Tag: Sales
-
GTM is like SDLC
Craft construction and factory construction are different ways to achieve the same goal. If you want a table, you can craft one by selecting lumber and using a wide variety of carpentry skills to shape and sand and varnish a table. Or you can select an item from a table…
-
Scripted and Off-Book Sales Engineers
I was some form of quota-carrying B2B (business to business) sales engineer for about 12 years, and have worked closely with these field engineers ever since moving into product management. There are many paths to success in the field, and I appreciate the clarity of a compensation plan: you’re either…
-
Software Bubbles
You know what I love about software? For any problem, there’s a solution that will automate doing a half-ass job on the easy parts of the problem, and a bubble based on claims that it will solve the whole problem and a couple of ancillary problems along the way. There’s…
-
Beta product releases
The team has worked hard, and milestones have been hit. It’s time to release, and a decision is made: do we call this done, or do we call it beta? I’m going to bundle all the betas together here, but it’s beta if any of these labels apply to the…
-
Competing with the Microsoft Bundle
Something must be done! Here’s something… The vast majority of my career has been in competition with Microsoft’s bundled solutions. I do not think that you win by doing what they do, but more expensively. And yet, this happened. When Microsoft really comes at you, they do it with EEE:…
-
The Rainfinity Demo
It’s easy to dismiss novelty, the new thing is often just the old thing with some small tweaks. But small tweaks add up, and eventually there is real change. Here’s what it was like to demonstrate virtual IP based network redundancy in the year 2000, over twenty years ago. The…
-
Vendor Management and the Unattainable Goal
It starts as a spreadsheet full of tickets. The customer feels that they’re not being heard, and they work with their sales team to produce a record of everything they have ever asked for. This record of course falls victim to the problems described here: 4/5ths of the responses are…
-
How to Present a Product Proposal Executive Deck
I’ve been writing and presenting my entire career, so this set of learnings was definitely puzzling to acquire. But it turns out that you need a different deck for executive presentations than you do for conferences, sales, or product updates. First, a general note for technical or academic people. There’s…
-
How to Run a Customer Roadmap Call
What is your goal? Depends on the stage of the company… you might be working with a five year roadmap of value extraction activities, but if so I can’t really help. I’ve always left companies when they hit that stage. What I’m much more used to is active value creation.…
-
The regrettable features you have to do
Sometimes as a product manager you get a feature request that’s fun and challenging and moves your company forward. Then there’s demands that just make you feel like a sad clown: stuff that doesn’t fit your plan at all. It’s hard work to ignore the nay-sayers and make a new…
Monkeynoodle.Org 