The Challenge: Keeping In Sync With The Buyer
One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is that they are too often focused on the most tactical aspects of the job: promotion, contacts, reach, social marketing, and are failing to connect the rest of the organization with the buyer.
High technology companies present a unique situation and are different than other industries because they can progress through developmental growth stages at a fairly rapid rate – from start-up to maturity in only a few years.
Many technology companies often lose site of the most important part of marketing, the source of value, is our understanding of customers - what customers want, and how to align your products to their needs and how they buy. Most marketing teams don’t have anyone dedicated to this function or don't have the right mix of skills to properly carry out this function.
This is especially important in B2B because buying processes are more complex, there are usually more buyers involved, and products tend to be more technically complex. To solve this problem, a relatively new function has been created, which is often referred to as product marketing.
Product marketing can be a challenging function to staff and manage: You need a robust understanding of marketing strategies and tools to maximize marketing effectiveness, a probing sales mentality that is able to discern what the customer truly values, an ability to grasp product or service capabilities, and an entrepreneur's ability to see new product opportunity and push it forward. All of this layers on top of great communication and project management skills.
So what to do?
Growth often requires changes in organizational structure and managerial processes as the business proceeds through developmental stages. Product Marketing is the flywheel that keeps everything humming
The Solution: Adding Product Marketing Capacity
The triangle of competencies
Technical & Business: Broad knowledge deep experience
Left brain & Right brain: Creative and analytical
Sales & Industry experience: Customer’s context and buying process
We provide the glue you need to connect inbound and outbound activities cross functions. And deliver insights about buyer's perceptions and problems to drive sales and marketing strategies that help build buying team consensus.
Product marketing sits at the nexus of product management, sales, and marketing communications to ensure that products connect with target markets. Strong product marketing not only ensures that products and services align with customer wants and needs but also improves sales effectiveness, accelerates market penetration, and lowers cost of customer acquisition.
The roles of team members need to be considered at every stage to ensure they are aligned with organizational priorities and staffed with the proper skills and experience. Resources can become strained, and without continued evaluation and alignment, quite often the key resources driving the product creation, delivery, and sales aspects of the business become overburdened and suffer.
Agile's product marketing consultants have the breadth and depth of product management, sales, and marketing experience to provide your business with the kind of product marketing expertise necessary to enhance other functional roles and enable market success.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
– Peter Drucker
Create a Multiplier Effect Across Your Organization.
The C-Suite
Maximize growth and exposure with targeted marketing spend. Evaluate expansion into new markets. Make sure you're staying ahead of the competition. Get insight into potential customers - what are they thinking and where are they headed. Differentiate and be viewed as a company to watch. Stay up to speed with the background and messages required to effectively communicate with investors, press, analysts, and customers. Maintain business agility and control cost by scaling marketing up and down to meet your needs.
Sales Leaders
Increase revenue with the same amount of sales resources. Make sure that sales is trained on how to sell the product - not just its features and functionality. Ensure they understand who to target along with their personas, goals, challenges, personalities, and pain points to effectively position your offering to meet their needs and differentiate from the competition. Create more selling time by giving sales the materials they need, so they don't need to create their own. Provide conversation starters and dialog prompters to facilitate productive meetings. Deliver readily accessible and up-to-date information on the market and the competition that's easily understood and communicated. Improve the effectiveness of each customer interaction with customer focused use cases, success stories, ROI tools, and demos to reduce sales cycles.
Product Leaders
Spend more time building great products and getting them to market faster. Reduce time supporting sales calls and gain more time to focus on product development and improvements. Spend less time supporting marketing and more time documenting requirements. Concentrate more on product direction and developing roadmaps. Gain more cycles to spend time with users to learn about their needs, doing win/loss analysis, and performing technical evaluations of the competition. Deliver products on time and on budget.
Marketing Leaders
Better connect with your audience to drive measurable results. Deliver great stories to Marcomm, PR, demand generation and field marketing teams with value propositions that truly resonate with prospective customers, analysts, and press influencers. Get the content you need to drive inbound and outbound programs. Deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time based on segmentation of the market, audience, and buying cycle. Go to market with well-orchestrated campaigns that align with sales. Better leverage marketing automation and analytics to measure and fine-tune program performance and maximize return on marketing spend and resources.