In previous articles I showed you how to build your product sales process and talked about the differences between hunting and farming. In this article, I want to share what I’d recommend when it comes to achieving the first big step in building an effective product sales process – repeatability. Background If your product sales…
There are two primary ways of generating leads for your product business: hunting and farming. Hunting is when you are proactively reaching out to prospects following your product sales process and farming is when you are investing in direct marketing activities that ultimately bring the leads to you more reactively. Both of these activities are…
Too many product companies view sales as art rather than science. I reject that notion. Product sales should be developed as a process with predictable and repeatable results. In this article, I’m going to walk you through how you can develop a sales process for your product. When complete, you should have the ability to…
I want to talk to you about the challenge of establishing effective product pricing. This phase of building a product experiences a lot of chicken and egg type situations, for example, if I don’t know what people will pay, how will I know how much I can charge? You may be worried that if you…
I talk a lot about the high failure rate of people attempting to build successful product businesses. That’s because I also want to share everything I know that can improve your odds of success by leveraging product strategies that have been proven successful. I’ve previously compared strategies of building a software product vs a productized…
Years ago I set out on a mission to rid the world of product failure. I thought the crazy high failure rate of products (greater than 9 out of 10) was insane and if I could even make a dent in that number then I could help a lot of people. A big part of…
After you’ve identified problems worth solving and selected the problem you wish to solve, the next step is to think through exactly how you are going to solve this problem and provide value to your client. Since you are likely interested in building a product to solve this problem, you are probably at least considering…
When I speak with operators of professional services firms, they often have similar goals related to scaling and boosting profitability. Unfortunately, the typical structure of professional services firms are not naturally designed to support either of these goals. So to truly solve them we must get creative. At the same time, we often speak about…
If you’re a key member of a company that offers professional services and you’d like to be successful in product, I’d recommend that you consider two key paths. The first is to build a solution that will immediately benefit your professional services organization. The second is intended to compliment the services you currently offer and…
Adding a software product to your list of client offerings introduces a lot of exciting possibilities to help your professional services firm grow. However, without a well thought out product plan, this project can go sideways quickly. Remember greater than 9 out of 10 software products fail. I’m here to provide everything you need to…