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Effective Product Marketing

Develop successful go-to-market strategies for your product

Is your product marketing plan just a list of tactical activities? Do you have a truly effective marketing program? Are constant requests from Sales dominating your time and resources? Is it difficult to build or sustain the company’s commitment to marketing?

Attend the Effective Product Marketing (EPM) seminar to explore the outbound marketing roles, priorities and processes that characterize market-driven technology companies. The Effective Product Marketing course shows you how to quickly develop a convincing plan for anything from a single campaign to a strategic go-to-market initiative. You will see what the sales team really needs now, and what you can do to deliver significantly more value over the next few months. Our Effective Product Marketing seminar will show you how to capture the marketing metrics that will permanently alter senior management’s relationship to the marketing organization and budget with proper effective marketing programs.

Whether your role is product marketing, industry marketing or marketing communications, the two-day Effective Product Marketing course is filled with case study ideas, templates and tools that immediately impact your results, and then pay dividends throughout your career.

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Who should attend?

Product managers, product marketing managers and directors, industry marketing managers, segment managers, anyone working in field marketing and marketing communications. You should attend if you are responsible for planning or execution of programs and tools that build market share in technology markets.

Seminar fees

$1,595 US per person for the 2-day Effective Product Marketing seminar. Tuition is due prior to the seminar and includes a complete set of training materials, continental breakfast and lunch.

Seminar agenda

I. Roles and Responsibilities
Most product marketing responsibilities are poorly defined, resulting in tactical go-to-market plans and constant, disruptive requests for sales support. Product managers need to optimize their time and knowledge to enable effective sales and marketing of their products. Product marketing managers and marketing communications people need to know how to work together, in planning, executing and measuring marketing strategies and programs. The entire product and marketing team, regardless of size, needs a process that measurably contributes to business and strategic goals.

This section of the seminar illustrates the differing roles of successful product managers, product marketing managers, industry or segment managers, and marketing communications team members. All participants gain clarity about the skills they need to master and the results they should expect from each part of the team.

Topics Covered:

Differentiate roles of product management and product marketing
Distinguish sales support from product marketing
Ensure effective hand-off between product management, marketing and sales

II. Segmenting and Targeting Audiences
Learn how to gain deep insight into the buying criteria associated with the economic, technical and user buyers who are part of a complex selling process. Case studies and templates show attendees how to profile each persona's pain points and the criteria they will use to make a purchase decision. Learn how to develop segmentation and messaging strategies that impact buyers in mature and developing markets.

Topics Covered:

Segmented marketing strategies
Buying criteria and program influences
Building market messages

III. Building a Strategic Product Marketing Program
Participants will see how to bring their most valuable “marketing assets” together to achieve measurable results. This section of the seminar is highly motivational for those where marketing is an endless list of disconnected activities. Discover product marketing as a science, not art, and learn how to choose and measure each activity for its contribution to a corporate goal.

See how to build a budget that clearly delineates the cost and results of each program investment, generating company-wide support for the right marketing investment.

We demonstrate various technology company program strategies through case studies, including successes and failures, reviewing all aspects of the marketing program plan and launch plan.

Topics Covered:

Communicating the business case for product marketing programs
Supporting sales goals
Metrics that build management support
Creating the right marketing budget
A strategic approach to the marketing program mix

IV. Align with Sales
Attendees learn how to effectively enable their direct and indirect sales channels without providing hands-on support for individual deals. We identify techniques to prevent the daily interruptions from sales people, giving them what they really need to move opportunities through every stage of the sales process; from lead acceptance through contract signing to implementation.

Product managers and marketers will see how to motivate sales people to sell new product or technologies to new buyers or segments, overcoming the channel's natural resistance to anything that is unfamiliar.

Part of this module explores opportunities to build web content and sales tools that influence competitive positioning and buying decisions, eliminating tactical activities that waste resources and budget.

Topics Covered:

Responding to endless tactical requests
Measuring and improving sales processes/productivity
Optimizing web content and sales tools
Working with Sales to sell new products and enter new markets

V. Goal-Oriented Program Execution
Attendees will see how they can contribute to programs that impact the company's strategic goals for revenue growth, positioning awareness and customer retention. We emphasize segmented marketing strategies and practical measurement practices that any technology company can implement immediately, whether or not they have Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM).

Through case studies and examples, attendees learn how to identify strategies and programs that can be implemented with budgets of any size. This process focuses teams on programs that have the highest probability of contributing to measurable improvements in both short and long term goals.

Topics Covered:

Managing and measuring lead quality and throughput
Integrating programs by market segment and target audience
Measuring results with or without CRM
Influencing customer retention and migration
Building and measuring positioning awareness

VI. Start Where You Are
In the final section, we explain ways to apply the process to work already in progress.

Attendees leave this session knowing how to begin to implement key concepts and principles for a near-term program or product launch. They depart with a clear sense of purpose and a more strategic view of their position, regardless of their role in the marketing organization.

Topics Covered: