Let’s net this out! Your product has two goals: Make customers measurably better at specific job tasks and workflows that have strategic value to their organization. Create long-term value for your organization in terms of revenue, market share, wallet share and customer retention. Goal #2 can’t be met without accomplishing…

In the enterprise B2B space, it’s hard to imagine a world where discovery calls and sales demos aren’t done via web meeting. If you’re in a pre-sales role, picture this…3–4 cities a week, all the hotels, planes, trains and automobiles you can take, one demo a day, and late night…

As a salesperson, it gets beat into your head in every pipeline review, every team meeting and every sales training session. Sell value, not features! Then comes demo day on your next opportunity and you’ve got the value pitch all teed up, except your audience wants to talk product. It’s…

The sales playbook is a double-edged sword. Salespeople ask product marketing for a lot of content, most of which never gets used. If you’re a salesperson, the most uncomfortable situation is when you don’t have an answer to a buyer’s question. In most cases, salespeople think it’s not OK to…

The leadership side of product management reaches its pinnacle when you have the complete trust of executives, marketing, sales, engineering, finance, customer success, and customers. The real question is, how do you get there? Product management leadership comes in two flavors. As an individual contributor, i.e., product manager. As a…

The value of your product isn’t what the product does. It’s what the product does for the customer. Think situations and outcomes. Here’s a typical scenario. A salesperson is having an initial conversation with a prospect. …

That fact that we’re even discussing data driven product decisions is a monumental leap for the product management profession. What features do customers use most & why? Which features do customers struggle to use and why? How quickly are new features being adopted? What are the most popular features customers…

Product presentations and demos are the biggest speed bump in the early part of the sales process. Nail the demo and the waters you’ll navigate to close the deal will be smoother sailing (in relative terms). One of the biggest factors that influence how buyers perceive a product presentation is…

Directly from many salespeople (clients) over the past 20 years, here are the most popular responses (in no particular order) to the question, “Why don’t you use the corporate positioning deck? “ Too much fluff. I would never say those words to a prospect or customer. …