Product managers are marketers; Innovation Investment Allocation; Thought Leadership Webcast

Jeff Lash

If you’re in Product Management, You’re in Marketing
I’ve heard something disturbing in recent conversations with product managers and product management leaders. As soon as the word “marketing” comes out of my mouth, there’s an almost-instant reaction: “Oh, I think you’re talking to the wrong person.” “I don’t deal with that.” “I’m not in marketing.” As I discuss in my latest post on the SiriusDecisions blog, I’ve got news for you – if you’re in product management, you’re in marketing.

New Research on Innovation Investment Allocation
At SiriusDecisions, we’re conducting ongoing research into how best-in-class b-to-b organizations optimize their investment decisionmaking, including how to allocate investments appropriately, pick the right initiatives to pursue and ensure those investments succeed.

I’ve started sharing some of the findings already on the SiriusDecisions blog, but our research is ongoing and you are invited to take part in this survey. It should take only 10 minutes, and everyone who responds will be given access to a summary of the results. We respect your privacy and the confidentiality of your information, so all responses will be anonymous, and data will reported in aggregate form only.

You can learn more about the research and some of the findings so far.

Free Webcast on Thought Leadership
On Wednesday, March 20, my colleague Pat McAnally will be presenting a webcast entitled Thoughtful Selling: How best-in-class companies leverage thought leadership into campaigns and conversations for game changing results.

Every company is focused on producing content in support of marketing, campaign and sales enablement programs. Yet most would admit the results of their efforts are still missing the mark.

A handful of forward-thinking marketing leaders know that their company’s thought leadership is the secret weapon to creating unique, differentiated and valuable content for campaigns and conversations that can change a sales path, elevate a salesperson into a more valued role and eliminate competitive similarity.

Pat has some fantastic insight into thought leadership and this webcast presented by Launch International and SiriusDecisions will offer some specific best practices and examples of how you can harness the power of your organization’s existing intellectual property and transform that insight into powerful and differentiated content and conversations.

Other Recommended Blog Posts
My SiriusDecisions colleagues have been writing some great blog posts lately — too many to mention here, but these are a few of my favorites:

In Beware of the Big Deal, Lisa Singer offers some great tips for product managers who are told that there’s a HUGE deal that MUST be approved, even though the proposal includes significant discounting. What should you evaluate? What are the risks? How do you know if it’s really a good deal or if it’ll come back to haunt you?

In When Did the Business Case Become Passé?, Marisa Kopec notes that in some situations, the business case is seen as “uncool” or shunned or deprioritized because those responsible are “too busy,” resulting in a lack of alignment between product, marketing and sales, as well as confusion around the direction of the go-to-market strategy. Yes, you want to be agile and nimble, but you also ensure that there is a solid business rationale behind your initiatives, and Marisa offers some advice for “making the business case cool again.”

One of our most frequent topics clients ask about is is how to improve product launch, though other than a Tweet or status update, often Social Media is forgotten or not fully leveraged. In Improve Your Next Product Launch: Engage Customers Through Social Media Channels, Pat McAnally offers insight from recent research looking at how best-in-class organizations are leveraging social media pre-launch, during launch, and post-launch.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash: