(As featured on the Pragmatic Marketing website.) The competitive landscape for software companies, driven by venture-backed startups and disruptive business models and technologies, has only become fiercer in today’s economy. Small players have to make good use of whatever means they have at their disposal to break free from the pack. One strategy to make that ...

Using references to talk to your prospects and endorse your software product can be the most effective way to close a sale and cut the length of the sales cycle. They reassure your prospect that his or her impending decision isn't too risky. For large purchases of business software, references are the equivalent of the ...

Note: It has been a month since my last article. Those of you who know me would know that it was hard for me to be silent for such a length of time! But don't worry, today's issue is probably one of my longest yet, about an effort that is both hard to pull off ...

Exhibiting at trade shows is a staple of marketing a software product. As part of a mix of marketing activities to reach your target market, trade shows provide visibility for your product, build familiarity, and bring in sales leads. Trade shows are also costly, not only in terms of sheer dollars but also in terms of ...

The effort to first define and develop the marketing message for your product usually takes place with a limited amount of research and input from customers, especially for new capabilities. For the many organizations that don't have the luxury, either in terms of time or money, to spend all they want on market research to ...

I'd like to showcase an entertaining and useful article that recently appeared in the newsletter from the Boston Product Management Association (BPMA). It is written by Mike Urbonas, Contributing Editor for the BPMA newsletter and can also be found online at www.bostonproducts.org. I encourage you to take a look at the site and some of ...

Happy New Year! This is the first issue of the newsletter in 2005, and the 78th issue since December 2002. I hope you'll continue to find this material helpful. Two issues ago, I wrote about partnerships between companies, which are so important in technology and software, and how to make them successful. In the last issue ...

Compared to manufactured goods or hardware, software products are easy to integrate so that they work together seamlessly. Therefore, collaborating with other software companies to complement and extend the scope of your own product has the potential to transform it and greatly increase your customer base, revenues, and profits. Joining up with partners can result in ...

For Product Managers who are have not been through the product positioning exercise a few times, the greatest difficulty about it may not be the effort itself but what you need to do in order to be ready for it. That's because in order to position your product well against the competition, you need to ...

Technology companies, since they are largely peopled by technically oriented individuals, often fall into the trap of creating marketing and sales materials that are overly focused on the technical side of the product. Product Managers usually play an indispensable role in pulling the development of marketing collateral and sales tools over towards the business perspective. There ...