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Quest Software a NASDAQ-traded company with annual revenues of $735 million, is a leading enterprise IT management software and solutions provider. More than 100,000 customers worldwide have selected Quest Software because of its innovative database, virtualization and identity management solutions. The company has more than 3,500 employees and operates in 27 countries.

The product management charter is split between dozens of product managers and product marketing managers.

Industry

Enterprise IT Software

Seminar

Practical Product Management

Challenge

A new director of product marketing joined Quest Software’s identity management business unit in 2007 and found that the product management activities and practices were different from team to team.

“Each product manager and product marketing manager had a different modus operandi,” states Bill Evans, director of product marketing for Quest.

Without a standard methodology to manage products through the development and go-to-market cycles, it was impossible to get consistent and predictable results for the product line.

In addition, the identity management offering was a loose coupling of more than a dozen products owned by several product manager/product marketing manager teams. Each team used their own approach to introduce and launch products. Sales of the identity management offerings were sluggish. Buyers did not understand how the disparate point products solved their business problem. Each product had a slightly different message that targeted a slightly different buyer. A bigger challenge was the sales channel did not understand when to offer a specific product. The identity management products needed to be relaunched as an integrated solution with new positioning, and a refined target market based on key buyer personas.

Solution

In April 2008, Quest brought in Pragmatic Marketing to deliver the Practical Product Management seminar onsite to the product managers and product marketing managers of the identity management group. By listening to some of the key issues of the product management leadership team, Pragmatic Marketing was able to deliver a seminar emphasizing go-to-market activities such as positioning and product portfolio. The seminar also introduced the product management team to critical tools and techniques that support the sales process, improving sales effectiveness, positioning and marketing through the concept of buyer personas.

Results

The new identity management solution was launched in September 2008 using processes based on the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. The team also used Pragmatic Marketing’s tools and templates to develop and deploy its own best practices.

The individual products were combined into a single Quest One Identity Management solution based on the portfolio management concepts of the Framework. The name of the solution is Quest One Identity Management.

Now Quest One Identity Management successfully competes in the market and is considered a unique and differentiated solution by analysts tracking the identity management market. The sales channel can offer a complete solution that focuses on the buyer’s specific pain.

In January of 2009 the Quest One Identity Management solution was recognized for winning a “shoot-out” competition sponsored by a major security magazine.

Customer Feedback

“We knew where we wanted to go with the identity management products, but we did not know how to get there. The Pragmatic Marketing Framework gave us the map we needed to reach our destination.”
Bill Evans, Director Product Marketing, Quest Software