Give Product Marketers Better Tech Tools
If you give Product Marketing better tools they will help Sales win more deals. It is really shameful in today’s age how underdeveloped and non-integrated Product Marketing tools really are. Companies are losing deals everyday as a result. Here is the basic logic:
- A sales person who has better customer Value Intelligence than their competitor has a better chance of winning.
- The backbone of Value Intelligence is the threading of: Customer Challenge ⇒ What the Customer Gets from You to Solve the Challenge ⇒ How You are Differentiated from the Next Best Alternative ⇒ Who Cares at the Customer ⇒ What are the Customer Metrics and Financial Outcomes that result. In many circles this Value Intelligence is referred to as a Value Proposition.
- “Someone” within a company is in charge of getting this Value Intelligence into the hands of Sellers. Product Marketing is most commonly the “someone” but the role does goes by different names.
- And here is the problem: the tools Product Marketers use to manage this critical Value Intelligence are underdeveloped, not connected and thoroughly inadequate. To cut through it, Product Marketers are using Crappy Tools.
The result is that sellers use whatever they can get their hands on or make up their own Value Intelligence. This actually should be some sort of financial crime given the amount of money that goes into building products and services and taking them to market.
Product Marketers Have Crappy Tools
The challenge for Product Marketing is they have no digitally enabled place to manage Value Intelligence. Pause for a moment and think about your own organization, where does this information get created? Probably in a Word doc, Excel or PPT. It may be the Word docs then get sent to an awesome content management system. But that does little for the Product Marketer as they are still stuck managing a source doc in Word, PPT or Excel. And so these problems result:
- Next to impossible to manage the Value Intelligence at a level of granularity below the generic offering. The result is that sellers see the Intelligence as too vanilla and not applicable to their customer situation.
- Ten Product Marketers will create and deliver the Intelligence ten different ways. The sellers experience little consistency and are confused.
- Versions are rampant, there is no real source of truth which results in sellers wasting time searching and using versions that may or may not represent the company’s best thinking.
- The concept of quantified customer outcomes is in an obscure spreadsheet a handful of people understand and no one is willing to put in front of an actual customer.
- Crazy hard to connect the qualitative story to quantitative customer outcomes in a manner sellers can communicate.
What Kind of Tools Do Product Marketers Need
To get started on this journey here are a few requirements to consider:
- A Place for Product Marketing: Embrace a platform that promotes the Product Marketers workflow and integrates their work into the critical digital threading of the business.
- Structure: Decide on your list of Value Intelligence. Focus on those elements that are dynamic or change from one segment to the next.
- Quantified Customer Outcomes: Connect tangible customer outcomes that sellers will understand. This is an area where technology can hold a truly special place by providing reusable customer metrics, calculators, and inputs.
- Connect it to Sellers: Get the Product Marketing work into the hands of sales thru CRM integration or wherever the sellers digitally live. Give Sellers the ability to customize and connect Value Intelligence into their Deal streams.
Win Rates Improved
This is what we mean by enabling Product Marketing. And here’s why win rates improve.
- The Product Marketer is now able to manage the Value Intelligence at an appropriate customer segment or even persona level. Now when the sellers access the info it is relevant.
- Sellers are provided with customer metrics and customer outcomes in easy to understand value trees that visually explain how their company’s product or services impacts those metrics.
- The qualitative stories and the quantitative customer outcomes are linked together with customer challenges. In this way the Sellers have, at their fingertips, a source-of-truth that threads together customer challenges, their company’s solutions and potential quantified customer outcomes.
- The Product Marketers are producing Value Intelligence that carries a consistent structure across the organization. Sellers learn what to expect and how to use it. Furthermore since it is consistent the sellers can provide improvement feedback which is impossible for Value Intelligence that lacks structure.
- There are no versions coming from Product Marketing. Just the source of truth on what the organization believes is the best Value Intelligence sellers should be using.
Win Rates are a Hot Button but there are More Benefits
Enabling Product Marketers and connecting digital Value Intelligence to Sellers to improve Win Rates is a big deal. But this is not the only benefit. This digital Value Intelligence can now also be better connected to Marketing Campaigns, Website Content, New Product Development, Strategy and Pricing. For companies that deploy Key Account Management strategies the Value Intelligence can be threaded thru to customer plans and customized down to specific customer levels.
Where Do Our Insights Come From
We provide SaaS products and services to a growing list of progressive B2B companies. Just like our customers, our insights come from collaborating with many companies across a spectrum of industry situations. In our case we get to experience thousands of users working to improve how they produce, manage and deliver Value Intelligence to their sellers. Their ideas are our innovation source for what continues to be a rich arena for improvement.
Product Marketing is One of the Last Underdeveloped Leverage Points for Sales and Marketing Technology
Enabling Product Marketing and the resulting digitization of Value Intelligence is genuinely an underdeveloped arena and is one of those few big levers that remains to be pulled to improve win rates, margins and profits. To learn more about how we are changing this, visit valkre.com
