Welcome to Product Management Challenges!

05012 Focal Point: Adding to Sales Discussions

Product Managers provide a unique role in a software company, something that may include skills in Sales, Marketing, and Development, but reaches well beyond the scope of any of those three functions. It’s a role nobody else fills. Yet because of their in-depth understanding of the market and the reasons people want and need their product, and because of the paramount need to make sales succeed, Product Managers can easily find themselves pulled into more sales calls than they care to be involved in, given their other priorities.

Pragmatic Marketing conducts an annual survey of Product Managers to determine salaries and other statistics about the job. In the 2003 survey, when asked: “What should the company know about product management?” a top answer was: “Product management is not sales support.” This finding underscores the fact that Product Managers find themselves pulled into the sales support role more than they feel they should be, and it is critical to manage the time they spend on sales support to provide the maximum impact in terms of improving the quality of sales discussions.

You can find the survey and much other valuable information at Pragmatic Marketing’s website at:

• http://www.productmarketing.com

As a Product Manager, you have probably experienced the positive impact you can have on a sales discussion with a prospect, and gotten encouraging feedback from the sales force and top management about how they want you to stay involved in sales to help make the team more successful at closing deals. You know sales are important, but you also know that sales calls could easily eat up all of your time, to the detriment of the many other critical aspects of your job.

When you serve in the role of Product Manager on a sales call (I say it this way because while your actual title might be anything from CEO to Founder to VP of Marketing or Development, you may be serving as Product Manager), your goal must be to bolster the sales force and train them, through example, to be more effective in future calls. You want to bring an important addition to the discussion, but you want the sales force to learn from your participation and be ready in future discussions to take on the role you have just played.

Read on below for insight on how Product Managers can add the most value to discussions with prospects, how they can increase the chance of a sale, and how they can help pass on their level of knowledge to the sales force.
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05011 Hit or Miss: Meeting Promised Development Dates

If you have worked in or with the software industry at all, you have lived through some dramatic delays in product development. For instance, Product Guernsey, originally announced last year, was due in January. It’s now the beginning of June, and it’s announced that the product, now called Providence, won’t be out until September. Or your last major release was supposed to take nine months. A year later, it won’t be out for another nine, so technically the team has worked for a year but it’s twelve months late.

In a business environment where companies are expected to run like clockwork, and planning and efficiency are prized, this doesn’t make your company look good. And people in all industries, including the software industry, are becoming less tolerant of this kind of slipshod scheduling.

If Product Management serves no other purpose, it serves to feed requests for new capabilities to Development and to structure the release of those capabilities. A Product Manager can be invaluable in helping your company be more successful at selecting, committing to, and meeting development (and consequently release) dates.

Read on below for guidance on how to commit to specific product release dates and meet them.
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