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53: Product is a 4 letter word · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is the curse of product knowledge holding you back?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Find out how in this episode.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Bite-sized sales podcast, where we believe that sales is the most important team in a B2B company, that the sales team deserves great sales training delivered online because it sucks spending days out of the field or off the phones, and we believe that taking bite-sized steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve your results.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and I'm using my 20 plus years in B2B sales to bring you simple, actionable ideas that you can use every day to help you get better.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get to the topic for today, this episode is sponsored by Sales Bluebird.
• 1:22
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• 1:29
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• 1:44
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• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to episode 53 of the podcast.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And today's subject is more about mindset or a thought process.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all about products.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about companies that exist, it's usually because they have something that they developed or created or bought which solves problems for some subset of the market out there, right?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the exchange of value that it takes place.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Company A has a problem, company B sells them something to help solve that problem.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Company A doesn't mind doing that because you know the cost to solve it is a lot less than the cost to keep the problem going.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And companies that that go and solve these problems, what they create are things they usually call products, right?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they orientate the whole company around them, if you think about it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, usually what they have is an RD team or development team that sits there somewhere, and what they do is they develop these things that call they're called products, right?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: They there's a team of people and they're usually orientated around a product set that they they'll go work on.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's the same in the software world, the hardware world, and many different types of products out there.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Also, what you tend to have are are managers of those products, product managers.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And their job is to look at the business side of that product and say, is it going the direction?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is it solving the problems?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Are we doing the right things to grow the revenue from this product?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And are we aligning the resources internally to effectively to be able to do that?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then what you also have on the marketing side is product marketing people.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what their job is, is to take the their knowledge about that product and the market, put together customer-facing materials explaining how great and wonderful this product is, and also internal-facing stuff, which usually goes to salespeople, that's all about that product as well, all the things that it does and and doesn't do.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens behind the scenes is that planning takes place around the product set, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they say, okay, well, we've got you know existing stream of revenue from this product, and we it's costing us this much to develop it and maintain it and support it.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we want to grow the business from this product.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So let's think think about the resources to go do that.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then after the fact, what they want to do is to say, well, you know, we launched a new product and we invested X million dollars to develop it.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how much did sales sell?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And was it all was it worth it in the end?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Did the ROI come through and all the rest of it, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they think about the investments in products to be able to do that.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: From our side, on the training on the sales side, when we're trained in these things, we're trained in those products, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: They'll say there's a product launch coming up, there's a new version of the product coming up, and they'll want to tell us, usually in a one-hour webinar, all the things about how great this new product or new version of the product is, and all the things the features do and things like that, right?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the world that we're in.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: The the result is that everywhere around us in our company, inside our company, and our partner set is an orientation towards products.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the huge problem with this is that our prospects don't care about us and our products.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care what we call them, they don't care what we think of them, we don't, they don't care if we think they're awesome and they're gonna solve world hunger.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care about all the whiz-bang features it has, they don't care about its color, its speed, its size, and the feeds that go into it, all this sort of stuff, right?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: What they care about first is themselves and their challenges, their aspirations, their fears and frustrations and any big goals, initiatives that they're trying to run uh this year or next year.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they care about.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And all those things are very, very rarely centered around any vendor's product, right?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're all about uh much bigger things and lighter things than that.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: They don't really start, their starting point is not some vendor's product.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So our big challenge as salespeople is how do we forget about the orientation towards a product and focus primarily on buyers and everything, everything that they care about.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting, you know, when I look back years over the years, I have worked alongside salespeople who literally just didn't know the features of the products that they were selling, right?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they would know the name, they would know the kind of thing it would do, but wouldn't know any detail at all.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they rely on other people around them to know that, right?