Dr. Mark, I am a product marketing professional. I work day and night on competitive intelligence, product positioning and messaging and other tools. I store everything on our company intranet and I send notification e-mails out to the sales teams, with detailed instructions on how to use the tools. Unfortunately I still get the same questions over and over again and it seems like no one is reading my e-mails or using the material I created. What am I doing wrong?
Regards,
Ray-Lee Concerned
Thanks for your e-mail Ray-Lee. Once again I get this question quite often and I too have encountered this myself early in my career. My guidance to you is to try these steps:
1) align with company priorities,
2) understand your salespeople by getting in the game, and
3) start to think about knowledge management (KM)
In an ideal scenario, your executive management team is already aligned across the organization. Sales and marketing live in glorious harmony and share common values, goals, priorities, metrics and compensation incentives. If not, please tell them to read a company level strategy article called “Sales and Marketing need to sleep in the same bed” by Christine Crandell. It can help everything move in the right direction.
Since you are asking me for assistance, I will assume that your company isn’t as aligned as Christine recommends. Worse you may be in a situation that has sales and marketing in a adversarial scenario where one group blames the other for insufficient help, air cover and sales tools, while the other laments the lack of recognition and use of all the great work that is being produced.
First it is your responsibility to ensure that any activities you pursue are directly relevant and align with the company’s priorities. Typically this isn’t rocket science. It’s generally a combination of increase sales/revenue, ensure customer satisfaction and possibly enable partners to be successful. In lean times, there may be a popular emphasis on being cost conscious as well. Assuming you are in a startup with growth aspirations, you should examine closely how your activities can add value to closing deals indirectly (providing air cover via press and analyst briefings, thought leadership and branding) or directly (sales tools, win loss reports, competitive analysis, product positioning and messaging, ROI).
Sometimes as a marketing professional we get so caught up with the “fundamental playbook of marketing”, we feel we have to do all of these basic things in equal measure and quality. The result is we become a marketing drone, cranking out weekly competitive reports, revised positioning and messaging, standard collateral pieces, WPs and datasheets. It’s no wonder we feel there is never enough time to complete our assignments. Once we have these elements ready to rollout, we send out e-mails to *All Sales and Marketing e-mail groups, either attaching a document or linking to the company intranet, inviting our sales people to come read and understand how these tools can help them be more successful. We are surprised when no one reads or uses what we create, and the term intranet becomes somewhat of a joke among not only sales people but executive management (more about how executives need to join the KM party in a future post).
In product management a crucial element is understanding the customers in order to set feature priorities. In product marketing, you must make the effort to understand your customers, which are your sales people, to ensure that you create effective marketing tools and have them used consistently. If you are a small startup for example, there is no sense in creating competitive analysis for competitors that your sales team is either not encountering, or having no problem dealing with. It is more important for you to get involved in situations where your sales team is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the competition and to deliver that knowledge and positioning right at the point of attack. Your sales team is simply too busy selling to pay attention to anything you want to tell them about, prior to the time in which they actually need it. Additionally, your generic analysis may not align with the main issues relative to this competitive encounter. The more you can create content and prove it works in actual real-time scenarios, the more sales will use it in their sales processes.
Understandably you cry foul, saying that this is simply not scalable. You can’t possibly support or educate each sales person, one at a time. You are correct, that is where KM can help you. Knowledge management is another one of those words that isn’t taken seriously in many immature organizations. Distribution of knowledge in a timely, need to know manner is recognized as very important in outbound customer support and service. However, internally it is typically not treated with the same priority. Most product marketers throw everything onto the intranet, together with works in progress, old and outdated materials. And the company doesn’t help by keeping the intranet behind the firewall.
Why don’t salespeople use the intranet? I can’t even begin to count the reasons, but let’s say that salespeople are always on the move, hate to VPN, are not pleased if a search produces ambiguous sets of results, would rather fire off email asking you a question, and if the content is stale, game over.
Often materials that you produce on a particular topic have multiple audiences. For example, information about a new release is made available to internal teams (including sales, professional services teams), the customers and in many cases partners. The core content can be the same for all groups, but it needs to be supplemented with an additional level of audience specific detail that makes it targeted. A strong KM system can help you create a taxonomy for your content, but also provide different visibility or security levels to allow the correct audiences to see and process the information that is most relevant to them. A great KM system can also make content available through multiple mediums, e.g. mobile smartphone access, web access without VPN, auto e-mail replies with most relevant search results based on questions returned. I will cover much more about KM and how to get the whole company involved in a future post.
To close, a key role for you in product marketing is to pull together the right marketing content that helps support company priorities. You need to get in the game with your sales people and demonstrate the content that you create will help their deals and earn their trust. Finally you need to abandon the intranet and emails as a means of distribution of content. You need to think KM, work with your support team to understand what they are doing for outbound customers and think about how what they do is also applicable internally to the company as a whole.
BTW, thank you to the fans that sent in e-mails after my last post, keep the questions coming.
About Dr. Mark Eteer
Mark Eteer was born in the UK in 1966. He studied computer science at the University of Essex and after 8 years as a programmer, moved into marketing. He obtained his PhD entirely online. His successes marketing for major corporations and minor startups, combined with his no nonsense straight forward guidance on all matters marketing, has led him to be sought out by some of the most well known marketing stars in Mollywood. Although unsubstantiated, he claims that he was the marketing/PR mind behind Tom Cruise’s behavior on Oprah, although he admits that Tom took it a bit too far. He currently lives in an exclusive suburb of Mollywood.
As a leading provider of scalable, enterprise-wide, high ROI marketing ideas, Dr. Mark uses his cloud-based, next-generation approach and solar-powered, game changing methodology which leverages social media to answer paradigm shifting questions about marketing and product management.
Dr. Mark would like to thank Ramon Chen for allowing him to be a guest blogger here on Cloud ‘N Clear and understands that Ramon disavows any knowledge of any bad advice he might offer.