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Teach Your Sales Teams How To Get In Their Customer's Heads...

Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you are at it, buy a lot of my product. If only we could really tell our potential customers this then life would be so much simpler. However, try this little verbal outburst just once and then you’ll have a chance to sit back and spend some time polishing your resume as you look for your next product manager job.

If you really want people to buy more of your product, then do what I’ve done – learn how to read minds…

How Most Product Mangers Equip Sales To Sell

In a recent poll that I took, I asked product mangers how they learned to do their job. 50% of the answers were for “on-the-job-training”. Clearly most of us are just winging it. Since we don’t really have any deep philosophy behind most of our product management actions, this explains why most of us are doing such a poor job of equipping the sales teams to sell our products.

If you need a sound bite for what we’re doing, then it would be the “pitch & pray” technique. This is where we teach the sales teams about the value of our product and then have them go out and pitch it to customers, over and over again. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t.

Moving To The Scientific Approach To Selling Your Product

Not all product managers are stuck at this very basic level of supporting the sales teams. Some of us have seen the errors of our ways and have managed to crawl our way up to the next level: scientific selling support.

This is where we’ve done some research (with or without the sales team) in order to find out just how the customer goes about making buying decisions – what is their buying process.

This approach generally brings in many more sales than the old way of just pitching the product’s value to as many customers as possible. However, there is one problem: not all customers are rational.

The scientific approach of matching your product to the customer’s buying process doesn’t work in the roughly 33% of all customers who are not guided by rational decisions. Oh, oh – what to do now?

Top Of The Pyramid: The 3 C’s Approach

There is a better way to equip your sales teams to sell your products. I’ve only bumped into a handful of product managers during my career who have been able to achieve this level of collaboration with their sales teams, but the success that they have been able to achieve has always served as a goal for me to shoot for.

At the top of the product selling technique pyramid are the product mangers who show the sales teams how they can Collaborate with Customers to Create new products. The thinking here is that a potential customer needs more than just your product to solve their problems. If you can teach your sales teams that your potential customers simply don’t know what they don’t know and that they need to help the customers to understand the big picture of a solution and how your product can fit into an overall solution, then you’ll be able to make even more sales.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers are the CEO of your product. In your company, you are the one person who is most heavily invested in the success of your product. In order for the product to be successful, your sales teams are going to have to know how to sell it.

All too often product mangers do the minimum amount of work to get the sales teams set up to sell their product: they just outline the product’s benefits. What we need to do is to take the extra steps that will make our sales teams even more successful. This means starting by taking the time to study and understand our potential customer’s buying habits and patterns. Once we know these, then we can help our sales teams match them.

Finally, we can work with sales to help them start to collaborate more closely with the customer. Once they are able to do this, then they’ll be able to open the doors to both more sales and to larger sales.

Now that you know what you have to do, get out there and help your sales teams sell more!

Do you think that your sales team could ever get beyond the “pitch & pray” technique for selling your product?

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you were going fishing, how much luck catching fish do you think that you would have if you didn’t use any bait on your hook? Sure, there are probably some either dumb or near-sighted fish that might still bite, but you’re going to be doing a lot of sitting around waiting. Is it possible that as a product manger you are fishing for customers for your product without bait?

Related posts:

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2. A 3-Step Product Manager System To Make Your Product Successful As the CEO of your product, at the end of...
3. Get More Customers By Offering Them A Suicide Drink Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in...

The question this past week was “Do people read and take actions based on your emails?“

The take-away from your responses to this week’s question is two-fold: first, people are reading your emails (that’s the good part), secondly it sure looks like it’s a mixed bag as to your emails having the impact that you are looking for.

The sad thing here is that if your emails are not causing the actions that you want / need to have happen, it sure looks like you’re going to have to follow-up in other ways in order to make sure that things get done. Who’s got the time for that?

It took me a long time, but my emails get results. It turns out that the secret to getting people to take action lies in how you write the email. It’s tricky — there’s not a single “silver bullet” that you can use, but rather a whole handful of techniques that together can turn your emails into a powerful tool.

