Pragmatic Marketing’s Process for Effective Product Marketing

Next Monday, I’ll begin a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules. To place those posts in context, I wanted to spend a bit of time looking at their process for building a successful go-to-market-strategy for technology products. As they lay it out, the process elements (in flow order) are:

1. Gather
2. Focus
3. Assess
4. Build
5. Execute
6. Measure & Improve

GATHER

Market-driven is one of Pragmatic Marketing’s mantras, and as part of their first step, the product marketer assembles product and market data, and collects information on the different audiences for their product. These audience profiles will enable the marketer to refine messages (and content) suited to each specific audience - essential where and when there are multiple audiences involved in a sale, as is invariably the case with large-scale B2B technology sales. Another part of the Gather process is “Management Goals”. This often forgotten step is essential to both crafting the overall marketing strategy AND, frankly, to managing management expectations about what they can reasonably and realistically hope to achieve from a product.

Tying your product’s goals to management’s goals will help ensure that your product is a player, an important element in the corporate strategy, not a marginalized, side-item that can easily be end-of-lifed.

FOCUS

Here’s where the product marketer starts to home in on the Target Audiences and Segmentation, and on the Messaging & Programs Strategy. What are all of the target audiences - verticals and/or size of business and/or buyers within those verticals and businesses. You may not have the budget to go after all of these different types of audiences, but the more precisely you think them through, the more precisely you’ll be able to craft your messages and programs to appeal to them. It will definitely steer you clear of $$$ sinkholes on the programs side. If you know that your audience watches the History Channel, you’ve got a cheaper ad buy than for the nightly news on a major network.

ASSESS

Well, I don’t know if I’m 100% on board with the word “assess” here for the Selling & Buying Process, and for Marketing Assets & Liabilities, but - what the heck? - is “lay out” any better? Not really. Anyway, laying out the selling & buying process, step by step, will help you when it comes to developing the sales tools your need, and for designing your program flow/marketing mix. Too often - especially in small companies - product marketers lump everything they’ve got together, tie it with a bow, and hand it off to sales who (without even looking) presents it to the prospect. Not only have you likely given someone more than they can assimilate at once, but you’ve also run out of ammunition you’ll be needing later. You’ve got to pace yourself, and knowing the sales and purchase process will help you do so.

As for Marketing Assets & Liabilities: it’s always useful to know where things stand, and this knowledge can - just like knowing the sales process - help you figure out what sales tools and programs you’re going to need. Think very broadly when it comes to your Marketing Assets & Liabilities, by the way. Your stock market performance, CEO’s personality, cherished customer - let’s face it, they can be either, and as marketers we have to be able to use - or excuse - what we’ve been given to deal with. I once worked for a company that made some headway about one of our engineers having been named “Sexiest Geek Alive.” It was fun, gave us a bit of personality, and gave us an opportunity to highlight just how brainy our geeks were.

BUILD

Having Gathered, Focused, and Assessed, you’re now ready to start making things happen. As a product marketer, the creation of Web Content and Sales Tools has always been sheer delight. (I’m serious!) I just love coming up with just the right words to express what our products are, what they do, and what they do for our customers. And I love developing sales tools - most of them, anyway. (I’m not so wild about ROI calculators and price lists, but I do love the annotated sales presentation, the buyer profiles, case studies, white papers, and all that other fun stuff). Remember: this step will be easier - and a lot more effective - if you’ve put in solid time and effort on steps one through three.

EXECUTE

Rubber, meet road. Now you’re moving the product into the Sales Channels, hopefully armed with the handy-dandy tools you’ve built. Here’s where you’re working with marketing communications, providing guidance and input into awareness-building and lead-generation programs, maintaining an oversight role to make sure that the positioning you’ve so carefully developed stays intact.

I worked for one large company that was in highly public financial difficulties. Our stock had been de-listed, we were losing money at a rapid and astronomical clip, and having precision-timed quarterly lay-offs. In this environment, I must say I was shocked to see an ad appeared touting our financial stability. I called the advertising person and pointed out that this wasn’t exactly one of our messages. Her response? It was the number one concern among our prospects. That may well have been the case, but our saying that we were financially stable didn’t exactly make it so….

Two elements that Pragmatic Marketing calls out here - Revenue Growth and Customer Retention - are two things that product marketing needs to keep an eye on, and I’d place special emphasis on Customer Retention, since it’s easier and cheaper to market and sell to someone who already knows (and maybe even loves) you than it is to find new customers. Attention must be paid: don’t let customers slip away!

MEASURE & IMPROVE

There’s a lot of emphasis on marketing measurement these days, and, frankly, it can drive you nuts. But, let’s face it, the surest way to ensure that marketing budgets and heads don’t get cut is to be able to demonstrate marketing’s effectiveness. Under this element, the Pragmatic folks start off with something they call “Impact on Business Metrics”. I’m pretty sure that they mean internal here, and it will often be the case that you’ll have to do some “post hoc ergo propter hoc” shuffling to connect what you’re doing to how the business is doing, other than by pointing to new customers and growing revenue. (As if that isn’t enough!) But we all know that sometimes it’s hard to directly tie marketing activities to “real” numbers: sales can always claim they found the lead no thanks to you, etc. etc. This can be tricky, but marketing shouldn’t be shy about taking credit - and if you have numbers to back you up, not just anecdotal evidence, you’ll be better off come budget time.

(I’ll also put in a plug for external “Impact on Business Metrics” here. You should always be working with your customers to build the case for impact your product is having on the customer’s business. Yes, I know that a lot of ROI  proving efforts are hooey, but I also know that customers love it if you can help them tie use of your product to their results. (They’ll look smart for buying from you.) And prospects often demand this information.)

Other things included under this section are Sales Velocity - are your marketing efforts speeding up the sales cycle? There’s a good “impact on business metric” for you!; and Return on Marketing Assets. Again, anything that can demonstrate that marketing dollars are being well spent will help guarantee that you’ll keep getting those dollars to spend and that, you, personally will be able to keep spending them.

Finally, Pragmatic Marketing ends with a call for looking at Product Profitability. We all, of course, love this idea, but when it gets right down to it, I have NEVER worked in a company - other than those with only one product, where there was no place to hide - that had the systems and processes in place so that they could truly and with any precision whatsoever determine whether a product was profitable. Too much time entirely spent on grousing about allocations, too much time threatening to “do without” any of those costly corporate overhead resources….I know that there are companies where it is, in fact, possible to figure out if your product is profitable. Just the luck of the draw, but my experience has been such that I never really worked in one.

But a girl can hope, can’t she?

Anyway, that’s my intro to the Pragmatic Marketing Rules on Effective Product Marketing. Episode One coming up next Monday.

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