Product Managers: Change the Top of the Sales Funnel: Trigger Driven Prospecting

The objective of this post is to talk about a new strategy for filling the top of the sales funnel with valuable opportunities. The harsh reality is that only a fraction of the mid-market and enterprise scale companies in today’s market will purchase and implement a major new software solution. As Gartner has noted, buyers are completing 70% of their buying journey before contacting a sales rep. Research shows the odds of winning the sale are 74% when you reach decision makers at the right time and help set their buying vision. This post talks about the types of triggers that lead to customers starting a process to identify and evaluate new solutions.

Free Website Chat. A Great Product Led Growth Story

Today I experienced one of the best new product implementations since I got my first iPhone. I installed the Drift chat capability on my website developmentcorporate.com. Their entry level offering is free forever. It took me 10 minutes from start to finish and it worked right out of the box. I do not expect that people are dying to chat with me about calculating the enterprise value of private companies or open source competitive intelligence for product managers. But chat would be a cool feature.

The Cost of Non-Customer Acquisition: The Ugly Truth

Acquiring customers is the biggest challenge any B2B software company has. Unless you are lucky enough to have an award winning solution that sells itself like the mythical product led growth companies (Slack, Dropbox, and Expensify), you have to grind it out like everyone else. Display advertising, landing pages, sales development reps, content marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM systems are the basic table stakes in today’s B2B software sales game. This post explores the reality of demand generation and makes a surprising recommendation to significantly improve sales funnel conversion rates and closed sales.

Prioritizing Agile Backlogs

Prioritizing Agile epics, user stories, and backlogs is something contemporary product managers have to do on a regular basis. In researching another topic I came across a great piece for Agile Product Owners by Daniel Zacarias entitled 20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour. The blog goes into great detail about 20 different techniques Product Owners can use to prioritize their backlogs. It is a long read, but definitely worth it.

Competitive Intelligence: Finding Revenues of Private Tech Companies

As a product manager, it is helpful to understand the relative size and success of your competitors. Public software companies are required to report their detailed finances on a quarterly and annual basis to the SEC. When it comes to private technology companies it is a little harder to determine annual revenues. There are fee-based subscription services like Pitchbook, Hoovers from D&B, and Privco. While these services are great, they are a bit pricey for the typical product manager. There are a number of free resources that offer revenue information for private tech companies. Two excellent free resources include Owler and Crunchbase.

Why Your Firm Should Sponsor an Annual Survey

I admit that I am a data junkie. I have found that data, both quantitative and qualitative, enables me to better understand key topics and trends. I am a voracious consumer of various periodic surveys. Recently, I read SalesForce.com’s third annual “State of Sales” research report. I believe that many organizations could obtain some significant benefits from sponsoring annual surveys amongst their customer bases. In this post I will talk about three specific surveys and how these surveys bring outsized benefits to their organizations.

Moneywheel – A Revenue Sourcing Analysis Technique for Product Managers

20 years ago I learned a technique for analyzing product line sales transactions known as the moneywheel. This approach helps product managers understand the dynamics of sales transaction types for their product lines. It can also be used to estimate demand generation requirements for each stage of the sales cycle. This supports the development of effective and focused sales development campaigns.