If you are interested in having me spill my guts on how you can make your emails work for you, leave me a comment to this post saying that you want to know more and I’ll put something together.

This week’s poll question: “Who gets more respect where you work Product Managers or Project Managers?” People seem to get the titles confused all the time, do they also forget to give us the respect that we deserve?

Visit the blog, vote, and we’ll talk about the results next week!

P.S.: New Feature: I’ve come up with some real stinker poll questions lately and so I now know that I need your help! Drop by The Accidental Product Manager forum and suggest a question for next week. You just might become famous…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Related posts:

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2. New! AccPm Weekly Poll – Make Your Voice Heard! You’ve got opinions, lots of ‘em, but nobody at work...
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Product Success Depends On How Well You Manage Your Sales Team...

I don’t care if your product turns lead into gold, if your salespeople don’t go out there and do a good job of selling your product then you won’t be a product manager for long. I’ll agree that you are not running the sales department, in fact you are probably not even part of the sales department; however, your product’s life depends on what that department does with your product so you had better start managing your salespeople.

Walking A Very Careful Line

For those of you who may be thinking “All right, now I’ve got permission to go in there and tell the sales folks how they really should be selling my product!” I’ve got one word for you – don’t.

Sales people are a very different beast from product mangers and because of this difference, there is always the possibility of conflict when we interact. Our motivations are different (your product is probably only one of many that they have to sell), our timelines are different (you are thinking about the next version of your product and they are thinking about the approaching end of the current fiscal quarter), etc.

The salespeople at your company already have a boss – they don’t need you to be another one. However, you have a vested interest in their success in selling your product. This means that you’re going to have to get clever here.

The Three Keys To Getting Sales To Sell More Of Your Product

In order to start to mange the sales teams that are responsible for selling your product you are going to have to find ways to work with the sales department without making it look like you are trying to tell them how to do their jobs.

The first key that you will need in order to be able to do this is to get access to your company’s sales tracking application. Every company has one of these and if you ask the right people, as a product manager you should be able to gain access to it. Once you are in, you will be able to track how sales of your product are going by sales person, by region, by time period, and potentially even by country.

After looking up some sales numbers for your product, you may be tempted to go running off to sales and start to show off your new-found knowledge by telling them what they are doing wrong in regards to selling your product Once again – don’t.

You need to realize that sales tracking applications always have at best partial data. The story that they tell is not always correct. If you do see a downward trend for your product’s sales, then perhaps scheduling a lunch with a salesperson in order to find out what is really going on would be a correct next step (you pay for lunch!)

The Importance Of Sales Metrics

The next key that you will need in order to start managing your sales team is sales metrics. The worst thing that can happen is for your sales teams to set their goals for your product without any input from you. A lot of different factors can cause things to change: weather patterns, time of year, market conditions, etc. The factors that affect your product are unique and only apply to your product. You need to work with them to set the sales metrics for your product

Take the time to identify the metrics that will affect your product’s sales and then share them with your sales teams. Make sure that they know what metrics will impact how they can go about doing their job.

Hands-On Coaching

How did your sales force learn about your product? Did you have a big product launch, throw some product brochures at them and then tell them to go out and sell it? Great – what kind of success can you really expect from that?

As part of your product manger responsibility you are going to have to take the time to develop an on going coaching program for your sales teams. The tone of these coaching sessions is going to be very important. You are not part of the sales department so you need to make sure that you don’t come across as sounding as though you are trying to tell them “how to sell”.

Instead, what you are going to have to do is to talk to the sales teams in a supportive manner that recognizes the challenges that they have and offers them information that will help them to succeed. You are a provider of product and market information, not a sales trainer!

What All Of This Means To You

As a product manager you are effectively the CEO of your product. As part of being the CEO it is your responsibility to make sure that the company’s sales teams do a good job of selling your product.

