I have been helping a small company get a strategic content generation service launched as part of my product management consulting lately and, in doing so, have stumbled on the theories of Content Marketing.   It is an interesting, fast-growing side-effect of Web 2.0 – now that users are generating content, companies have to begin generating their own quality, relevant, customer-focused content to keep themselves competitive.

I think that it is going to have some significant effects on the role and duties of Product Managers in the future, so I’m going to share my thoughts on the matter.

In order to fully understand the nuances of Content Marketing, I recommend reading the work of Joe Pulizzi and David Meerman Scott, but let me provide a limited definition for our discussion.  Content Marketing is basically the production and distribution of content for customer generation, retention and attention.  However there is a twist – customers don’t want to read endless ramblings about your product.  Rather, they want to read content focused on their business problems and opportunities.  They don’t want sales pitches for your product; they want solutions for their problems, regardless as to whether or not they have anything to do with your product.

Stop and think about that for a second.  They really don’t want to hear about you, your company or your product. They get enough of that through ads, glossies and presentations. Instead, they want to hear about themselves and their business landscape.  Understand this concept and act on it and you can become their “Trusted Advisor” which gives you an “in” that you can leverage to get your product exposure.  Ignore it and you very well may be relegated to an also-ran.

Achieving the “Trusted Advisor” status has significant benefits with both current and potential customers.   Once your company becomes a trusted advisor to your current customers, they will be much more interested in interacting with you and may give you first access to business problems that they are having.  Interestingly, it may be actually more powerful to have trusted advisor status with your potential customers because you will have less work to do for lead generation and credibility establishment.  Your customer will seek you out (and actually be able to find you on search engine) and your established credibility means that sales will have less work to close the first deal.

Okay, great lesson for a marketer, but as a Product Manager I really don’t care…

My friend, you have never been so wrong.  Marketers understand the market, but Product Managers understand the customer and their day to day trials and tribulations. Product Managers are the only ones close enough to the customers to be able to produce content that the customers are actually going read.  Like it or not, you need to be the one generating the content used in the content marketing strategy.  You need to be the one who produces the article on the struggles of implementing CRM experienced by your specific market segment, even though your company doesn’t provide a CRM system.  Or how changing government regulations are causing billing problems for your market segment, even though your product portfolio provides unrelated automation for their warehouses.

You understand their business, their strategies, their problems and their needs inside and out, so you are one of the few individuals in your organization with sufficient insight to develop the right content to become their trusted advisor.  If your company wants to leverage implement Content Marketing, add content generation to your list of duties – fresh, relevant, quality content just became your newest product feature. As with any feature that a product manager develops, you will be responsible for coordinating the activity and ensuring the quality and relevancy.  Writers can be hired and sales can help you produce content ideas, but overall this is going to be your baby.

In an earlier post, I advocated that marketers design their marketing launch plans to better serve the sales cycle process. I thought I should provide a few examples about how to achieve that objective.

There are many sales methodologies out there, and every sale situation is different. However, sales cycle processes typically include at least four phases: screening, evaluation, decision-making and procurement. Let’s look at each of them individually to see how marketers can best serve each phase:

Screening

Account managers must evaluate a large number of leads. During that phase, they have a lot on their plate: they must rapidly assess whether or not your product can meet the business needs of the customer, as well as identify the key individuals who participate in the decision. They must ask themselves questions such as: are they serious about making a purchase? Do they have a budget? Finally, the account manager must understand if the competition has already shaped the opinion of the buyer, or if there is an opportunity for your company to “condition” prospects, so that they see all competitors through the prism of your product and your company. With all this information, account managers must decide, along with their management, if the account is worth pursuing. Needless to say they must also sufficiently interest the prospect in the product to motivate them to move to the next phase.

What tools do marketing managers provide to support the account managers?

Of course the success stories, case studies, testimonials and white papers are crucial, if their content directly supports progress in the sales cycle. Does your material answer the questions typically asked by prospects when they first learn about your product?

Sales VPs have sometimes asked me for an “ice-breaker” presentation with just 4-5 high-impact slides. That presentation helps any account manager position your product, tell the story about what your product does, how it does it, and how it resolves the customer’s business need. A 20-minute web conference discussion going over these slides as the prospect presents their business pain points can be a real time-saver for both the account manager and the prospect.

Evaluation

Once the best prospects are identified and a real sales cycle is started, the sales force must take advantage of their first-mover status, get to the top of a “short list” of competitors or combat an incumbent during the evaluation phase. They must do it as efficiently as possible in order to avoid draining the company’s resources. How can Product Marketing help besides providing great positioning, a kick-ass demo, evaluation procedures, references and actionable competitive analysis?

