Effective Product Marketing Rule #5

This is the fifth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #5: Focus on your sales process to anticipate the needs of the buyers and sales people.

For starters, I’ll ‘fess up that at points in my marketing career I’ve been as guilty as the next guy in creating all sorts of “stuff” without paying all that much attention to what the sales process was - and where we might use the “stuff” within that process. Thus, in the pre-PDF, print-based world of yore, I became adept at stuffing the corporate folder full of one of everything - brochures, data sheets, white papers, article reprints, customer profiles - and using it as fulfillment.

Someone comes by the booth during a trade show? Load ‘em up with a full collateral set, a demo disk, a CD-ROM, a DVD. After all, you don’t want to pack all this stuff up and send it back after the show’s over, do you? Swipe their badge, send them on their way, and, when you get back home, send them a full collateral set.

(And how many times have I roamed around a trade show, grabbing one of everything on the lit racks, only to come home and throw it directly in that bright blue recycle bin. Of course, I also helped myself to whatever tschotke they were giving out, so all was not lost…)

The problem with this “all or nothing” approach is that you exhaust your pile of goodies, kill trees, overwhelm (or bore) your buyer, and leave your sales folks empty handed when they need to move onto the next phase in the sales process, whether it’s moving a suspect to a prospect, or moving a prospect to a likely buyer, and a likely buyer to a buyer.

What you really need to do is work with your sales people so that you understand their process - and so that they, in turn, understand the marketing process. (For every folder I’ve personally larded up with one of everything, I’m quite certain there were 100 cases in which the sales guys did the same.) At each step in the way, make sure that there’s something that will anticipate the questions that your buyers will be asking and that will give your sales people an opportunity to contact and connect with their prospective buyer.

In the early, “getting to know you” stage, your prospective buyer will need to know something about your company (if you’re not MSFT or IBM), and something about your product(s). This can be accomplished with a brochure or data sheet that provides enough information to make it clear what you are and do; make the case that you’re a credible provider (especially if you’re not MSFT or IBM); and establish interest, if any.

Moving on, you might want to offer a non-sales-y white paper that talks about the market, and why there’s a need for product(s) like yours. This step is also a good point to provide a customer profile (or, absent that, some usage scenarios).

As things progress, you will need to provide data sheets, and as things progress even further, more technical information (bits/bytes/implementation) - some technical buyers never get enough of this.

Towards the end of the sales cycle you will need the things that will help close the deal - ROI information, more managerial-oriented information if a technical buyer needs to sell up in the organization.

There is, of course, nothing to prevent your buyers from helping themselves to everything they can get their hands on from your Web site. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to handle this. Some companies want to be totally transparent and lay most everything right out there with easy, no registration necessary access to it. Others let you have some information for free (brochures, datasheets), but require registration for more advanced materials (white papers, webinar replays, podcasts). I can’t imagine that there’s anyone out there who’d let you do a software download without registering, but some might let you go through the online demo without doing so.

You need to make a conscious decision about how much information you want to make available, and under what conditions. Some information you may want to hold in reserve. ROI calculators, third party content that you’ve paid for (e.g., reprints of analyst reports) are very useful reserve items.

In this post, I’ve focused on collateral, but there are obviously more tools in the marketing tool box than the written word: podcasts, webinars, breakfast seminars, user groups, trade shows, executive briefings, guru time (in which you bring out the techie guru to impress the prospects with your genius). And don’t forget to let your sales people know about new goodies: an article that just appeared, a favorable analyst report, a new customer win or success story, a general purpose article on the industry (yours or your prospect’s), a blog (yours or someone else’s) on a topic that might be of interest - this is the kind of material that can help move a sale along by giving your sales person a reason to contact a prospect.

The point is - while it’s harder and harder to do in the age of information ubiquity - that you never want to put your sales people in the position of following up for the first time with a prospect and having them ask the question, “Do you need any more information?” and risk that the answer will be “no”. That second, third, fourth, whatever call or e-mail in the process should all be around the theme of, “You might find this helpful….”

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