The proliferation of SaaS and Apple’s demonstration of the impact of product design and user experience, have changed how marketers and their companies look at products. The lines between product management, product development, marketing, and sales are disappearing as quickly as chocolate from my kitchen.
At a recent Churchill Club CMO panel, Nora Denzel, Senior VP, Big Data, Social Design and Marketing at Intuit articulated this trend best with the comment, “our product IS the funnel.” She described that Intuit customers make decision based on product use, not marketing messages. Their experience in using the product determines whether they spend money on it. That should be old hat to anyone offering a freemium model, but may not be explicitly understood by companies new to the products as services environment. Even more traditional products are evolving to play a bigger role in sales and marketing. Interactive TV guides provided by carriers upsell on-demand channels and premium content, toys include complimentary on-line gaming components that cross sell more toys, and grocery packaging offers recipes that promote sister brands and products.
A key implication of this product-as-sales-tool trend is the accompanying change in product design and development, which marketing leaders clearly recognize. Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP remarked that “product launch is the day you sat down to decide what product you are going to build.” To which Laura McLellan of Gartner quipped, “If marketing gets involved when the product is done, engineering gets what it deserves,” voicing my own observations that R&D culture has been slow to change and, in some companies, still drives product roadmaps with a myopic focus on technology and features rather than user experience. (You know who you are.)
Taking it a bit farther, Jonathan Becher described a vision of product development in which just-in-time creation of features and designs that respond to the customer’s current preferences would replace precisely targeted marketing of existing products
Bottom Line: Whether you’re delivering products on-premise or as service, your Product Managers should have among their top design criteria:
- Ease of use and high quality customer experience
- Opportunities for customers to experience the product before they buy
- Usage and behavior-based upsell and cross sell features
- Seamless integration of usage, behavior, and request-based support and social features
- Intelligence and analytics capabilities that use information like product configuration, user behavior and preferences, and transactional data to provide additional value to your company and to customers
- Product architecture, design, and/or manufacturing process that allow fast and easy modifications, feature additions, and integration of complimentary products.
Please share your examples of products with built-in sales and marketing.
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