I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks focusing on consuming content, spending a good deal of time in PowerPoint and getting insights from folks which has been very rewarding and challenging.   I’ve also been taking an inventory of situations I’ve been in/witnessed throughout my career to see if I would address a situation/access the situation differently today than I would have say 6 years ago.    The scenario I’ve dragged out and documented below is one that most product managers who have a global sales force have been in before – a newly launched solution in which not everyone is fully up to speed on, especially the folks who aren’t in your country.    Regardless of the organizations readiness, there are opportunities in the pipeline and work has to be done to move the prospect through the sales cycle, like a demo for a large customer somewhere on the planet and the local SC’s don’t know/aren’t comfortable with the product yet.

Launching products are tough enough in one geography, but launching a product globally requires additional discipline, different tactics and a baseline understanding of what each market and sales organization needs to be successful post-launch.

So while it might be easy to just to do a webinar or provide  “global” product overview sheets for the field it may not be the most effective way to engage and spin up a global sales organization for lots of reasons.  Below is a reasonably accurate reconstructionist email thread from a while back around a product launched globally which which aligns to rule of thumb asserted above.  For ease of reading I’ve reversed the order of the email thread:

De: pname@companyk.com [mailto: pname@companyk.com]
Enviado: Lunes, 08 de agosto 20xx 6:02 AM
A: pmanager@companyk.com
Asunto: Reunión y Demo en Barcelona y Madrid

Producto Gestor,

Dos de nuestros grandes clientes en España desea un panorama general de nuestro nuevo producto, ya que todavía no han tenido una llamada de ventas en la solución, ¿sería posible que usted venga a España y aportar la visión global de NOMBRE DEL CLIENTE 1 y CLIENTE NOMBRE 2? Déjame saber y confirmar las reuniones de 15 de septiembre y 18. Gracias.

Personas Nombre
Solution Consultant
Empresa K

Follow Up Note:

From: pmanager@companyk.com [mailto: jgatrell@companyk.com]
Sent: Lunes, 08 de agosto 20xx 8:12 AM
To: xxxxx@xxxxxx.com
Subject: RE: Reunión y Demo en Barcelona y Madrid

Persona Nombre,

Sólo hablo un poco de español, pero si usted me pregunta que hacer una reunión en el otoño de España a principios, entonces tengo que pensar en eso. 8 horas en el aire, el tipo de cambio y todo lo que puede hacer que no de 4 horas de las reuniones de la pena. Voy a seguir en el próximo par de días. ¡Salud!!

Product Manager
Company K
www.companyk.com

For even easier reading, I’ve used Google Translate below, which is what most of us use anyhow when researching a global product inquiry in which over 50% of the forwarded email thread is in a different language:

From: pname@copmanyk.com [mailto: pname@companyk.com]
Sent: Monday, 08 of agosto 20xx 6:02
To: pmanager@company.com
Subject: Meeting and Demo in Barcelona and Madrid

Product Manager,

Two of our larger customers in Spain want a quick overview of our new product, which I have not yet had a sales call  for the solution, is it possible that you come to Spain and to provide overall vision CUSTOMER NAME 1 and CUSTOMER NAME 2? Let me know and confirm the meetings of September 15 and 18. Thank you.

Persons Name
Solution Consultant
Company K

Response:

From: pmanager@companyk.com [mailto: pmanager@companyk.com]
Sent: Monday, August 8, 20xx 8:12
To: pname@companyk.com
Subject: RE: Meeting and Demo in Barcelona and Madrid

Person Name,

I only speak a little Spanish, but if you’re ask me to do a meeting in the fall of Spain at the beginning, then I have to think about it. 8 hours in the air, the exchange rate and all we have is 4 hours of the meetings of the sentence. I will confirm in the next couple of days. Cheers!

Product Manager
Company K
www.companyk.com

There are a good deal of options to pursue and at this point, from a wholesale no to other travel related options.  I’ve listed a couple for consideration:

1. Decline the meetings wholesale and kindly point them to the intranet information (training videos, presentations and online demo)
2. Setup additional client meetings yourself, extend the trip a week and do a couple more sales calls throughout Europe, but also schedule a product session with the field on the newly launched solution face-to-face.
3. Book flights for the in-laws to come down to watch the kids and add your wife to the boondoggle and accept the two meetings only while occasionally responding to emails.
4. Accept the two meetings, enjoy Olympic Harbor, do email at odd times and essentially work 14 hours a day for a week responding to inbound email and meeting requests in North America
5. Setup a webinar for the EMEA organization to again provide an overview and decline the request
6. Request from your superior to do 90 days helping the field in Europe to get comfortable with the new product, effectively becoming super SC for Europe and odd hour email response personnel.

Are there other options you would pursue? Or would you do a hybrid of a couple of them, say option 2 and 5?  Option 4 is basically just a reality from my experience, at least the 14 hour days part.

As an FYI:  Option 3 is tough many levels even though it seems like a good idea on the surface, I had a Microsoft Partner Conference in New Orleans I tried it with, but we did get to see 2 nights of  Widespread.

So what would you do?

Products don’t sell themselves. The process of introducing a product to market is a serious undertaking. Unfortunately for many companies it’s merely an afterthought; a set of deliverables created from a checklist at the end of product development. When the level of effort and resources applied to the creation of the product dwarfs that of the launch, it’s no wonder product launches fail to achieve the sales velocity anticipated.

What follows are ten easily identifiable signs that help forecast if a product launch may be in trouble. Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster.

Case studies have always been an interesting pain point for most technology organizations and marketers.  You always need more (according to sales), they are difficult to push through to completion and no one in sales uses them once they are done because many times they are fact free, devoid of numbers and generally represent a feel good piece about your product or company which doesn’t help a buyer decision anything or discern why they should further evaluate your product/solution.

Sales Has Some Needs, Ideas and Some Candidates For You!

The typical case study process starts with a sales feedback session and as you would suspect — they need more stuff.   We can always debate if they ACTUALLY need more stuff, but why wouldn’t you want more case studies anyhow, right?  After all, sales is kind enough to give you a handful of companies to talk to, but 99% in the list can’t do one due to some corporate policy or other lame reason like being too busy, but y’all luckily find that 1 which says “yeah we can do a case study if you want”.

It may not be the one you wanted, it’s in a corner case industry for your product, but it’s the one you got and the next time you talk to sales it’s like: “Victory! We have a case study in progress and MARCOM is working with the customer”.

Ready, Set, Write!

So it’s off to the races and it’s a pretty straight forward process for the person in MARCOM who’s been assigned to get it done:

• Interview the contact
• write a little
• work the approval process with the customer
• 3-6 months later you may or may not have case study.

Providing you are lucky enough to get final approval,  you probably have  some watered down document which doesn’t work for sales or the marketplace at large and looks something like this from a flow perspective:

• Generic statement that “we worked with big or not so big company to do stuff”
• Customer Company overview with Logo
• Perfectly reverse engineered problem statement
• Quotes about how nice your product is in sidebar call outs from Jeremy,  the Project Manager
• Your company’s boiler plate

There could be any number of reasons why this happens, the contact wasn’t the the right one, we asked the wrong questions or we just couldn’t get the cool content through their legal – some competitive differentiation/advantage thing.   While, it would be great to think our products do actually provide a competitive advantage, most case studies aren’t discovery sessions around how well the implementation went, it’s a checklist of questions which MARCOM  goes through like case study best practice robots.

Asked, Answered and Outta Here

In many companies it’s MARCOM which works the checklist of obvious questions with no real involvement from Product Marketing or Management and the main reason is they have a list of questions which they have used historically and the cookie cutter questions typically get the job done.  Pretty formulaic stuff for most technology companies.   In fact it is so formulaic that MARCOM may even outsource it, because it so easy – after all we have the corporate communications template, the style guide and a list of questions we can hand off to anyone.

Once we get the answers to the questions we have a case study right?  Probably not, more than likely we have yet another document which sales won’t use and buyers won’t find any real benefit from.  So what can you do to improve the likelihood that you will have something of value when done?  Notice I didn’t say case study, since not all customer stories are really case studies.

Qualify the Case Study

While case study candidates are hard to find, fluff pieces immortalized in Adobe aren’t that helpful to most sales people or buyers.  Try to better understand why someone/a company might want to do a case study.   It’s not that hard, just ask them “So why are you looking to do the case study?”  The types of answers will vary, but might look like:

• Hey our marketing guy thinks it will improve our SEO
• To fulfill some contract term which got slid in for a 55% discount.
• We reduce cycle times by 12%, increased utilization by 3% and lowered costs by 8% resulting in an additional $18M in profit in the first 6 months.
• I selected the solution, I think it’s implementation will improve my career, so let’s put it in print – k?

So there are lots of answers you could get back and other drivers than true partnership with your company or success with your product which could make a organization want to talk about their implementations.  It’s these type of nuances which makes MARCOM and definitely an external third party probably not the right resource to work the process via a hand off from sales.   In fact, why does sales often represent the starting point for case studies and not professional services?

Conversations, not Case Studies

So as you have probably guessed it might be best to not go in search of case studies, but to have regular conversation with recent implementations and find out how folks are using your product.  While having these conversations you just might find a real case study, a customer focus blog post or other quicker to write (and get approved) web content piece which would help buyers in the discovery process better understand the problems solved by your solutions/product.

I know — sales still wants case studies, but I betcha they would be really cool with video testimonials though.  It also just might be easier to get big brands with a video approach.  How?    Have MARCOM setup a video camera at the next users conference and solicit participation in quick 60 second testimonials around your products, after all everyone loves your product at the user conference and you can slip in some “right to post/tape language” in your click through license for the online conference registration.   Just an idea…..

