As the CEO of your product, at the end of the day you are responsible for making it a success. Not sales, not developers, not CEO. You. This is one of the HUGE differences between a project manager and a product manager.
Project managers can complete their tasks, make sure everything is checked off, and then have an immense sense of satisfaction. A product manager doesn’t feel that way unless their product is a commercial (or internal) success. In too many companies, the process to make a product a success is too complex and appears to have been designed by a project manager—read with many steps and dozens of milestones. Making a product a success is actually a relatively simple process and can be achieved by a product manager by following the following three steps.
Simply put, making your product a success comes down to doing three things right: improving the quality of the leads your sales teams generate, improving the presentations about your product that are given to potential customers, and increasing the number of leads that your sales teams call. To simplify the life of a product manager, improvements must be made simultaneously in all three of these areas. Now here is how to do that:
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Improve the Quality of Leads Your Sales Teams Generate: Help your sales teams by having existing customers provide referrals to new customers. Hey, the job of selling any product, much less your product, is a difficult task. When a salesperson shows up at a new customer’s door, do you think that potential customer is happy to see them? No. However, if he can get existing customers to open the door for his sales team, then the prospect’s guard will be down and your salesperson will have a great chance of getting them interested in his product. Direct your sales teams to only meet with decision makers. You know better than anyone what kind of fee will be required to shell out the cash needed to purchase your product. Tell your sales teams what to look for. This will help your sales teams make the best use of their time: if they can’t reach the right person, they’ll know to move on to the next lead. Guide your sales team toward the big buyers and away from the small buyers. Every deal takes about the same amount of time to close and if it turns out that a prospect doesn’t have a lot of money to spend, then they really aren’t a good fit for your product. Remember that just a few big deals is much better than a bunch of little deals.
- Improve presentations about your product given to potential customers: Help your sales teams by equipping them with the supplies they need for multiple meetings with a potential customer. Rarely will a deal be closed in the first meeting, so you’ll need to teach your sales teams the flow of conversation around your product. A key part of this is helping them identify goals for the first and second meeting. If possible, as a product manager, you should practice with your sales teams to ensure they don’t repeat themselves out of nervousness or raise objections before the customer.
- Increase the number of leads your sales teams call: You are the CEO of your product. It’s up to you to guide your sales teams to the right leads and then let them work their magic. Make sure your sales teams only meet with decision makers – meeting with anyone else will allow your team to be identified as a salesperson rather than potential business partners. Put your sales teams in charge of their schedules. Ask them to agree to meet with a prospect at any time that works best for the customer, and then call back later to change the time/date that works best for your sales team. This way, they can fit more customer contact into any given day. This is how they will eventually end up selling more of your product.
Finally, make sure the sales teams selling your products are out of the office during prime business hours. If they are in the office, then they are not in front of a client selling your product and this is bad for both of them. While this may seem like a lot of sales work for one product, remember that you are the only one in your company who will ultimately be judged by the success of your product. You have to be able to do it all!