Archive for the ‘communication’ category

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Pre product launch communication

December 1st, 2011

Pre product launch communication, thanks to www.spacetoday.orgIt is difficult to validate your products marketing messages and concepts with your stakeholders, partners even clients before you launch your product; Why? Because we are all against the clock, any additional revision / modification that is outside of your control is not desirable so what usually happens is that product marketing is done internally and behind closed doors, so to speak. When everything; concepts, messages, brand, unique selling points are closed and finished, from the managers point of view, then and only then are they communicated to the shareholders (internal teams), partners and finally clients.

Be careful

The unfortunate thing about this conservative, yet understandable, point of view is that A) You run a huge risk of not getting it right B) you miss an opportunity to get people involved early on, each of these have a huge importance and benefit the products possibilities of success.

Get close to get it right

Being right is relative, we can all agree. In this context for you to get it right you must ensure that the work you do will resonate correctly with the target audience. To do so you need to get as close to the target audience as possible or at least to those that are close to them. By validating your work along the way, before product launch, you possibilities of getting it right are increased greatly.

Getting people on board; generating inertia

Validating your product marketing (branding, concepts, design, messaging etc.) before long before you lunch the product with internal teams, partners and even customers ensures that you achieve the main objective of any product launch, you generate sales momentum.

The ideal situation is that your stakeholders (sales, marketing teams, and partners) totally get the product long before it is launched and are anxious to sell it. They in turn are in contact with customers telling them about the magic that is coming down the line, so that on lunch day 0 your sales team is in frenzy to sell a product to hungry market space.

The earlier you can get people involved in your product launch the better, I would recommend as early as possible, as soon as you have mock ups, prototypes, concepts anything you can share and share with as many stakeholders as possible.

Learn to lose control and unleash the potential

Companies have to learn to control less, be more nimble and learn to live with the uncertainty of all of this collaboration especially in time sensitive situations like product launches. This calculated risk means companies product launches are focused on results (generating sales momentum = sales) not on deliverables (we created presentations, brochures, facts sheets, direct email campaigns etc). The results are amazing and they can be seen very quickly, but it defiantly takes a huge leap of faith and getting out of the comfort zone.

Have you launch a product recently, what was your experience? What other points do you think are of interest?

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Posted in communication, Market Driven, Product launch

The power of why

October 14th, 2011

The power of whyFor those of you who don’t already know, I am a staunch believer in market problems being the key to product and business success. Products should always, without exception, respond to a market problem (whether it is an actual or a future problem). A customer’s problem is never the lack of the solution, it is something else and you need to find out exactly what that is before you create your product / business.

So for me Why is the most important word when identifying market problems and by extention creating market driven products. On the other hand What is the question that sales / customer driven businesses use. This means that the sales force ask their biggest customers “what do you want?” and never why do you want it, this is customer driven as it is usually driven by a small handful of big customers and it is also solution focused, not problem focused as you may not even know why the customer wants the feature / product in question.

Henry Ford understood the power of why

Asking the what question does not necessarily mean you are solving the problem correctly, it only means you are giving the customer (not the market) what he / she wants. Doesn’t sound too bad really when you say it out loud, however, as Henry Ford once said; if he had listened to his customers (asked What not Why) he would have breed faster horses.

Why; the distance between the known and the unknown

I recently sent an email to some customers to identify market needs, I was in the discovery phase after which I validated it against a mass audience. I  asked what problems they were facing in regards to IT, I got one answer that said: Additional capacity would be useful, to which my answer was…… “Why”, “Why do you need that additional capacity”, I could have supposed, I could have imagined or thought she has the same problem as the other customers I have seen so far, but why do that when you can ask?

The customer did tell me why and it was something I would never have thought of, so why do we not ask why enough? I think when we ask why it means we are effectively admitting that we do not know the answer and we don’t like being in that situation, the unknown. However, what exists between the known and the unknown is called GROWTH and supposedly that is what we are looking for, isn’t?

Is Why an important word in your vocabulary? Why? Why not?

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Posted in Analysis, communication, Innovation, Market Driven

Webinars. VoIP or teleconf?

July 14th, 2011

In previous posts (1 and 2) I talked about how much I value webinars as an efficient way of communicating with sales / marketing teams and partners in a large geographically distributed company and also some of the main “Dos” I have learnt through trial and error over the past 5 years both in Marketing and Education roles.

In this post I wanted to touch on the point of using VoIP (+ chat) or teleconference, which should you use and when?

VoIP + Chat it’s cheap but there’s more to it than that

In this case I am referring to a 1 way audio communication where attendees use chat to communicate with the presenter. First of all it’s cheaper and, in a lot of cases it is free depending on the service provider. VoIP is a much more manageable option when you are dealing with large groups of people as you can reduce the incoming communication to chat. By doing so your stride is not broken and you can deal with the question when you are ready.

If you are dealing with a large group using VoIP it is particularly useful to have somebody with you who can manage the chat so you can focus on your voice. If you can imagine a phone call with over 50 people talking at once you can automatically understand the benefits of keeping inbound communication to chat

The trust factor

VoIP + Chat is an excellent solution for a first time contact with a new team / client etc as it means they are not under pressure to say the right thing. This is especially true if the session is in a language which is not their native language (generally) English. So in the first contact webinar the presenter takes all the pressure and this creates trust, from which you can build and maybe in the 3rd session you could use teleconferencing

Teleconferencing: You must justify the investment

It is more costly so you want to be sure you are getting ROI and that it has additional value over VoIP otherwise it does not make sense so ask yourself first, what can I get out of using teleconferencing that I cannot get out of using VoIP.

The answer for me is that you are interested more in what the other party has to say. There are times when the objective is to talk (transmit information) and other times when the objective is to listen (receive information). In that sense I would recommend teleconference if you want to get to understand the other party better, a customer experience etc. A problem with the conf call is that you may have some people only using the telephone and not the PC which means they cannot follow your presentation.

That’s my take, what about yours?

So deciding on which technology to use all depends on costs, your target audience and your objectives if you have these 3 clear the decision should be an easy one. Which type of communication do you prefer using and when? Are there any other options technologies you have used that add more value that the standard webinar?

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    Posted in communication, Engagement, Marketing, Webinar