Product managers win when their products are adopted.

Therefore, half of the battle is building amazing products, and the other half of the battle is selling amazing products. This principle is especially relevant for B2B products.

Effective product managers need to understand how to best work with their sales teams. We mentioned previously in this series that you can get involved with your sales teams at varying levels of commitment. There are three levels, starting from easiest to hardest:

1. Shadowing
2. Partnering
3. Driving

So far, we’ve covered how to shadow your sales team, and how to partner with your sales team on calls.

For this article, we’ll focus on how to drive sales calls as a product manager.

But first, let’s address why driving sales calls matter for product managers. Continue Reading

In our previous article, we discussed how to shadow your sales team to uncover new insights about your product.

While shadowing your sales team can be incredibly valuable, you can learn even more about your customers and your prospects by playing an active role on sales calls.

By joining your sales team on calls, you can provide additional value and increase the odds that your company will close the deal. After all, as a product manager, you hold unique insight about your product that others may not have.

Plus, as you become more senior as a product manager, your participation on sales calls will eventually become mandatory.

Therefore, no matter what level of seniority you’re at, you should start learning how to partner on sales calls. Continue Reading

As product managers, we only succeed if our products are adopted. That means that we need to know both how to build amazing products as well as how to sell amazing products.

And what better way to know how to sell your product than to join your sales team on their calls?

When you join your sales team on calls, you’ll learn a couple of eye-opening insights. You’ll learn how prospects make decisions, how your salespeople position your product, and where the key gaps are in your product versus the competitive landscape.

These learnings are critical, because they drive tangible next steps on how to strengthen your product offering.

You can get involved with your sales team at varying levels of commitment. Generally speaking, there are three levels of commitment, starting from easiest to hardest: Continue Reading

Product managers are fundamentally non-essential to the creation of a viable product – that is, we enable functions to collaborate and prioritize to provide 100x the impact they otherwise would, but many successful products out in the world don’t have product managers.

In fact, most small startups run without a dedicated product manager, because they haven’t reached the scale at which they would need a fully-dedicated employee to tackle product management.

Product managers are not value generators – they are value multipliers. The foundational value generators at a company are our cross-functional stakeholders and contributors.

Therefore, having empathy for stakeholders is just as important as having empathy for customers, or else you can’t get anything done. Continue Reading

Product managers who build B2B products have all faced the problem before: a large customer needs the product to work in a particular way that isn’t currently supported.

So, what should you do next?

Before we actually answer that question, let’s first look at the different general strategies available to you when a customer makes a feature request for a B2B product.

You have 4 strategies:

1. Build globally
2. Configure
3. Customize
4. Punt

Let’s talk through all 4 of the above strategies, noting their strengths and weaknesses. Then, we’ll dive into how to make the appropriate decision, based on your situation.

Building a Global Feature

In B2B, your customer knows how to run their business much better than you know how to run their business.

Therefore, much of the time, their feature requests will make lots of sense across your entire user base – especially if your customers are leaders in their industry. Continue Reading

In our previous article, we discussed the three core categories of switching costs: financial, procedural, relational.

How might we use switching costs to drive more value from our product? You have two core strategies available to you.

1. Decrease the cost your customer must pay to switch to your product
2. Increase the cost your customer must pay to switch to competitors

After all, if you decrease the cost to switch to you, you’re providing more value: value is the ratio of benefits to costs. When you drive down costs, you increase value even if you don’t increase the benefit you provide.

And, if you increase the cost to switch to competitors, you are diluting your competitors’ value. Since value is the ratio of benefits to costs, when you increase their costs, you decrease the viability of their value propositions.

Let’s dissect both below. Continue Reading