Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Your prospective customer has conquered the hurdle of internally selling your product, and now they have it — a shrinkwrapped CD or a download URL.   But there’s still a bit step between that and getting it installed.

In your company, the people who are building your product are people who could just pop open a console window and install it themselves.  The people product managing your product are still perhaps only one step removed from that process (“Hey Michael, can you install this thing?”  “Sure.”)

But the people buying and using your product may have relatively little power over how and when software gets installed/deployed.  And, certainly, if your product breaks something, they’re not the first people who’ll get the blame.  That will land on the shoulders of their coworkers in engineering or IT.

So, understandably, these coworkers aren’t going to be in a huge hurry to install your product.

It’s usually not even a conscious thing – these engineers aren’t cackling with glee trying to sabotage you and your product sale.  (Well, maybe some are.) They just know they need to have certain bits of information before they feel comfortable installing any bit of code or software.  And if you don’t make those bits of information readily obvious, they’ll say “when I have some free time I’ll read up on it and then figure out when we can deploy it.”

That time spent “reading up on it and figuring out what to do” doesn’t come cheap!  One hour of an engineer’s “thinking about it” time may be nearly as expensive as your whole product!

Here’s what you do instead:

• Talk to an early customer (and their engineer) about the installation process.  Ask what questions came up, what delayed them, what they had to stop and think about.
• If possible, ask to watch someone install your product, or be on the phone with them, listening as they walk through the process.  This allows you to see for yourself the places where they hesitate, or ask a question, or start flipping to another tab to read documentation.
• For each question or hesitation point, figure out the information that would’ve made that go more smoothly.  Ask yourself if there’s any way you could make this faster or require fewer steps.
• Figure out how long installation takes (if multiple steps are involved, figure out an approximate time breakdown per step).  If you don’t provide this information, customers will almost certainly assume it takes longer.  If a 4-step process took one of your customers 28 minutes, don’t you want everyone to know that versus assuming it’s an all-day project?

When you do a good job of this, you’re improving your overall product solution and making it faster (and cheaper) for your customer to get the value you promised them.  When you don’t do a good job of this, you get customers who keep postponing purchases (or purchase and keep postponing installation, which earns you some revenues but not a satisfied customer.)

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Cost in dollars is not the only cost of your product.

In fact, unless you’re talking to bootstrapped startups, it’s probably the cheapest in a series of costs.

This is part one in a series: the cost of internally selling your solution.

As I mentioned last week, your primary stakeholder is not the only person involved in buying, installing, and using your product or service.  In many cases, though, they are the only person you get to talk to.

Last week I had a Skype conversation with a prospective customer.  He was very excited to use our product; so much so that he’d already:

• had one meeting with the boss
• signed up for a free account and created a couple test questions
• was scheduled to propose us as a solution in a 10-person conference call to try and get approvals to try it out
• then was going to report on results and have another meeting.

All this for a $29/month service which calls you to copy and paste 3 lines of javascript onto a web template.

Even by the most conservative estimates, this company has already spent more than the equivalent of a years’ worth of subscription fees on just trying to convince people to try us.

We have to make this particular cost cheaper.

Here’s how I think of it: your marketing gets you noticed.  It gets that primary stakeholder / your internal champion excited.  But it doesn’t convince the hidden customers.

For that, your internal champion needs to be able to explain what your ROI will be, make his developer comfortable that this won’t slow down the website or be a security risk, compare you with other vendors.  Being able to show off some eye-candy probably wouldn’t hurt, either.   He needs to sell your product internally.  That’s a lot of work!

I want to try and make that process easier for our internal champions.  So here’s what I’m working on right now.  It’s a bit of an experiment, based on working with larger companies in the past and seeing a lot of what was asked for in RFPs.

We’re going to add a downloadable zip file with the following:

• Screenshots – lots of them. Full-size (if you have a text-heavy product, you should never shrink your screenshots – they’ll just look blurry and crappy).
• Customer success stories. (probably will be shorter format than ‘traditional’ case studies just because I can turn those around faster)
• The long bullet-pointed list of features.
• Technical specs.
• Benefits comparison matrix.

This is not exciting marketing content.  I wouldn’t kick anything off our homepage to accommodate this stuff, because it’s not sexy.  What it is, is highly practical.  For someone who has to put together a PowerPoint deck to propose us as a solution, hopefully it’ll shave 2-3 hours off their task.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

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Much like your desk at work, your online personal brand gets cluttered and dingy over time.

You can’t find things when you need them.  Little funny trivial things detract from your serious work.   And after a while, people look at it and start wondering if you’re actually the same person that they heard was so smart and productive  (maybe it was someone else with the same name?).

This is where I’m going to stand up and say, yes, my personal brand needs de-cluttering.  And by blogging about it, shame myself into actually tackling this list.

If you work in the online space, ever plan on getting another job in the future, getting another speaking gig, or recruiting a team, these probably apply to you.

Most have been broken down into GTD-friendly chunks so you can tackle one each time you have a few spare minutes.  (It’s like a New Year’s resolution, except in October, when you might actually stick with it!)

General purpose:

• Clearly describe current job on LinkedIn profile and make sure you have links to company and/or products you work on.
• If a colleague were to recommend you, what would you want her/him to say?  Make sure that’s what your LinkedIn summary says.
• Re-order personal business cards.   (Remember, the primary purpose of business cards these days is to remind the person to Google you, and remind them why they should care enough to Google you.  More ‘elevator pitch’, less ‘job title and contact info’.)
• Make sure any social media where you have a presence (blog, Twitter homepage, Quora profile, Slideshare, LinkedIn, etc.) are all sharing common visual elements and the same one-sentence description.
• Make sure any social media where you have a presence has your contact information (whatever channel you will actually answer.)
• Remove publicly-accessible resume.  (unless you are actively job-hunting, there is little benefit to having this, and unethical recruiters will download resumes and present them to companies without your permission.)

Blog:

• Add good search feature (WordPress built-in search is terrible; if you’re relying on that I guarantee you are annoying your readers).
• Add speaker bio page with description, links to Slideshare presentations, and availability.
• Add curated pages linking to the best posts on the topics you care most about (improving user experience, customer development).
• Find solution to regularly re-surface older blog posts – lots of good and still-relevant content from a year ago.
• Either figure out why FeedBurner is broken or find another way to make RSS subscriptions easier.

Network:

• Scan LinkedIn contacts — if you don’t remember how you knew them, delete them.
• Put on your calendar to send one “keep in touch” email per week to someone you haven’t talked to in 6 months+.

(If you don’t have a blog, check out something like Flavors.me or About.me — because you do need a place to aggregate information about yourself.)

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First of all, a tiny rant: Marketing is, fundamentally, telling people that you can make their lives better because you have a solution to their problem.

There is lots of expensive, complicated, and sometimes fluffy stuff that can come into play later on, but I cringe when I hear entrepreneurs or product managers try to wash their hands of marketing altogether.  You can’t do it.  If you cannot communicate effectively why your product will help me, you don’t have a product.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s proceed.  You are probably making these mistakes.  I feel pretty confident in saying this, because I am making these mistakes even though I write about this stuff all the frickin’ time.  So this is a reminder to me and a kick in the pants to you to go do what you know you should be doing.

Not explaining how you’re different from your competitor / the leader in your space

Do you know who you should be differentiating yourself from? If you’re in a resegmented or new market, you may think you have no competition.  Wrong.  There is some alternative – if customers were not using your product, what would they be using?  If you don’t know, do some customer interviews.  (The answer may be a product that you think is totally different, or it may be a manual/offline solution.)

Are you effectively explaining how you’re different? Talk to 3 power-user and 3 semi-novice customers and ask them “how would you explain to a friend how our product is different from [competitor]?”   Are their responses factually accurate?  Are their responses similar?  If so, you’re doing a great job.  If your power users can explain the difference but your novice customers can’t, you need to find the explanations that work.

How I’m working on this right now: a couple of face-to-face customer interviews where I try to explain the difference between us and the competitor (over coffee, people are much more forgiving of you rambling).  I watch for the phrases where I see a light go off in their eyes, or where they are prompted to interject with a question, and I write those down.  After three face-to-face interviews, I have a list of concepts that I think are worth pursuing.

My next step will be to cull those into 2 or 3 sets of bullet points, and build a few quick-and-dirty landing pages.  I’ll show those to people and ask them if they understand how we’re different from our competitor.   Note that I haven’t mentioned A/B testing – in this case, I prefer to start with qualitative feedback, because the goal I’m after is understanding, not a numerical conversion.

Not using your customers’ own words to describe your benefits

Where are customers getting value from your product? It may not be where you expect.  Ask the people who are regular customers, paying customers, why they like your product.  The way they describe your benefits is the language that will resonate with other people.

When I was at Yodlee, we were pretty sure that the benefits of our personal financial management product were: being able to see all of your financial information in one place, being able to see where your money was going, being able to see if you were saving more than you were spending.  When we asked customers what they valued most, one answer rose to the top: “I feel like I have a sense of control over my money.”

We never would’ve come up with that – and personally, I thought it sounded too marketing-speak/new Age-y – but when we put that messaging on our splash pages, more visitors were interested enough to continue past the homepage, and a higher percentage converted despite a fairly long registration process.

How I’m working on this right now: Currently, doing some interviews with active customers; will be launching a mini-survey soon that only appears for logged-in, returning users, to ask them how they’d describe the value they’re getting from us.

Not asking customers to tell others about your product

There are two Mac apps that I paid for, use every day, and love.  (Curio, for sketching and brainstorming; and PTH Pasteboard, for remembering the last 100 things you ‘copied’)  Whenever the subject arises, I’ll eagerly recommend them – but people don’t ask that often.

These companies are missing out – because if they just asked, I would happily tweet about them, write a review, refer a friend.  But like most companies, they don’t ask.

Even if you think word-of-mouth recommendations aren’t going to bring in a huge number of new customers, there are two reasons why you should encourage happy customers to spread the word.  First, it brings good search engine juju – when people are searching for your company, don’t you want them to see happy tweets and reviews along with your corporate info?  Second, it reinforces customers’ happiness – once you recommend something, you actually feel more positively about it (thanks to a neat psychological effect called post-decision dissonance).

Something as simple as a link that says “Are you happy with [product]?  Tell your network!” that pre-fills a Twitter post would be easy to implement for just about any site.

Who has done this brilliantly: Dropbox.  Good article by @pricing on their referral and pricing process: http://www.pricingwire.com/home/2009/5/7/referral-and-pricing-lessons-from-dropbox-beta.html

How I’m working on this right now: Currently building a “refer a friend” workflow similar to Dropbox for our new KISSinsights product.  I’m also collecting customers’ descriptions of why they like the product and planning to whittle those down to “easily-retweetable” sound bites.

Did you learn something new from this blog post today?  Tell your network!

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