I saw a friend the other night at a concert. (His young kids were both performing solo songs at a coffeehouse – it’s kind of a precocious family – they were great!). He recently moved from product management to product marketing. His current project is to pull together a go-to-market plan for his product. At the moment, in his words, he is “Waiting for product management to tell me what I need to know.”

This is one of the downsides of being the locus of all this product communication – people are always waiting on us product managers.

But it started me thinking about how we might make this as easy on ourselves – and as easy on our teammates in product marketing – as possible.

In this episode, I talk about what go-to-market really means. The “what?” and “why?” of the situation. And then I give one idea for how you might be able to work with your product marketing manager to “tell them what they need to know” in a relatively painless way.

On Product Knowledge and Go-to-Market

In the episode I mention a number of articles and podcasts on this topic of “product knowledge” for go to market, and here are some of them:

* Sales Team Missing Quota? It’s Not Their Fault – This article is the jumping off point for a bunch of related information about how to help your sales and marketing teams succeed. * A podcast version of the article above and some of its sequels, in two parts: Sales Not Making Quota? It’s Probably Your Fault – Part 1, and Sales Not Making Quota? It’s Probably Your Fault – Part 2* How To Elicit, Structure, and Use Customer Success Stories podcast episode* My customer stories cheatsheet – how to tell better customers stories, and the questions you need to ask to get the good stuff.* An article on objection handling and how to prepare your sales team with the appropriate stories and guidance: The Secrets of Highly Successful Sales People: Objection Handling

Other Good Links

* April Dunford’s great book Obviously Awesome (Amazon link) and her site. You can find a lot more of her content on positioning effectively, including talks and articles.* And since we’re talking about positioning, I must recommend one of the original books on the topic, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout.* Project Product Conference: Check out the Project Product conference, and if you’d like to register, use discount code “SPKRFRIEND20”. It runs March 10-11 in Indianapolis, Indiana.* Workshop: You can sign up for my workshop on mastering presentation and influence skills for product managers and product marketers in Indianapolis on March 11, following the Project Product conference.

Subscribe, Rate, ​Review

You can subscribe to the podcast using the buttons below,