the time required to complete their tasks, we cannot drive a successful launch.
In this week’s #prodmgmttalk discussion, the topic was innovation in product management. One of the specific questions posed revolved around why innovation is so hard. It seems that it is difficult for many of us mere mortals to step out of our comfort zone and embrace change. Fear of failure leads us quickly down a negative path.
