Pragmatic Marketing Rule #19

This is the nineteenth in a series of posts on the Practical Product Management rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketing Rule #19: Provide collateral, tools, and programs to support each step in the sales cycle.

This is one rule that, I’m afraid, is especially hard for small tech companies to observe. Short on staff (and likely short on budget), you really want everything you do to do double, triple, quadruple duty.

When I worked for a small software company, one of our principal lead-geno programs was a series of breakfast seminars. We used them as a way to encourage early cycle suspects, who might be reluctant to opt for a face-to-face sales call, to get off the dime. It worked reasonably well, giving the sales folks a reason to call (and a reason to focus), and we got a few customers out of them. (We were a really small company, with a really high priced product, so a few customers was a pretty big deal for us.)

But I always tried to turn the breakfast seminars into customer events while we were at it, inviting local customers to attend. On one level, this worked out well, as our customers were there to bear witness to the product’s benefits. But in order to make it worthwhile for them to haul themselves out of the office at 8 a.m. - other than for the free donut - I’d throw in a section on product futures.

This was interesting for our customers, but not all that fascinating for our early-on prospects. They needed to know what the product did now. We really weren’t yet at the stage with them when they cared very much about what was coming up. (I will confess that, until I just read through this rule, I never really thought that combining a customer “mini-user-group” event with a pure sales event maybe wasn’t the brightest thing I ever did. Live and learn.)

However, there’s nothing wrong with co-mingling an event for your customers and later-stage prospects. Maybe you have a lunch and learn where you bring in a hot shot (your own or a hired gun) who’s going to talk about something of generic interest (i.e., not 100% about your product or company). Make sure there’s time for a bit of networking at which you can introduce customers to prospects and let them take it from there. [Risk alert: if you invite a disgruntled customer, this can really backfire.]

If you have an Annual User Group, it may be helpful to invite ready-to-close prospects to it. This is a bit risky, as they’ll be seeing the kimono opened more fully than is the norm for someone who’s not yet in the fold, but it’s a great way of letting a prospect see your most enthusiastic customers at work and play.

Small or large company, there’s always the temptation to shoot out all the collateral at once. Take one of everything! Don’t we have a lot of neat stuff for you? And, of course, now that we don’t actually shoot out much of anything in actual physical copy, there’s a tendency to put it all up on the web site and let prospects download whatever they want. Unfortunately, those prospects may end up overwhelming themselves and/or not reading much of anything.

Even if you do go ahead and put your full collateral set up on the web, you still may want to pace your marketing and sales folks on what gets sent out as physical fulfillment (if you still do it) or via e-mail communications.

The early on prospect needs to know the basics about your product and company. Enough to help establish interest (theirs) and credibility (yours). Period. Dangle a case study in front of them. If they bite, great - you’ve moved them a little further along.

Thinly veiled sales pitch white papers  - you know, the ones that give a little “here’s how we see the industry” overview, followed by “here’s what a product needs to do in light of this,” followed by the “Surprise! Ain’t it remarkable that this is exactly what our product does!” section - can go out in the second wave, but you might want to reserve a really meaty white paper that really digs in on industry and/or tech trends, and down pedals the product stuff, for someone who’s demonstrated serious interest. (If you have such a white paper, you probably paid plenty for it and want to use it judiciously. This is a goodie. This is worth something. Serious prospects only!)

As you move forward in the sales cycle, you want to introduce tools and collateral that help the ROI cause, that explain implementation, etc. At this point, prospects have a need to know and need to use.

For heaven’s sake, don’t send out the whiz-bang PowerPoint until you’re scheduled to walk through it in a virtual meeting (maybe not even then - if you’re willing to spring for the conferencing service that let’s you show and tell, rather than going on the cheap and having to keep saying “We’re now on Slide x.” You can e-mail them the PPT after the virtual meeting.)

If you’re meeting in person, some people like to give presentation copies out before hand; others like to distribute them after the fact. I’m for giving them out after the fact, preferring to turn a presentation, wherever possible, into a two-way conversation, rather than a mutual slide read-long. And make sure that the give-away copy is annotated, so that someone who wasn’t at the presentation making notes, and is reading a slide that says:

• It’s big.
• It’s wonderful
• You’ll like it.

Can read the fine print and understand what point you’re trying to make.

How do you enforce the rule about tying collateral, tools, and events to the sales cycle?

Well, enforcement - as we know - is never easy.

But for starters, create a roadmap for yourself. Lay out the sales cycle. At each stage, list the collateral and tools that are appropriate, as well as the events that make sense.

You will very quickly find that you do not want or need to front-load everything. B2B technology sales do not tend to occur as one shot events. They take time, and during that time, you want to make sure that you have something more to say or do than have your sales folks on the phone asking, “Have you made your decision yet?”

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