Although you don’t work in the sales department, managing the sales team that is selling your product is something that you have to do. The trick to this is doing it in a way that motivates the sales team to sell more of your product without coming across as being condescending.

You have three keys that can unlock the sales team to your message: the company’s sales tracking application, sales metrics, and hands-on coaching that you provide. Each of these keys will provide you with additional insight into the sales process and will help you to make your product be even more successful.

What is the one thing that you could do to get your sales team to sell more of your product(s)?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you are at it, buy a lot of my product. If only we could really tell our potential customers this then life would be so much simpler. However, try this little verbal outburst just once and then you’ll have a chance to sit back and spend some time polishing your resume as you look for your next product manager job.

Related posts:

1. Learn To Read Your Customer’s Mind In 3 Simple Steps Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you...
2. A 3-Step Product Manager System To Make Your Product Successful As the CEO of your product, at the end of...
3. 7 Ways A Product Manager Can Be A Success During A Recession Psst – don’t look now, but it sorta looks like...

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Asda Is About To Make A Terrible Product Management Mistake...

Shopping for groceries is a pain. Being forced to do a grocery store’s job for them is a bigger pain. The U.K. supermarket chain Asda (owned and operated by Wal-Mart) is #2 in their market and they want to be #1. Their product managers have come up with a truly horrible plan to get there.

A Bad Plan From The Start

Sure, product managers everywhere would like to find a way to get closer to our customers. The grocery store business is no exception – it’s hyper-competitive. However, over at Asda they’ve gone too far.

The Adsa product managers believe that they can gain more customer loyalty if they give them more of a voice in how the stores are run. Wait a minute, I don’t really WANT to have to tell Adsa how to run their stores – I just want to shop there and have everything just be right.

One of the things that the product managers are going to do is to give 18,000 of their existing customers access to products before they are launched in the stores. Umm, where I come from we call this a focus group.

Touting this as a new customer outreach program is stretching things just a bit. It’s also not clear if the folks will get these goods for free, or if they’ll just be able to buy them before other people can. How excited can one get over having the ability to buy a new type of cracker before everyone else?

Why is Asda doing this? One of the drivers is that their CEO has publicly stated that he feels that customer loyalty cannot be bought with points or discount vouchers. Once again, what? I don’t know about you, but YES my loyalty to a grocery store can be bought when they offer me discounts based on the products that I actually do buy!

The Thinking Behind A Bad Product Plan

As is the Wal-Mart way, Asda positions itself in its markets as a low cost provider. They spend most of their time advertising their competitive prices. This has not been enough for them to overtake the #1 grocery chain in the U.K. Tesco.

The Asda product managers are hoping that by involving their customers in making decisions about how the company is run, they will be able to build as much loyalty as the other grocery store’s discount programs do. One technique that will be used is to put in web cams so customers can see how the firm runs: one at a local dairy, another at a carrot-processing plant, and yet another at the company’s head office. How incredibly boring will that be?

Just to take the foolishness one step further, Asda will be building what they are calling a “transparent store” where glass brick will replace brick walls and customers will be able to see back into parts of the store that are normally not visible. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think that I want to see how the meat is being cut into steaks or the fish is being de-scaled. Some things are better left to the imagination.

What All Of This Means For You

Don’t make the same mistake with your product that Adsa is getting ready to make with theirs. I predict that this new plan of theirs is going to have a very short shelf life. It is fundamentally flawed.

Yes, I can understand how it started – at an Adsa brainstorming session someone suggested making the company more open and letting the customers dictate how the company was run. Where things went wrong is that they missed the fact that I don’t want to have to tell my grocery store how to do things, instead I want them to understand what my needs are and then shape how they do things to me.

The same goes for your customers. They really don’t care about your product development process or what your product support area looks like (get rid of the web cams!). They don’t want to go to work for your company.

Instead, what they want are the product features that they need even before they know that they need them. They want support that is so good that you fix things before they know that they are broken. What they really want, is for you to do your job product manager.

