Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

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 e...

When I started out in the team, I was tasked out with coming out with a plan so that we can demonstrate the product with real data. The idea was to demonstrate it to our prospect with their own data and win them over. However, when I started working, I found out that what we lacked was not a plan but a vision. I quickly put together a one day workshop with our team and our product owner. When we started talking, we talked about several things and figured out that we needed a plan of various proportions. We needed a plan that could help us one the following: Provide a focus for the long term with near term focus on just one thing Help us talk to prospects on what we are going to do Help us decide on when we would need to focus shift on which function - Engineering , sales etc We also did a quick “Product in a box” exercise so that all of us in a team can practice and imbibe the elevator pitch. We needed this since we had to do this pitch at several levels - Inter...