Co-opting Product Management Into Sales To Beat Quota 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 the sales team to hit quota. This can be a bad thing or Read More
Continue reading(This article about how to pre-handle objections – including 3 powerful techniques – is the third in my series on Persuasion Tips.) It’s all about reducing risk Imagine you’re happily presenting away, and suddenly you feel the audience going cold. They slump back in their seats. Maybe some start checking their phones. What happened? What Read More
Continue readingUnderstand and articulate what you’re trying to achieve (This article is a follow-on to my overview article on persuasion tips for product managers.) Every presentation or opportunity for persuasion has a goal, or possibly a few goals. Are you trying to get some executives to make a decision in your favor? Are you aiming to Read More
Continue readingUse these 7 persuasion tips to instantly make your presentations, roadmaps, marketing and sales materials more compelling, engaging, and influential.
Continue readingHow 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
Continue readingHow 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
Continue readingWhen 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
Continue reading(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
Continue readingSuccessful 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 for our project management solution. The product worked well – although it was a bit long in the tooth – and we had a good lead Read More
Continue readingI’ve started working on an online course on “writing for product managers.” It will come out in the next few months. In the process, useful tips about writing keep popping up. These tips will help you make your product management writing more persuasive, easier to read, more engaging, and more effective overall. Some of the Read More
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