What is the best way to build customer loyalty for your product?
Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I don’t care if your product turns lead into gold, if your salespeople don’t go out there and do a good job of selling your product then you won’t be a product manager for long. I’ll agree that you are not running the sales department, in fact you are probably not even part of the sales department; however, your product’s life depends on what that department does with your product so you had better start managing your salespeople…

Related posts:

1. Product Manager Would You Sleep With Your Customer If They Offered You $1M Order? Would you sleep with your customer if they offered you...
2. Grocery Store Success Lessons For Product Managers The company has no extra money for advertising right now....
3. Learn To Read Your Customer’s Mind In 3 Simple Steps Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you...

The question this past week was “For your product, who gets to deal with angry customers?”

I suspect that there won’t be too much surprise to learn that the Customer Service team is on the front line when it comes to dealing with angry customers. However, the Sales and Product Management teams were in a strong second and third place.

In fact, when taken together, Sales and Product Management are dealing with almost as many angry customers as Customer Service is. Was that ever part of your job description?

This time around we’re going to focus on a product manger’s favorite way of communicating: “Do people read and take actions based on your emails?” Goodness knows we send enough of these things, but are they actually working for you?

Visit the blog, vote, and we’ll talk about the results next week!

P.S.: New Feature: I’ve come up with some real stinker poll questions lately and so I now know that I need your help! Drop by The Accidental Product Manager forum and suggest a question for next week. You just might become famous…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Related posts:

1. AccPM Poll Results: What part of being a product manger do you dislike the most? The question this past week was “What part of being...
2. New! AccPm Weekly Poll – Make Your Voice Heard! You’ve got opinions, lots of ‘em, but nobody at work...
3. AccPM Poll Results: Have Your Customers Started Buying Again? The question this past week was “Have your customers started...

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How Should Product Managers Handle An Indecent Proposal?

Would you sleep with your customer if they offered you a million dollars to do it? That was the question that was asked in the blockbuster movie “Indecent Proposal” with Robert Redford, Demi Moore, and Woody Harrelson.

Sure Demi Moore wasn’t a product manager, but the situation was similar to the one that we often find ourselves in when we are dealing with a manipulative client. What should you do – take the money and feel dirty in the morning or refuse it and watch your product sales hit rock bottom?

It’s Really Not About Sex…

In the world of product management, (hopefully) we don’t spend a lot of time talking about sexual favors in order to boost the sales of our products. However, there are a lot of customers who will do almost anything to get their way. Couple this with product managers who have the inability to say no to a customer and you’ve got a recipe for a disaster.

I think that we all know what an angry customer looks like, but what is a manipulative customer? A little psychology textbook research shows that this type of customer is attempting to both mange and control another person (you!) , or a situation, in order to make things turn out the way that they want them to.

Before you blame the customer for manipulating you into doing something that you’ll regret tomorrow, hold on a minute. All too often we product managers not only allow, but in some cases even invite our customers to manipulate us.
How do we do this? Simple: we make two mistakes.

First we have a deep need to seek constant approval of both ourselves and our product from our customers. Second, our greatest fear is that the customer will tell us that they don’t like either us or our product and we’ll end up losing our product manger jobs. We can’t bear the thought of that happening. Shape up product manger!

Learn How To Turn Down A Customer’s Improper Advances

Manipulative customers aren’t going to go away – they will always be out there. As a product manager you are going to have to learn how to deal with them in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling cheap and easy.

The first thing that you need to realize is that every manipulative customer has their own special way of twisting you around their little finger. Once you understand how they do it, then you’ll be in a better position to prevent them from doing it to you again.

A case in point is the customer who has the way of turning your words around and using them against you. The next time you find yourself presenting to them, take the time to write out what you are going to say – perhaps even going so far as to use flipcharts instead of slides. This way you’ll control the conversation and take away his greatest weapon against you.

If you dread meeting with a customer because of the bad experiences that you’ve had with them in the past, then you will probably be putting off that meeting for as long as you can and caving into his demands when you finally do meet with him. However, this just shows that you are suffering from low assertiveness – show some spine!

