Marketing Seasonal Products July 15, 2010
Posted by Hari Prakash in Implementation.add a comment
Spain has lifted the cup, the vuvuzelas have died down (finally!), the Jabulani has kicked the dust and we can all get on with our lives. At least until 2014, when the frenzy will begin all over again.
For marketers, seasonal products (and the FIFA World Cup is one, being a once in 4 years event), are both a dream and a nightmare. During their season, there is nothing to beat them –indeed, sometimes there aren’t enough of them to go around. Once season ends though, they are of little use.
Technology products are often impacted by seasonality – even if they are not seasonal products themselves. How so? After all, many tech products may be one time purchases by institutional users.
Yet, the increasing demand from users for SAAS models and pricing means that product companies can no longer hope to sell with a fat margin and sit back. If a dairy product manufacturer finds their sales dipping due to a scare on a particular ingredient, its technology vendor who manages the billing system will find its revenues dipping too. Technology vendors are only becoming more closely integrated with their customers.
Technology vendors who cater to such industries where products come into demand during a specific time (such as fashion, retail, agricultural and travel industries) need to forecast correctly and deal with such highs and lows.
The tactics adopted may vary depending on the company’s overall strategy and business plan. Some companies may choose to spread risk by diversifying to other, less seasonal products. Some may choose to focus on after-market products and service offerings that can make up for the loss of revenue. Yet others may re-work pricing strategies and include a license or other one-time fee that takes seasonality into account.
Whatever the strategy you adopt, if your company is looking to launch in a market that hinges on occasional events or distinct buying seasons, you can’t afford to ignore seasonality.
Defining Market Requirements : Essential Step from Market to Product May 12, 2010
Posted by Hari Prakash in Implementation.Tags: market research, product management
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There are companies that believe they know everything about the customer; you are not one of them. You’ve interacted with your potential early adopters, you’ve spent time understanding customer needs, you’ve researched different pricing options – so, is it time to get the product up and running? Not yet.
A critical step that many companies without a structured product management program miss out on is crafting the Market Requirements. Put simply, you need to put down your understanding of how users want a problem to be addressed.
For instance, a market problem could be ‘Persistent power outages cause problems for industrial users.’ Based on your customer interaction and market research, your market requirement could be ‘Users want a low cost and environmentally-friendly solution to power outages.’
From this example, it is evident how crafting a market requirements statement can bring clarity to the product development process. For this particular technology provider, it is clear that their users need not just a solution to power outages, but one that is low cost and environmentally friendly. Of course, these are broad terms and will need to be further specified, but without them, it is difficult to achieve commonality of purpose among large teams.
Defining a market problem in user terms will set the boundaries for the development process by providing the overall user objective (a low cost and environmentally friendly solution), as well as the rationale behind the user’s objectives. This ensures that the development process stays on track in spite of changes in the team composition. It can also help align the many different external agencies that may be involved in the process, such as vendors, consultants and contractors.
Crafting a good market requirements statement is an essential part of the product management process; if you don’t yet include this step, it’s time to get started.
The hidden reasons why clients won’t buy April 30, 2010
Posted by Hari Prakash in Implementation.Tags: client acquisition, product marketing
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Decoding client roles and motivations is a critical part of the product marketing and client acquisition process. Critical and Difficult. Difficult, because roles and motivations are rarely visible. Few clients will tell you, hey, great product, but really, I don’t want to spend my time convincing other departments to get on board. Instead, what your sales team gets is meetings with multiple teams and no one who seems ready to take the decision.
How then can you help your sales team avoid getting enmeshed in a never-ending sales dialogue? From our work with companies to strengthen their client acquisition process, here are some learnings to help you do just that.
Get to the vision. The sales process has a much better chance of succeeding when your product (or service) ties in well your clients’ vision for their business and with larger goals. To understand this vision and see how your product fits in, you need to get to the CEO or business owner – they are the people who really understand the business vision. Unless you can get them enthused about your product and how it will further their goals, chances are that you will never sell to the company, no matter how many meetings you have with others.
Your product may offer better productivity, lower costs, superior quality etc – but beyond functionality, other attributes may influence the decision too. What are the ‘real’ barriers to sale? For e.g. when it comes to ERP implementation, a Fortune 500 company with plants located around the globe may consider only the top 3 global vendors. An innovative but lower-cost solution by a lesser-known player may be viewed with suspicion; low cost may get translated as “novices”, “poor quality” or “unreliable.” Finding out the real barriers is important.
So is identifying what trade-offs the buyer is willing to make. The ideal product will deliver superior quality at the lowest cost, in unbeatable time (and throw in a lifelong warranty too!) Most buyers know that this is unlikely to happen, and will have a mental picture of the trade-offs they are willing to make. However, few buyers may communicate these openly, so identifying them requires considerable skill, patience and the willingness to ask, in many different ways.
There is also the question of Company Culture. Some companies favour decision by committee while others allow individuals significant leeway. Unless your marketing process takes into account the company culture of your clients, your sales cycle will continue to be long. For complex and expensive products, a one-size-fits-all approach rarely works.
Individual gatekeepers and influencers must often sell your product to their own company. Why should they bat for you? Identify pain points that your product will resolve and benefits that it will confer . Apart from what it will do for the team/company, will it make the CFO the person who saved millions of euros in a recessionary year? If it’s not a strategic purchase, will it at least save your buyer 2 hours of routine work every week? Make sure they know what they are getting out of it.
Market Validation for the Boot-strapped February 10, 2010
Posted by Hari Prakash in Implementation.Tags: market research, market validation, start-ups
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In an earlier post, we discussed the issue of ‘How much Research is Enough research?’ For many start-ups however, it may seem as though any research at all is prohibitively expensive. It’s not just an issue of cost, either. Frequently, start-up founders do not have the bandwidth to focus on what seem like ‘extraneous’ tasks – building and launching the product is hard enough!
Yet, market validation (through market research or other means) is as critical for boot-strapped companies as for any other; in fact, it may even be more critical. After all, large companies can afford to make a mistake on one product line but for start-ups, that could mean the end of business.
So, how do boot-strapped companies, short of time and money, go about market validation? Rigorous and formal surveys do have their place when it comes to questions such as estimating market size. There are however other options that the savvy start-up team can adopt.
Analysts such as IDC or Gartner often place a tremendous amount of market information online. While the information may not be customized to a specific problem that a start-up faces, it can provide a fairly good overview of the market. Analyst briefings and sectoral blogs are other good places to look for information.
For B2B product companies that tend to have a fairly good idea of who their customers are, online tools such as surveymonkey or esurveyspro can help in getting feedback from potential users. For a small fee, these services also help analyze the data collected. Business communities such as LinkedIn can also be an excellent resource to test ‘what if’ scenarios in an informal manner.
The key to getting excellent answers lies not just in the amount of money spent, but in the questions asked. Identifying the right questions to be asked makes half the difference. For instance, a team developing a general social networking website may ask which of its features the audience appreciates. In reality however, getting people to move to a new website from myspace or facebook is extremely difficult. When asked, users may claim to like the features of the new website and yet refuse to shift due to the level of community they already have elsewhere.
Ultimately, most new products that succeed are those that answer a specific problem, not those with better features. “I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn’t solve anyone’s problem” is the number reason for failure cited by Fred Jabre in this interesting post on why his new product (a web app that allowed SMB users to interact with it using voice commands) didn’t make money.
To avoid this disconnect, start-ups need to see how their ‘fantastic product’ looks from the user perspective (and eventually, if there are enough such users). Our thought paper, Market Validation for the Boot-strapped, offers more useful suggestions on how start-ups can research their markets effectively.
5 Must-have Skills for Product Managers December 22, 2009
Posted by Hari Prakash in Implementation.Tags: product management, product management skills, project creep, scope setting, team management, time management
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Why hasn’t a Google emerged from India, or even a smaller technology product such as Adobe? This is a frequently asked question, and the lack of product R&D in India has been explained by many reasons, including the exclusive focus on services, the basic educational system that promotes rote-learning and a paucity of talent. So much has been written on it that we are not going to get into that discussion here!
Instead, in this post, I’d like to look at a more positive aspect of the situation: while a product focus and therefore product management in India has not dominated the market, the situation is slowly changing.
As tech product firms grow, naturally, there is a greater imperative for product management and product managers to be involved and help the firm move to the next level. Here is our list of five essential ‘daily’ skills for product managers working in India in a dynamic and challenging environment. These are not about tools or techniques, but about qualities that every project manager needs.
Setting the scope. Whatever the size of the firm or the scale of the project, “project creep” seems to be an intrinsic part of product development. Product A starts out as a tool to help individuals manage their finances, but soon the powers that be decide that it must be usable for SMEs too; soon, the features demanded are so many that the product doesn’t really meet anyone’s needs well.
A good product manager can be invaluable in setting the scope well, and avoiding a reduction in quality at the expense of quantity. This is easier said than done and may involve conflicts, but it’s better handled early on than seeing your product land in the market with a resounding thud.
Time Management. This may sound basic, but it doesn’t come easy for many, many managers (so much so, that we now have entire blogs dedicated to the topic of time management). The Indian work culture with its coffee breaks and group lunches and cubicle gossip can be a big challenge for managers here. Some tools for better time management include regular to-do lists, setting curbs on Internet time and getting one’s team to adopt time limits for meetings.
Documentation. No one likes it, but everyone needs it, at some point or the other. With start-ups, there is often little documentation of development goals, processes or troubleshooting. Sooner or later, the team changes and that’s when the lack of documentation raises big questions. The smart product manager avoids this with appropriate documentation.
Taking the team along. The term ‘product manager’ is somewhat misleading in one sense – ultimately, the product manager’s focus is not just the product; instead, the product manager is at once a customer evangelist on one end and a team ally on the other. Getting the development team to buy in on customer needs and continuously demonstrating to them why a product needs to be a certain way, is an essential skill for every product manager.
Influence without authority. Related to the previous point, the question for most product managers would be – how does one influence people without authority? In most situations, product managers work with team members who do not report to them and are often peers. Authority therefore comes not from ‘designation’, but from knowledge – team members will listen to you only when they feel that what you are saying springs from a detailed understanding of market conditions. Ergo, the only way to acquire authority is to first become an expert in your market and know as much about it as possible.
