Category Archives for "Go-to-market"

3 Proven Ways To Help Your Sales Team Beat Quota

Co-opting product management into sales My good friend Geoffrey Anderson (@ganders2112) recently wrote about a situation we product managers sometimes find ourselves in. When sales are not going well, company leadership might ask product management come in to help hit the numbers. This can be a bad thing or a good thing. As Geoff said: Read More

Mental Models Applied: Using A 2×2 Chart For Handling Competitive Objections

In some earlier articles and in a talk I gave at a local product management meetup, I’ve shared about the importance of having a toolkit of mental models. They help with decision making, problem solving, communication, plus every other thing we do as product managers. As an exercise for myself, I decided to take a Read More

Storytelling For Product Managers – The TL;DR Version

In my last article, I covered a powerful storytelling technique in great detail. This article is the summary (the TL;DR) version. Do you hem and haw when asked talk about one of your accomplishments? Do you stick to a “just the facts, ma’am” approach when telling a story? Are your stories falling flat and failing Read More

3 Simple Steps To Make Your Customer Stories 10x Better

How To Accelerate Sales With Great Storytelling In my articles about go to market, I always mention the importance of “customer stories.” These stories are a critical component of the knowledge that product management can provide to sales and marketing and sales engineers to help ensure sales success. But, if you’re like me, maybe you Read More

The Secrets of Highly Successful Sales People: Objection Handling

How to use better stories to overcome sales objections During the sales process, the prospect may – and usually does – mention obstacles to getting the deal done. Reasons they might not want to do the deal. They might say “It’s too expensive,” or “your competitor has feature X that you don’t have, and we Read More

The Secrets of Highly Successful Products: The Sales Discovery Call

When the sales team has the right product knowledge, they will be much more successful. Which means they sell a lot more of your product. This starts from the first call with the prospect. If a sales person asks the wrong questions during that first call… … then even a good prospect can turn into Read More

What Successful Companies Do To Get Better Leads

(This is the second post in my series about using product knowledge to create better sales enablement and jumpstart a repeatable sales process. Read the first post, on the overall topic.) “I Need Better Leads!” Does your salesforce complain “We don’t get enough leads from Marketing, and the leads we get aren’t any good?” I’ve Read More

Sales Team Missing Quota? It’s Not Their Fault

Successful customers, quality product, but bad sales When I started as the Director of Product Management at my last company, they had a lot of successful and enthusiastic customers, a product that worked – although a bit long in the tooth – and a good lead pipeline. But they had one big problem. The sales Read More