To solve this problem, you need to tackle the next meeting with that customer head on. Get it set up as soon as possible – don’t delay! Then, before you meet with the customer, picture a successful meeting in your mind. What would you say? What would the customer say? Having a picture of success in you head will allow you to keep steering the conversation towards that idea. You’re not assured of being successful, but this will certainly boost your chances.

Final Thoughts

In the end, you are not going to be able to get your customers to change their manipulative ways. Instead, you are going to have to change how you deal with them.

In the product manager job description we are told that we need to be empathetic with them and listen to their issues; however, just because they have issues does not mean that you need to make changes to your product or your pricing just to suit them.

Every time you deal with a manipulative customer, you need to keep a record of what they tried to do and how you dealt with it. As you have more and more successes, this record will serve to remind you that your own judgement is more than good enough to deal with customers who just want to have it their own way.

What’s the best way that you’ve ever dealt with a manipulative customer?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Shopping for groceries is a pain. Being forced to do a grocery store’s job for them is a bigger pain. The U.K. supermarket chain Asda (owned and operated by Wal-Mart) is #2 in their market and they want to be #1. Their product managers have come up with a truly horrible plan to get there.

Related posts:

1. Customer Led New Product Design: Notes From The Field This post is an invitation for you to come along...
2. Too Much Choice Is Bad: Customers Don’t Want To Do Your Job For You Shopping for groceries is a pain. Being forced to do...
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T-Mobile Found Out That Customers Don't Like To Change

It’s expensive to create, market, deliver, and support a product. Having customers who make your life more difficult and the whole process more expensive does not help matters.

Since we’re bright, smart product managers it sure seems as though when we spot an opportunity to change something about our product that will benefit everyone we should just go ahead and do it and not have to wait for our customers to ask us to make the change, right? Well that’s what the product managers over at T-Mobile thought before the lawsuit…

The Problem With Going Green

… is that where as everyone agrees that it is a nice idea in concept, most of us are too lazy to actually do anything about it. This is the problem that T-Mobile’s product managers were staring at awhile ago when they started hunting around for ways to cut the costs associated with delivering their service.

That paper bill that shows up in your mail every month looked like a nice juicy target for getting rid of. I mean come on, it’s the 21st Century after all and we’re talking about a customer base that is at least progressive enough to have a cell phone. Think about all of the costs involved: printing, folding, mailing, and dealing with returns. If you could get everyone to drop paper bills and go with electronic billing then the savings could be huge!

As most companies tend to do, T-Mobile at first tried taking a “green” approach. They told their customers that they’d plant a tree for every customer who agreed to drop their paper bill and go paperless. This really didn’t motivate very many people to sign up. See – what did I tell you about us being more lazy than green?

T-Mobile’s next step was to start to charge an extra $1.99 for those customers who wanted a detailed printout of their bill. The exception to this charge was existing customers who could choose to get it without having to pay extra. Once again, this didn’t really cause any major change in customer behavior.

The Big Stick

Clearly the message was not getting through to T-Mobile’s customers – stop asking for paper bills and agree to switch over to electronic bills. In August of 2009 T-Mobile finally got serious.

They started charging an extra $1.50 monthly fee for all customers who had not switched over to electronic billing and who were still receiving paper bills. This fee was applied to all bills, both short and long, and it also covered existing customers – nobody got to escape it.

What’s interesting about this big stick approach is that it worked! Before the new fee was announced, T-Mobile had about 1,000 customers sign up for paperless billing every day. Once the new fee was announced, this number shot up to 33,000 per day.

It turns out that T-Mobile sends out 16.5 million invoices every month. At this new accelerated rate they had the possibility that they could converted their entire customer base to paperless billing in as little as 15 months.

