Archive for Working with Marketing
Adele on Roles
Posted by: | CommentsAdele Revella offers this simple, straight-forward definition of four roles: inbound product manager, outbound product marketing manager, marketing communications, and sales. Read more in Let's not waste a good crisis.
on geeks and flakes
Posted by: | CommentsScott Sehlhorst reminded me about Geek Marketing 101 by John Dodds.
John writes,
It is so named because I see amongst many geeks a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is, and a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses.
Scott adds,
Don’t let them know, but we’re on our way to understanding how this stuff works.
I spend time with marketers and developers constantly yet I often forget about the chasm between the two. A marketer says "Talk to me like I was a five-year-old," a phrase which translates for a developer to "I don't know enough to work here."
Technical people are often obsessed with technology–the "how" of the product–but people don't care about the 'how' until they understand the 'what'. Marketing people are often obsessed with competitive positioning, the unique selling proposition–they are more concerned with the "what" than the "how"–but customers don't really care how you're better until they understand what you're gonna do for them.
Geeks and flakes need to meet in the middle: what are we going to do for customers?
on unrealistic schedules
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Bill Miller writes about unrealistic schedules:
I often wonder why software teams always seem to be committing to unrealistic schedules. You know when the sales team signed a contract with a customer to deliver functionality on a date without ever asking the engineering team whether it were possible. Never mind the roadmaps identify an entirely different set of functionality than what was committed. And guess what? The product roadmaps can’t change either; the sales team has signed contracts on that functionality too.
Product managers, sales people, marketing departments, and executives make commitments all the time–and often they’re unrealistic. We commit to a roadmap and then change it. We can’t really commit to schedules when the feature-set keeps changing–but then we commit anyway. Yeesh. We have long advocated time-boxing as a method for balancing the schedule and commitments. Come to our Requirements That Work class to learn an agile approach to product planning.
Years ago, the president of a startup asked the product manager to commit to an aggressive date. The product manager discussed it with the dev lead and the whole team and agreed that, yes, they could make the date but it involved a fair amount of overtime. The team agreed to work Saturdays until the project was complete. When the president announced the decision that development would work Saturdays, he also committed the entire sales department to work Saturdays until the project was complete.
The moral: being a team-player means that the people making the commitments should have some skin in the game too.
How the Rift Between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps – Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson – Harvard Business Review
Posted by: Steve Johnson on November 10, 2011 | Comments (0)In a recent Corporate Executive Board survey, sales executives’ top terms for their marketing colleagues included “paper pushers,” “academic,” and perhaps worst of all, “irrelevant.” On the other hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as “simple minded,” “cowboys,” and flat out “incompetent.” Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative.
Read more in How the Rift Between Sales and Marketing Undermines Reps – Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson – Harvard Business Review.