Other Product Management, Case Study and Content Related Stuff

• The Boring Web Content Challenge (mpdailyfix.com)
• The State of Product Management: Tweets, Conversations and Near Quotes…. (spatiallyrelevant.org)
• Case Studies in Perspective (altitudebranding.com)
• Putting Listening to Work with Customers (conversationagent.com)
• Have a Case Study But Don’t Know What To Do With It? Guest Blogger, Angela Kambarian Has Some Suggestions… (hilarytopper.com)
• Content Marketing is for Customers Too! (myventurepad.com)

PCampATL has been a great time.  Good discussion, networking and session facilitation. Great job by @jbrett and the rest of the volunteers.

Many thanks to the folks that attended the session and provided your insights on the things we get bogged down on.  Based on the discussion, it is clear we all get bogged down in the daily noise, the tactical and the stupid things which stop us from doing the right things for the business.

Related Product Management Articles:

• Not everyone’s strategic and 4 other things to think about before you finalize the company’s 2010 goals
• The State of Product Management: Tweets, Conversations and Near Quotes….
• The 4 PM Confusion in Technology Companies

• Now that’s an adhesive concept you can’t shake.
• It’s kinda like that  mid-January cold you get every year.
• <insert other made up silly thing which wouldn’t be as effective as sticky>

In previous recessions, many marketers doubled down on large, historically profitable customers, geographies, and market segments—an approach that may now be ineffective because economic woes are affecting consumers and markets in unexpected and very specific ways. Marketers should therefore toss out their historical expectations and look for emerging pockets of profitability.

In all fairness the piece that the chart comes from was originally published in 2008, so I suspect the backing data set is just a little stale, but my concerns with the hierarchical categorization still remain.   Even though the piece is a little aged, I’m pretty sure the concepts of regions, states and cities were fairly well defined by then.  Below is the graphic which indicates that Atlanta and Washington D.C. have achieved the functional equivalency of statehood for market analysis, which is just a little off from my perspective.

Now admittedly this just could be a bad graphic (that’s actually probably it), but it begs the several questions at least for marketers:

• How should a marketer define a region?
• How can a state have the same market qualities of a city?
• What is the median income of the different zips analyzed in Jacksonville?
• What are the deltas in Housing Values in the Jacksonville zip codes presented?
• People allocate meaningful marketing spend in Montana which can be analyzed?
• Would it have been more valid to only look at incomes, unemployment rates and zip codes?
• Can any data set from 2008 really be used 12 month’s later when it comes to B2C?
• Recession? What recession?

While the full piece asserts the probable impact of unemployment, the housing sector changes and other key indicators which would impact consumerism, it doesn’t provide any additional data sets of note except one manufacturer’s anecdotal experience in their customer base customer base, which means the piece mixes B2B and B2C for some unknown reason.  The main thing I take away from the piece, is that old models are broken.

Observation: Maybe, just maybe, it’s only about micro-markets now.

Potential Articles of Interest

• Improve throughput, cut your customers in half! (business901.com)
• Ideas to Income: An introduction to marketing (slideshare.net)
• The Simplest Secret To Business Growth (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Global Survey Shows Benefits of Web 2.0 (revenews.com)

While MindBody’s revenues are not as big as Google or Facebook, they are growing very strongly and there still larger than Twitter. 

Here are the 14 tips that Rick laid out in the SoftwareCEO article. 

1. It has to be SaaS
2. Be prepared for some challenges with SaaS
3. If you have the customer base, private equity may be better than VC
4. Seek investors who want to collaborate, not dominate
5. Aim at a boutique market
6. Narrow your sights so you can be a significant player
7. Know the related micro-verticals you can expand to
8. You can’t beat the big boys, so join them
9. A friend may not be your best partner
10. Don’t fight in front of the kids
11. Price your software low enough to avoid cutbacks
12. Publish your customer list
13. Use agile development to respond quickly to customer feedback
14. To create raving fans, offer your customers concrete business advice

 You should click through and read the entire seven page article to get the color commentary on these tips.

Disclosure: I conducted the technical diligence assessment for MindBody’s investors.  John Mecke is the Managing Director of DevelopmentCorporate, an Atlanta-based corporate development advisory firm.  He blogs primarily at www.developmentcorporate.com.

I pretty much laughed/chuckled/smiled on every slide, even the missing #1 reason.

While regional deltas in culture and other contextual considerations are imperatives for advertisers, all actions needs to support the brand’s promise which typically doesn’t vary by region or by the sporting season.

So the biggest challenge/conflict for the brand probably is that per Yum! Brands website, the parent company of KFC is they believe “Making progress in diversity is a business priority and the work of everyone in our system.”  So while they have estensive processes and compliance requirements for their suppliers of foodstuffs, they may not have that level of review or scrutiny for ads.  I’m thinking there is a new review process in the works at KFC/Yum! Brands and probably a new agency search underway, at least in Australia based on this cricket match commercial.