A Lawsuit Can Wreck The Best Plans

Of course there always has to be an unhappy customer somewhere, right? In this case an unhappy customer was so unhappy that they went to the effort to file a lawsuit against T-Mobile. The suit said that the new fee was a “…material modification to the contract by T-Mobile.” For those of you not up on contract language, it turns out that it’s a no-no to make changes to a contract after both sides have signed it.

The T-Mobil lawyers took a look at this lawsuit and realized that they had a problem on their hands – it was legit. T-Mobile then promptly backed off and announced that they were dropping the $1.50 fee. Dang!

What Went Wrong Here?

So there are a couple of interesting things that a savvy product manager can lean from this T-Mobile case study. Here they are:

• The Big Stick Works: to an extent. Having an extra 32,000 customers sign up for paperless billing every day, even if it was only for awhile, will result in a fantastic cost savings for the company. However, clearly customers didn’t like feeling that they didn’t have a choice.

• Always Check With Legal First: Sure, nobody likes the folks who work in the legal department. However, when you are messing around with a big stick approach to anything, it’s probably a good idea to touch base with them before you pull the trigger.

• Carrots Work Better Than Sticks: Sure a stick is easier to use, but carrots work better. In this case waiting until a contract was over, and then making the $1.50 fee part of the new contract would have been ok – as long as T-Mobile also offered a gift or upgrade at the same time for customers who opted to go paperless.

Final Thoughts

If the number of people signing up for paperless billing now returns to their previous levels, T-Mobile estimates that it’s going to take just over 41 years to move all of their customers to paperless billing.

Clearly the T-Mobile product managers had their hearts in the right place, it’s just that it appears that their brains weren’t there also. Using the big stick approach can work, but it generally only works in the short term. If you want to have a long term positive relationship with your customers, then you’re going to have to take the time to find ways to motivate them to take the action that you want them to take.

What do you think that T-Mobile should have done to get it’s customers to go to paperless billing?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product -  it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Would you sleep with your customer if they offered you a million dollars to do it? That was the question that was asked in the blockbuster movie “Indecent Proposal” with Robert Redford, Demi Moore, and Woody Harrelson.

Related posts:

1. Get More Customers By Offering Them A Suicide Drink Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in...
2. Learn To Read Your Customer’s Mind In 3 Simple Steps Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you...
3. Performance Based Pricing – Is It Right For Product Managers In Tough Times? Not to get too doom and gloom on you or...

The question this past week was “What part of being a product manger do you dislike the most?“

Talk about clustering! Only two of the possible answers got votes this week and they were neck-and-neck for most of the week.

In the end, my personal favorite won out: pricing is the most disliked task. Somewhat amusingly #2 was dealing with your management! I suspect that pricing is a real product management issue, the boss issue affects everyone out there no matter what their job is!

This time around we’re going to be asking “For your product, who gets to deal with angry customers?”

Visit the blog, vote, and we’ll talk about the results next week!

P.S.: New Feature: I’ve come up with some real stinker poll questions lately and so I now know that I need your help! Drop by The Accidental Product Manager forum and suggest a question for next week. You just might become famous…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Related posts:

1. AccPM Poll Results: For your product, who gets to deal with angry customers? The question this past week was “For your product, who...
2. New! AccPm Weekly Poll – Make Your Voice Heard! You’ve got opinions, lots of ‘em, but nobody at work...
3. AccPM Poll Results: Do people read and take actions based on your emails? The question this past week was “Do people read and...

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Being Able To Customize Your Soda Is Just The First Step...

Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in tow, they start instantly clambering for me to allow them to get a soda. On those occasions that they have worn me down enough that I’ll do almost anything to get them to shut-up, I’ll give in and let them. What they proceed to do next would take the breath away from any sane adult.

They start by grabbing one of those big 32oz cups and then they proceed to dance down the aisle in front of each of the soda fountains pausing only long enough to dump some of that flavor into their cup before hurrying on to the next one. By the time they reach the end, their cups are filled with some sort of monstrous blackish goop that they endearingly refer to as a “suicide drink“. Yes, I have actually sampled this concoction and words can not begin to describe just how bad it tastes…

However, is there a possibility that this approach to building the ultimate soft drink might be showing product mangers the way to create the ultimate product?

