VALKRE | Value Creation

How Can Product Marketing Help Win Deals?

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:

1. A sales person who has better customer Value Intelligence than their competitor has a better chance of winning.
2. 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.
3. “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.
4. 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:

1. 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.
2. Structure: Decide on your list of Value Intelligence. Focus on those elements that are dynamic or change from one segment to the next.
3. 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.
4. 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

Convert Your Product Catalog into a Value Proposition Catalog

How many 50 page catalogs have you flipped through, filled with 1-page product descriptions focused on features that are expensive to create and are rarely updated? Probably more than you can count, and probably more than you cared to read through because the information truly wasn't useful. Even worse, why don't any of those offering documents sell the outcomes and benefits for a customer?

I'm currently working with a company, helping them take a customer-back perspective and organize what makes their offering great according to outcomes by customer segment and competitive situation. The intent is to provide a more useful 'catalog' that will have real impact on a customer's buying decision.

Here are the seven core activities you can do to make your offering catalog more customer centric:

Align on what customers buy, not what you sell. This nuance can kill customer engagement right from the start. Do customers want to buy a partner or a specific product? Maybe both? For example, a contractor using your products is more likely looking for a business partner. A railroad is probably looking for a product or service to improve their operation. Understand this and take an inventory.

Align on the competitive situations you find. For each of the things customers buy, identify relevant competitive situations. Competitors could be another company, a product substitute, customers doing it themselves, customers not doing anything, or upgrading from a specific solution. There could be one or more contexts to consider.

Align on the customer segments you serve. For each of the things customers buy, identify the relevant customer segments that matter to your business. Start simple and use a segmentation scheme that is already well known to your organization

Create a distinct list of your value propositions. A good value proposition will encompass those first three dimensions: what customers want to buy, competitive context, and customer segment. How many do you have? List them all out and start with the ones most critical to growing your business.

Define differentiated value propositions that connect product features to customer outcomes. For each value proposition, don't simply document a pithy elevator pitch. Instead, articulate a series of value stories that connect differentiating features to the people who care about it at the customer and to the outcome they should expect. You may end up with more than a few of these value stories. Rank them based on value to the customer, given the competitive context and customer segment. Bonus points for quantifying the value customers should expect for one or more of the value stories.

Complete the Marketing Strategy. Now it's time to bring in the rest of the marketing 101 information. What is the market size? Who are the competitors? What positioning? Branding considerations? Pricing / profitability? This information will be easier to communicate by starting with a value proposition rather than just the product.

Connect to the organization. Establish this work as a dynamic source of record for the organization. Sales, marketing communications, product management should all know where to access the most up-to-date information on the value proposition. You can't force people to become more customer centric but their use of the same common data on outcomes will push them in the right direction.

 

The above is just a quick outline for achieving a better product catalog that resonates with customers. If you want to learn more about the details, send us a message below and we'll be happy to share more of our experiences.

If Marketers Were World Cup Teams, Which One Would You Be?

There have been a number of BMA14 recaps sent out to attendees over the past couple weeks. We wanted to do something a little different with a World Cup themed quiz. So take a crack at it and find out how you would stack up as a World Cup team!

Recalling More than the 10%: My BMA Recap

Another great BMA conference is in the rearview mirror. It was an honor to be a sponsor and connect with some amazing marketers influencing where B2B is going.

But after every conference, I always feel a little bit of information overload. After all, there were 41 keynotes, fire starters, and panels that filled 36 hours of sessions and networking. And it was all compressed into 3 days.

One of the tidbits I did retain is that people recall only 10% of what was said 2 days afterwards. (Thanks, @TRiesterer, for imparting that knowledge). So to that end, I’ve combed through my notes and distilled all the brain fodder down to my top 5 insights from BMA14:

1. Run your business in 2014 and not from 1980's. Start using the tools of the year we live in: Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. Put out stuff that people want. Give first, don’t ask.
   
   As a corollary to the above, you have to be a certain kind of guy to get away with using 64 F bombs as an effective tool in a presentation. @garyvee is one of those guys.
2. Download the Run Pee app. If you help a customer, you can create a customer for life. We don’t need more tools, conversation or data. We need a prism through which to look at marketing and decide what makes sense.
   
3. Marketing’s NPS score with CEOs is a –6 (just to be clear, that’s a MINUS six).  Expectations are not being met. 61% of CEOs think their marketing organizations are as innovative as squirrels.  CEOs want to get involved with customer engagement and they want marketing to drive it.
   
4. A speech about electrical currents is way more marketable when set to musical tunes. While industrial musicals faded in the 1980s, creativity is always going to be in style. So reach customers and employees in ways that will inspire them.
5. Finally, avoid the hammock. Customers will remember very little of what happens in the middle of a presentation. You need to open HOT, close HOT, and figure out ways to spike engagement in the middle of a presentation by telling customers about an opportunity they didn't know they have. And associate your story with the right visual so that it will be 6 times more recallable.

 

What were other highlights of the BMA14 conference that you think are missing from this list? Let me know in the comments below. Otherwise, looking forward to engaging with you at your nearest BMA Connect2 conference in the Fall.

Selling Problems? Your Value Proposition May Be the Issue.

There’s thousands of enterprise cloud-based apps for businesses available on Google's Apps Marketplace, Salesforce's AppExchange, and Amazon's AWS Marketplace. When you look through Google's recently updated Apps Marketplace, you realize there’s technology to do pretty much any and every business task, ranging from apps for managing projects to apps for managing customer relationships to apps for managing money. But if you search through those marketplaces, can you find an app that helps companies manage their Value Propositions?

The answer to that question is no. Yet you'll find tons of apps for expense reporting!

Just stop for a moment and think about the fact there’s technology for something as banal as managing expenses. And then when you consider the amount of investment (time and money) on managing your travel and entertainment expenses — including the system you put those expenses in, routing them to the right people for approval, tracking of reimbursement, and billing back to your customers — you’ll understand why technology is used to manage expenses.

With the aforementioned use case in mind, you’ll appreciate why we at Valkre believe it is critical to use RENDER to manage your Value Proposition, which, for a company and its relationship with customers, is the most important growth asset in business. We’ve blogged here previously that a strong Value Proposition requires rigorous defining, along with an organizational commitment to continuous improvement and collaboration with customers. All of that can be done more effectively when technology is used to bring structure and speed in managing that work.

On December 11th the Institute for the Study of Business Markets is hosting a webinar on how GE is using RENDER to manage its Value Propositions with its customers. During the webinar, GE will share how RENDER enables their company to:

• Define Value Propositions. How you get Value Propositions out of powerpoint, word docs, and spreadsheets and into a dynamic system that ensures that sales people are equipped and selling at any given instant the latest, most compelling value proposition to customers
• Improve Value Propositions. How you manage initiatives that improve the value prop and ensure that the entire organization has visibility and accountability for executing those initiatives
• Collaborate with Customers on Value Propositions. How you link all of the value prop work to voice of customer to ensure you are on the path to solving challenges critical to the customer

To see this demonstration of the SaaS platform GE and Valkre are building and using to revolutionize how they manage Value Propositions in today’s fast paced customer world, register today for the ISBM webinar by clicking here.