Skip to main content

How to pitch your product

Product managers have to be on the road with the sales team and try to understand the market better.

Any amount of market research is not sufficient to help understand what should the product shape up like.

In case you have observed, We need two kinds of pitches to make - they need to be made on a specific scenario - some times to the same contact at the different times.

Scenario 1:  You want the prospect to start listening to you. The prospect has not yet connected with you.

This scenario is the most common when we do cold calling or when we meet people in conferences / fairs.

The prospect has no idea who you are or what problem you are trying to solve.

In this case, you need to have the following information
  • What is his/her dominant problem?
  • What figures do we have to state it more quantitatively?
To put it in better perspective, The dominant problem of a typical retailer that we meet is as follows:
  • I am not sure what kind of stock is left with me at the end of the month and not sure what is the sales trend. If I know this, I could procure in a better way and handle my inventory in a better way
  • If the retailer has known what inventory he has in a monthly fashion, he could push the higher valued inventory within 3-4 months of procurement. Since he is not able to do this, he is losing on approximately 5% of his original planed margin.
This tells a story and lets him connect to the product immediately.

Scenario 2: You have 2 minutes to explain , based on which you can get into a detailed conversation.

Your 2 minutes starts when the prospect has connected with you and wants to know more. However, he is not sure what kind of product you are trying to sell and before he can explain what his real problem is , he wants to hear you out.

It is better to go for a simple and effective pitch , probably structured as below. Helps a lot.
For [Target Customer]
who has [Customer Need]
[Product name] is a [market category]
That [one key benefit]
unlike [Competition], the product [unique differentiator]
While there could be more effective ways in which you could pitch your product, I would suggest that product managers leave them to the sales team. They are far more effective and have more rabbit in their sleeve than we can even think of.

This should be effective enough and is a definite thing for a product manager.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The right business model for your product

How would you decide what is the best business model for your product? Deciding on the right business model is very important for the product. It does not necessarily mean what is the price of your product. There could be no price for your product - though that is a myth. For example, we think google or Facebook is free. However, we are never the customers for Google or Facebook. It is the advertisers that are its customers. What we need to figure out when we decide on a business model are as follows: Who is my target audience? Who is my customer What is the price. How is the support model going to work Who are my partners While we do not absolutely need to price a product, we need to understand how we would make money. For example Open ERP does not price its product. However, its product is not the ERP software but really the hosting, service and training that it offers. While pricing is an important part, what is more important is in realising who is you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Designing for Accessibility

The software world has starting being more inclusive. After serving only the geeks and the techies, a lot of the software that is produced in this world has started looking at how it can be mor euseful. One of the key constituencies of software usage is people with disability. The ADA (Americans with disability Act) has forced a lot of the software developers to look at this issue. The software world has also responded sensitively and with care making as much of the software usable by people with disability. One of the key components that we are looking at in this are people with visual impairment. Over a period of time, a lot of the software has made sure that the user experience is adjusted in such a way that is is intuitive. Google has been a front runner in this and a lot of others are also not left behind. Text The size and the font typology is very important. Choose those aspects with ADA in mind. Media like Images A lot of the media , including video and images ,...
Post a Comment
Read more