Coke’s Freestyle Approach To Creating Suicide Drinks

Coke currently sells 3,000 different flavors of soda, tea, juice, and flavored waters globally but they want to sell even more. The product managers at Coke – the same people who tried to bring us New Coke – have a problem on their hands: not all of their customers have the same tastes. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Every so often, Coke decides that it wants to try to capture even more of our spending on drinks and so they role out a new flavor and keep their fingers crossed. Sometimes the new products work (Cherry Coke), and sometimes they don’t (Vanilla Coke). Clearly they’ve got a problem on their hands…

It sure seems as though now that we live in the 21st Century, we all should be able to pick whatever flavor of drink that we want and not have to hope that another million people also like the same thing as us. Coke is making that possible with a new style of vending machine: the Freestyle.

A single Freestyle self-serve drink dispenser will pour more than 100 varieties of soda, tea, juice, and flavored waters. Each Freestyle unit will contain 30 cartridges of flavorings that can be used to mix up to 100 different drink combinations – can anyone say “ultimate suicide drink“?

What Does Total Choice Mean To Coke Product Mangers?

I personally can not imagine anything worse than standing in line behind someone who has to decide from among 100 different drink combinations. However, I do see the genius in Coke’s product manager’s plans.

Each Freestyle unit has a wireless connection that will allow it to report what people are buying and when they are buying it. This is going to allow Coke to test out a whole bunch of new flavors simply by making them available in the machine. If they start to see a trend appear where people are buying a flavor, then they’ll be able to determine in which region the flavor would be popular and so on.

What Would Total Choice Mean To Your Customers?

They probably never covered this in your product management training but just imagine what you could do if you had the same ability to customize your product? Although you probably aren’t selling drinks, you can probably imagine your customers walking up to a dispenser and having the ability to choose 100 different variations of your product.

Remember, we’re not necessarily talking about different product features here. We could be talking about different configurations of support programs, product appearance, or even payment plans.

If such a machine for your product existed, then what would happen to your sales? Would they go through the roof? If you go back and take a look at the past 12 months of sales for your product (well, the past 12 months have probably sucked, so take a look at the past 24 months) I’m betting that you’ve actually sold a whole lot of different configurations of your product. Maybe you didn’t set out to do that, but I’ll bet that you ended up doing it.

Final Thoughts

In the product manager job description there is a requirement that we all memorize the phrase “Your customer is always right“. It turns out that your customers love to have choices. Or at least they love the option of having choices.

No matter how many product models you think that you sell today, I suspect that the reality is that you are actually selling a lot more than that.

If you sit down and take the time to lay out all of the different choices that you are already offering to your customers, you’ll have a fantastic story to present to your potential customers about your product marketing mix. Even if your product is not the best one out there, just providing your customers with more choices will make your product more attractive and will drive more sales.

How many different variations of your product do you think that you sell today?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Since we’re bright, smart product managers it sure seems as though when we spot an opportunity to change something about our product that will benefit everyone we should just go ahead and do it and not have to wait for our customers to ask us to make the change, right? Well that’s what the product managers over at T-Mobile thought before the lawsuit…

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Product Managers Need Mentors To Be Successful (c) - 2008

I’ve got a quick question for you: what is the next step in your career? What do you want to get promoted to? In fact, as long as we are talking about that, what comes after THAT promotion? In product management the career ladder generally goes: product manager, director, executive director, VP of marketing, Sr. VP, CEO. Got a plan on how you are going to get to that next step?

The Problem With Product Manager Career Mentors

It used to be that what you needed in order to climb out of a product management position was a mentor - someone who would take you  under their wing and guide you during your career. Bad news – those days are long gone.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the old way, it’s just that the world started to move faster. Nowadays nobody stays in a given position long enough to act as a mentor to you for any reasonable length of time. Even if they did, they are probably too busy to spend enough time with you keeping your career on track.