It all depends on the type of evaluation your customer will need. However, no matter what type of evaluation method, the marketing manager can always gather statistics about what makes this evaluation phase a success or a failure, and ensure that the evaluation occurs in the most auspicious circumstances. If your product is complex, a longer evaluation should work in your favor. What features best solve the customer’s needs and are known to win evaluations? Also, framing the context of the evaluation to ensure that only the success criteria that favor your product are used is also key to the evaluation success. How do you gather these statistics? Look at past evaluations, talk with all parties involved, gather metrics and conduct win/loss analysis to complement your investigation.

Decision Making

During this phase, the account manager builds a coalition that will push the decision in the favor of your products. Enemies will fire bullets provided by the competition. Your account manager may not hear these bullets flying. Last minute requirements may emerge from left field as the prospect identifies new needs. The marketing manager must be ready for this phase by providing not only responses to competitive objections, but also eventually supplying competitive landmines as well. Return-on-investment (ROI) analysis that can justify the purchase will help as well.

Procurement

Your product was chosen, the money is available, so there is no time to get bogged down in legal entanglements and pricing discussions. Does the sales force understand and defend your product pricing, as well as the specific clauses of the contract that pertain to your product? What objections are raised and how are they best circumvented?  What alternate pricing methods can be used?  A pricing calculator, or better, an on-line pricing wizard that asks questions of the account manager will allow them to quickly run multiple scenarios while respecting pricing guidelines.

In conclusion, as a marketing manager, you have a better chance of demonstrating your value and increasing your popularity with the sales force if you ensure that you understand your company’s sales cycle process, and if each and every one of your collateral pieces is designed to support a specific phase of this process in order to help bring a sales cycle to close quickly and with less risk.

Does your collateral serve your sales cycle process?

Product marketers, and I mean by that product managers or product marketing managers, will tell you that most of the collateral they produce to support the sales force is underused or simply ignored. Product marketers looking at their marketing portal metrics know that most of their documents, brochures, data sheets or presentations are seldom downloaded.

On the other hand, the sales force argues that they can hardly use the material provided because the value proposition is too vague to truly apply to the unique needs of each customer, or that the presentations are long on gobbeldy-gook and short on details. Some formats such as data sheets or white papers may be more popular than presentations, flash demos or ROI analysis, but overall, account managers are usually dissatisfied with the material provided.

I say that product marketers have the duty to fully satisfy the sales force because, at the end of the day, it is the account manager who has the biggest opportunity to properly position the product with the customer. And these product marketers must do so by continuously optimizing their product launch around the company sales cycle process.

Surprisingly, the misalignment between product marketers and sales is widely accepted as a necessary evil and can remain unsolved for years, causing lost or delayed sales and frustration for all parties involved.

Why is that?  First sales and product management are separate organizations. As we all know, account managers are focused on closing deals this quarter, while product management works for the mid- to long-term. The second reason in my eyes is more insidious: when marketers plan for their launch, they fail to push for feedback from the sales force who is unable to communicate their needs anyway because account managers do not understand yet the special requirements of the new product. Therefore a launch plan is executed and never revisited.

It does not help that, sometimes, by the time the enterprise has understood the new sales process, the sales organization has adopted a new one.

Fortunately, some prospects can get their hands on your product material via your corporate website, but you should not assume prospects will actively dig to find your content. A direct sales force remains the best conduit to bring your material to the prospect. Also collaborative techniques that allow the sales force to comment on the usefulness of specific material will, if accepted, guide marketers toward greater success.

So what do account managers need?  In my opinion, they need to have any possible excuse for not pushing your product taken away from them.

Specifically they request collateral that directly supports their sales cycle process by reducing its duration and its risk. As we all know, the shorter the sales cycle, the fewer the chances of something bad happening before closing.

Marketers can truly become heroes by understanding and serving the sales cycle process. This idea is not new and deserves to be better explored by product marketers.

A highly developed sales cycle process is a proven method to codify and monitor the sales process, and has long been a way to ensure consistency during the sales experience for all prospects. It allows less-experienced account managers to apply the same successful techniques as their top-performing counterparts. For management, it is a well-accepted sales process refined over the years that increases the confidence level of the forecast.

In short it is a core company-wide process that must be supported by all sides of the organization, and it is troublesome that so few marketing managers do not view this process as a terrific opportunity to increase the impact of their collateral.

A focused organization demands that product marketing launch plans be designed to best serve its sales cycle process.

In a future post we will suggest some specific examples of how marketing managers can better support the sales cycle process.

How is your product launch supporting your sales force?