PRAGMATIC MARKETINGTRAINING THAT DIDN’T SUCK

Brian Kelly @resetbrian Feb 2016 Ann Arbor LSC Meetup

IN OCTOBER 2014, I ATTENDED A THREE-DAY TRAINING SESSION IN BOSTON.

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

HERE’S WHAT I LEARNED

▸ Why this topic is relevant to Lean Startup Circle

▸ Who should care about it?

▸ What is Pragmatic Marketing?

▸ How you can apply it

3

Credit / Thanks / Disclaimer: Most of the ideas and content in this presentation are taken directly from Pragmatic Marketing, Inc. I wish they were all mine, but they’re not.

I found these ideas so useful that I created this recap to share them with people who might not have heard of Pragmatic Marketing. I highly recommend that you take their training. pragmaticmarketing.com

IDEAS ARE CHEAP. IT’S ALL ABOUT EXECUTION.

Lean Startup Fanboy

PRAGMATIC MARKETING 4

WHAT’S MISSING?

STRATEGY FIRST.

THEN A PLAN. THEN EXECUTION.

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

WHO SHOULD CARE ABOUT THIS RECAP?

▸ Product Managers

▸ Product Marketers

▸ Engineers

▸ User Experience Designers

▸ Founders

6

AT COMPANIES OF ALL SIZES

TL;DR: FOCUS ON FINDING AN UNMET NEED, USE PRAGMATIC MARKETING TO REFINE, BUILD, BRING YOUR SOLUTION TO MARKET

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

PRAGMATIC MARKETING, INC.?

▸ Yep. That’s the training company’s name.

▸ Established 1993

▸ Focus: Product Management & Product Marketing at technology companies

▸ “Trained tens of thousands of professionals at thousands of companies.”

8

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

COMPANIES THAT ATTENDED MY SESSION (BOSTON, OCTOBER 2014)

▸ Acquia

▸ Backupify

▸ Best Doctors

▸ Blackboard

▸ Bloomberg

▸ Canadian Medical Association

▸ Duo Security

▸ Equifax

▸ Everbridge

▸ IBM

▸ Ipswitch

▸ Polycom

▸ RSA / EMC

▸ Seagate

▸ Wolters Kluwer

9

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

CURRICULUM

▸ Foundations

▸ Focus

▸ Build

▸ Market

▸ Launch

▸ Price

10

Product Management (PM)

Product Marketing (PMM)

This recap (a bit of each)

Marketing

Technical

Strategic

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

If you’re in the business of building and selling a product Pragmatic Marketing is a proven model for how be successful.

▸ How to determine if a product should be built

▸ What to do to bring that product to market

▸ Who does what (PMM, PM, MKTG, Sales, …)

▸ When to do it, and how to do it

12

FOUNDATIONSPRAGMATIC MARKETING

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

WHAT IS BEING “MARKET-DRIVEN?”

▸ Market-driven means we base our decisions on what that market is asking for.

▸ It’s being outside-in.

▸ It’s not thinking inside-out and focusing on what we can do.

14What is being “market-driven”?

Market-driven means we

base our decisions on what

that market is asking for.

→ Be outside-in.

It’s not: Thinking inside-out and

focusing on what we can do.

AN OUTSIDE-IN APPROACH INCREASES THE LIKELIHOOD OF PRODUCT SUCCESS

PRAGMATIC RULE

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

THE AIM OF MARKETING IS TO KNOW AND UNDERSTAND THE CUSTOMER SO WELL THAT THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE FITS HIM AND SELLS ITSELF.

Peter Drucker

PRAGMATIC MARKETING 17

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

SO, WAIT, WE DON’T NEED A SALES TEAM?

If it was only that simple!

‣ Marketing gets customer attention…

‣ But, some customers prefer working with sales, and sales reps are often needed for large, complex deals.

18

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

THE PRAGMATIC P’S

19

Product, Price, Promotion, Place

What’s missing?

Problem

Which one do companies often put too much focus on?

Strategy ExecutionLess Technical

Markets and Business

More TechnicalProducts and Technology

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

TYPICAL APPROACH: EXECUTION-FIRST

Problems with this approach

▸ Activities have a lot of guesswork

▸ It’s really hard to make an impact with tactics because we don’t yet have a strategic view of the market (a.k.a. we don’t know the problems well enough, yet).

22

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

BETTER APPROACH: STRATEGY-FIRST

▸ Do everything from the left.

▸ This gives us everything we need for the right.

23

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

START WITH THE PROBLEM

▸ Get this right, and it will multiply the effect of every single other activity.

24

GOAL: TAKE EVERYTHING THAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE MARKET AND DISTILL IT INTO ONE PAGE.

LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylockreidhoffman.org/linkedin-pitch-to-greylock/

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

TYPICAL SOURCES OF IDEAS

Loudest voices in the room

▸ Input from sales team, tech support, user groups, (some) execs

▸ This results in enhancement requests, special one-offs, etc.

Don’t do this!