The old way of picking a mentor and having them work with you over time to shape and guide your career is gone – things move too fast and change too often to allow this to work any more. Instead, product managers need to discover how to create networks of mentors that they can use to provide the career guidance that they will need over the years.

If you thought the old way was tough, just wait until you try to figure out how to do things using the new way!

The New Way Of Managing Your Career

Dr. Dawn Chandler (CA Polytech State University), Dr. Douglas Hall (Boston University) and Dr. Kathy Kram (Boston University) have spent some time looking into this problem with the modern product management workplace and they’ve got some ideas about how we can fix things.

Since there is really no way for you to get a single individual to agree to act as your mentor for the 40-45 years that your product management career is going to last, instead you are going to have take a different approach. You are going to have to create a network of mentors that you can use to accomplish what you need to get done.

Oh, there is one small problem with this clever solution: most of us are not all that good at creating a mentor network like this let alone trying to maintain it. It looks like you are going to need some suggestions on how best to do this.

Building And Maintaining A Mentor Network

One of the first things that you are going to have to realize about building your mentor network is that the people that you are going to ask to be a part of your network will not all be the same. This means that you are going to have develop a special set of skills in order to be able to (1) find them, and (2) create relationships with them that will make them want to mentor you.

Here is what you are going to have to do in order to create a mentoring network that will help your product management career move to the next level:

• Talk, Talk,Talk - you are going to have to be willing to take the initiative and reach out to those people that you want to be a part of your mentoring network – they aren’t going to contact you. Once you’ve contacted them the first time, then you are going to have to work at maintaining contact with them so that they don’t forget about you.

• Be Sensitive – Not everyone that you talk to is going to want to be your mentor. It’s going to be up to you to take the time to pick up on the message that they are sending your way. Few  people will actually come out and say “no”, so it’s up to you to detect those folks who would like to decline the opportunity.

• It’s The Takeoff That Counts – when you’ve found someone who is willing to be a member of your mentor network, then you’ve got to be willing to make an extra effort to make sure that your initial interactions with that person go very well. They will set tone for the rest of your relationship. Show up early for meetings, follow up quickly on actions, and pay attention when they are talking.

• Be Prepared – make sure that you get ready for every meeting with someone who is in your mentor network. Research what you want to ask them, make sure that you can show that you are making progress in your career, and come prepared to ask questions about challenges that you are currently facing.

• Information Is The Key – you need to be willing to share information with your mentoring network. This does not mean that you have to tell them all the details about what you had for breakfast today, but rather that you be willing to lay out your current challenges and failures that you’ve had – you know, stuff that can be hard to talk about.

• It’s A Two-Way Street – if someone agrees to be a part of your mentoring network, then you have agreed to do your best to help them out also. This means that you have a responsibility to help your mentors out whenever you have an opportunity to do so. This can be as simple as passing on information that you run across to actually doing work for them.

• Be A Nice Person – Nobody want to work with a jerk and they certainly don’t want to mentor one. No matter what kind of day you’ve had, always be on your best behavior when you interact with a member of your mentor network.

• Be Positive – how you choose to view the world is a key part of how others see you. If you have a positive attitude you will naturally attract people to your mentor network and you’ll be able to keep them there. If you’ve got a negative attitude, then nobody is going to want to lend you a helping hand.

Final Thoughts

As a product manager you are undoubtedly busy. However, it turns out that you have yet another job on top of your “day job” – managing your career. You can’t do this by yourself and so you’re going to need to have someone guide you – a mentor network.

Creating and maintaining a mentor network is no easy task. However, if you go about doing it in the right way it can become a powerful force that will cause your career to shoot ahead and make sure that you don’t get left behind.

Product managers who can do this will have have found yet another way that great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product -  it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in tow, they start instantly clambering for me to allow them to get a soda. On those occasions that they have worn me down enough that I’ll do almost anything to get them to shut-up, I’ll give in and let them. What they proceed to do next would take the breath away from any sane adult…

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