Tag Archives: Product Management

How Do You Compete Against Free?

Several weeks ago, I attended Boston ProductCamp and discussed pricing with a group of product managers. One of the main points of our conversation was how best to compete against products offered for free. Companies have been managing this issue for years. Linux is free, yet Windows and Mac operating systems still exist. GIMP and Photoshop coexist today as well. Free offerings are part of the competitive landscape, so take this as a challenge to validate and accentuate the value you provide to customers. Here are some ways to compete with free:

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How to Charge More, Offer “Less” and Get Better Conversions

Last week, the popular photo-sharing site Flickr made headlines for increasing its photo storage to 1 terabyte per user – enough space to store 537,731 photos, by Flickr’s calculations. Flickr's competitors – many of which have offered unlimited storage (with minor restrictions) for years – might be wondering why Flickr got attention for offering an amount of storage that is technically less than what they provide. Remember when dial-up Internet ruled the world and AOL gave away millions of CDs offering free Internet access? Some CDs provided unlimited access for a trial period, usually 45 days. Others offered 1,000 hours free during the same trial period. The CDs offering 1,000 free hours were much more successful at converting signups and attracting new users than those offering unlimited access.

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Portfolio Marketing Is the Whole Enchilada

SiriusDecisions’ perspective is that the traditional catch-all term “product marketing” cannot encapsulate the go-to-market functional competency of a b-to-b company – the categorization is too narrow. Though product marketing is still an absolutely necessary role in the marketing ecosystem, the term doesn’t accurately describe the holistic high-level marketing competency required to bring a b-to-b organization’s portfolio to market. And bolting on “solution,” “segment” etc. within the “product marketing” category is not the right answer. How does this internal naming problem get solved? We recommend that “portfolio marketing” become the new umbrella functional categorization term representing all job roles focused on marketing segmentation/sizing, persona definition, content ideation, launch, sales enablement and go-to-market planning for all elements of an organization’s portfolio across products, services, industries, audiences and solutions.

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Respect Your Competition

Product managers and marketers are naturally competitive. They want their products to win in the marketplace, and they want to beat the competition. This trait is important to the success of a product manager or product marketer. However, it's important to balance support and bias toward your product with the realities of the marketplace. There's a difference between being a champion for your product and being blind to the market, customer needs and perceptions.

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Getting Back to the Basics

Sometimes we need to step back from the complexities of our b-to-b marketing day jobs to make a simple decision: what type of demand we are trying to create. The demand type of a product or service drives a number of fundamental marketing decisions – messaging, targeting, the offers you create, the tactics you use and more. Yet seemingly agreeable colleagues often disagree on which demand type matches their products or services. This disparity is dangerous to your ability to market effectively as a team. SiriusDecisions has identified three demand type categories.

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Summit 2013: Day 3 Recap

Summit 2013 finished big, with the unveiling of two new SiriusDecisions frameworks and presentations by two winners of the Return on Integration (ROI) Awards. The day’s events began with the Summit’s traditional highlight video showing the sights and sounds of the participants enjoying the event, including last night’s tour and dinner aboard the USS Midway.

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Summit 2013 Highlights: A Balanced Approach to Innovation Investment

“The best way for us to look at an organization’s strategy is to look at its budget,” said Jeff Lash, research director for SiriusDecisions’ Product Management service, in introducing the final presentation of Summit 2013. “56 percent of organizations we surveyed reported that more than half of their new offerings fail to meet financial and performance objectives,” Lash noted. “That’s an astounding number. So why does this happen? Because only 11 percent of organizations align their process for investing in new offerings with marketing and sales budgets.”

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Summit 2013 Highlights: The Unified Integration Model for Marketing, Sales and Product Functions

When polled about the state of integration among b-to-b product, sales and marketing functions within their organizations, 98 percent of Summit 2013 attendees agreed that at least one of those functions was not well integrated with the other two. Twenty-six percent of those polled said that product functions were not well integrated with sales and marketing, 11 percent said sales was not well integrated, 9 percent said marketing was out of sync, and 53 percent said their companies’ integration problems were generalized across all three functions. To address these issues, the SiriusDecisions Unified Integration Model was introduced today at Summit 2013 by Jay Gaines, vice president and group director of the b-to-b research firm.

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Do You Let Customers Set Prices?

Many product management and marketing leaders tell us that they carefully develop pricing according to business strategy, and that their pricing is guided by three requirements: the needs of the buyer, the value the offering delivers and profitability. But they fail to set strong pricing policies to ensure the fruits of the strategy are delivered. Without this policy, every transaction runs the risk of becoming an “exception,” and customers – not the organization – end up setting prices.

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Simplify Market Research by Framing Your Objectives as Questions

Understanding potential customers and their needs is one of the most important elements in developing a successful offering. Market research activities like customer interviews and observational research are great ways of understanding needs, problems and opportunities. However, before running out to start talking with buyers, put together a simple research plan. It doesn't need to be a complex or lengthy document – it can simply be one page that lists the research objectives, types of organizations to target, buyer and user personas to target, number of interviews needed and the focus areas of the research.

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