▸ This is the noisy 20% of the market

▸ We should be focusing on the quiet 80%

26

PROTIP: QUIET

DOESN’T MEAN

THEY’RE HAPPY

MARKET SEGMENTS

THE BUILDING IS FULL OF PRODUCT EXPERTS. YOUR COMPANY NEEDS MARKET EXPERTS.

PRAGMATIC RULE

IN EVERY MARKET SEGMENT, WE HAVE Potentials

Evaluators

Customers

Market Segment: A group of individuals or businesses that share a set of problems.

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

CUSTOMERS

▸ People who have gone through the process to evaluate solutions to a problem they identified they have, and they have purchased something.

30

PotentialsEvaluators

Customers

Our customers

Customers of our competitors

HOW ARE YOU REACHING

YOUR COMPETITORS’

CUSTOMERS?

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

EVALUATORS

▸ People who want to do something about their problem, but haven’t purchased anything, yet.

31

PotentialsEvaluators

Customers

HOW ARE YOU REACHING

EVERY EVALUATOR?

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

POTENTIALS

▸ People that we believe have a problem, but they don’t know they have that problem, yet.

32

PotentialsEvaluators

Customers

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

DEFINE YOUR MARKET SEGMENTS

Market Segment: A group of individuals or businesses that share a set of problems.

33

▸ Bad Examples ▸ Fortune 500 ▸ Global 2000 ▸ Mid-tier ▸ Wireless

▸ Good examples ▸ Organizations that must produce

regulatory reports ▸ Field salespeople that need to

update the home office from the road

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

USE SEGMENTS TO FIGURE OUT YOUR POSITION

▸ For each segment, identify:

▸ Your distinctive competencies

▸ The competition

▸ Barriers to entry

34

▸ Align with strategy

▸ Sales channels

▸ Development teams

▸ Technology direction

THE ANSWER TO MOST OF YOUR QUESTIONS IS NOT IN THE BUILDING.

PRAGMATIC RULE

PROTIP: SPEAK WITH A

CUSTOMER EVERYDAY

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

INTERVIEW EVERY TYPE, IN EACH OF YOUR MARKET SEGMENTS

▸ Customers tell us the past

▸ Evaluators tell you about the present

▸ Potentials tell you about the future

36

PotentialsEvaluators

Customers

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

FIND THE QUIET 80%

▸ Training classes

▸ Conferences

▸ Associations

▸ Executives and colleagues

▸ Social networks

37

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

ASK… CUSTOMERS AND POTENTIALS

▸ What drives you crazy about your job?

▸ What drives your buying decisions?

▸ What do you think of my company / product?

▸ Who are my competitors, and what do you think of them?

▸ What great products have you seen lately?

38

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

OBSERVE

▸ Start with an open agenda

▸ Understand “a day in the life”

▸ When do they pick up a pencil?

▸ How do they survive without your technology?

When in doubt, listening is better than talking.

39

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

MANY INPUTS, ONE PROBLEM

Problem Statements

▸ “I need a file-indexing database, coupled with a complex query engine, which would allow ad-hoc search and retrieval of documents by random criteria.”

▸ I look bad when I waste time looking through 20 directories and I can’t find the one file that we need.”

40

Bad.

Good!

YOU CAN LISTEN TO WHAT PEOPLE SAY, BUT YOU WILL BE FAR MORE EFFECTIVE IF YOU LISTEN TO WHAT PEOPLE DO.

Seth Godin

PRAGMATIC MARKETING 41

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

EVERYONE IS A PRAGMATIC MARKETER

▸ My buyers tell me that…

▸ I have a neighbor in our industry and she said…

▸ I met a competitor’s customer on the plane…

▸ I recently attended a conference and met…

▸ I made a cold call and heard…

▸ Our user group said…

▸ While visiting our clients I learned…

42

ONLY BUILD SOLUTIONS FOR PROBLEMS THAT ARE URGENT, PERVASIVE AND THAT THE MARKET WILL PAY TO SOLVE.

PRAGMATIC RULE

ORGANIZING YOUR TEAM

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

45

DEV

MARCOM

SALES

PRODUCT TEAM

build stuff

sell stuff

promote stuff

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

ACCOUNTABILITY

▸ Product Team: Collects and quantifies the problem

▸ Development: Solves the problem

▸ Marketing Communications: Promotes the product

▸ Sales Channel: Helps people buy

46

HOW WELL IS YOUR

COMPANY KEEPING THESE

RESPONSIBILITIES

SEPARATE, TODAY?

IF THE PRODUCT TEAM DOESN’T DO ITS JOB, OTHER DEPARTMENTS WILL FILL THE VOID.

PRAGMATIC RULE

37activities

Which are the most compelling, right now?

Strategic

Execution

DEFINE OWNERS

Less Technical

DEFINE OWNERS

More Technical

PRAGMATIC MARKETING

IN CLOSING

▸ Discover and validate market problems

▸ Focus on markets and problems to identify the best opportunities

▸ Create market-driven artifacts (personas, buying process, etc.)

▸ Clearly define the lines of each team: product, dev, comm, sales

Run the product like a business of it’s own.

51

Brian Kelly @resetbrian Ann Arbor LSC Meetup Feb 2016

THANKS

Now, go take this training! pragmaticmarketing.com