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: They'd have a pre-sales engineer, someone there who whose job it was to know the details, they would let them do that.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they would just focus on you know the outcomes the product delivered and who would care about it and go and try and match the two.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, when I think back, there were two camps internally when they looked at those people, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's say that the rep who didn't know his products was called Jimmy, right?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: There was one camp who would really put the person down.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: They would say, Jimmy doesn't even know what our products do.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: He sits in front of customers and can't answer simple questions, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the camp that is, you know, Jimmy's quite successful, and you know what's funny is Jimmy doesn't even know the features of the product set, right?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's two very different lenses in which to look at Jimmy.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've tended to find over the years is the people that don't know their products but do know the outcomes they deliver and how to go talk to uh prospects about things that they care about in relation to outcomes, they tend to be pretty successful, right?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: They tend to be pretty successful, and it's funny how they're able to just filter out all the noise around us to be able to focus on what they know their prospects and their senior execs at the prospects really care about.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: So when I look at uh what to do about this, I think there's three situations that come up a lot, and I want to see if you can put yourself in one of these and and do something different.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is you know, it's the start of the year, there's gonna be people listening to this who are starting at new companies, and it's fairly likely you're gonna walk into your new company, there's gonna be some sort of new hire training, and there's gonna be an orientation around products, right?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know what it's like you walk in and you're gonna get PowerPointed to death by a product marketing person or someone like that about all the awesome things that the products do and how it's the most wonderful thing in the world, and how you should go out and sell their product versus any other products that we might have as a company, but also the competition, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the orientation on that on that training is gonna be around the product.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so the challenge for you in that situation is don't fall to the curse of knowledge, right?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you learn all the nitty-gritty stuff, you'll want to go out and talk about the nitty-gritty stuff, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if you focus your efforts on learning about outcomes and the things that the products solve and why and who the prospects are that care about those, that's where you're gonna be successful.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So your job is to filter out the detail that you doesn't matter and focus on the things that your clients and your prospects care about.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: The second situation you might be in is start of the year is often a time when people talk about new product announcements.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you might be in an existing company and there's some new things happening, right?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And again, the challenge is you know, what is it about this new product that my prospects, senior execs of my prospects, are gonna care about?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a lot of things you're gonna be trained on.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, your job is to try and filter out the detail and focus in on what really matches and some outcomes problem solved and how it's different to everyone else.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And by the same token, you know, the third situation is gonna be new versions of existing products.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I hate to say it, but you know, I I've sat there and seen announcements about new products, uh, sorry, new versions of products, and really sat there and said, there is nothing about this that I would go and start talking to prospects about because it's such minutiae, it's so detailed.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: The the uses of this new feature that they developed are so small that it's not worth doing it, right?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there will be ones that they are quite impactful, but still you're gonna they're gonna be focused on their discussion about how it's so wonderful and how you know this one feature is gonna change how we're doing things, and and very few times is it oriented around the buyer and the prospect.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, your job there is to filter out the things that our prospects don't care about and get really focused on the outcomes and the big things this changes.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, these are the challenges I think that we're gonna have is how do we ignore some of the things that don't matter and focus on the things that we know do matter.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And every day, every week, and every month, you're gonna have to force yourself to think about your prospects first, learn about them, and then talk about how the outcomes that we deliver through the products will actually make a difference for them.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can think that uh anytime product detail is a four-letter word and customers is where the value is, then you'll learn to think about prospects and customers first and not product first.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this episode, the single most useful thing you could do to support this podcast is share it with your sales network.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It'll probably take you less than 20 seconds.
• 11:14
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• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It will mean the world to me and it could make a difference to those you share it with.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I need your suggestions, please.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a topic you want me to cover or just want to get in touch, simply email me at upside at unstoppable.do.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's upside at unstoppable.do.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And now to wrap up, training without implementation is just entertainment.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And pretty poor entertainment when I deliver it.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So make sure you take action on what you learned today and keep getting it better and better each and every day.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Also, this world does not need more sales BS.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: So please don't create any more.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Be great at the fundamentals, be honest, be real, be yourself, just do not BS.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, I'm signing off as the great Joe Sexton would by saying, gone to sell.