Better Product Managers, and Product Management

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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