Get your advocates selling your Product

Your greatest marketing and sales tool is customer advocacy. Having others talk about your product is important. And getting them selling the virtues of how your solution will benefit like-minded customers with the same need as themselves is everything!

 

This approach will drive the strongest growth. If you get it right, you’ll also create a strong bond between you and your customer base going forward. I have never found a greater marketing and sales machine than ‘bought into’ customers: where you have a great relationship and they love the brand and solutions you deliver.

 

The first and the greatest voice of those customers you want on board are the customers that everyone is looking towards to guide the market. These are your innovators.

 

If you are entering into an existing market with a new product, gather those innovators together that you know already.

 

If it is a new market, you are going to have to do some work on segmentation. Start building personas as to what an innovator looks like in this new market, and then start to build relationships. You could offer them an incentive to take a look at your new product before anyone else, get them on the pilot providing feedback, or offer them a years free subscription.

 

Ultimately if you can get the innovators to understand and start talking about the value of the product you are launching into a market, you will move from the innovator to early adopter phase of the maturity model very quickly. Remember, innovators are generally happy to take a risk on a new solution if they feel it gives them a competitive advantage.

 

How to make a Product Partnership successful: the 7 things you can’t afford to ignore

Following on from my last post on the importance of Product Partners and how they help software organisations increase revenue, I was asked what to do once you’ve identified a potential software partner.  How do you make that partnership work?

There are no hard and fast rules and every Product Partnership will be different.  However, here’s my checklist for getting a successful partnership off the ground:

1. Business Alignment

You need to define a strategic mutual vision of success for the parties involved outlining how each can leverage the strengths of the other.  You have to be brutal here though and include looking at how any partnership might adversely affect your business in the future.

2. Business Planning & Governance

A business plan that clearly states missions, objectives and revenue goals is essential, and must be reviewed at set time intervals to make sure this strategy remains relevant and in line with your company’s priorities.

 3. Contracts

Contracts should be put in place to agree the type of relationship, responsibilities, mutual risks, rewards, payments, service level agreements, branding guidelines and rules of engagement.

 4. Technical Interoperability

Customers need to feel confident about the commitment of both companies behind their joint solution, so you’ll need to work with your Partners to ensure and communicate that both products and/or services work seamlessly together.

5. Executive Engagement

Senior Executives within partner companies are key influencers so it is imperative they are on board with the partnership vision and regularly communicate the overall alliance goals.

6. Marketing

Strategic consistent communications, internally and externally, will need to be conveyed throughout the alliances. Your partnership should create a joint Value Proposition unique to customers which will be promoted through marketing content.

7. Sales & Compensation

When working with Partners, each party involved will need to determine who in the sales teams gets rewarded and how they get compensated.  Your sales teams need to be well-versed on the collaboration with a consistent message; they need to be equipped with the necessary tools to effectively verbalise and demonstrate the partnership.

The importance of Product Partners: 4 ways software organisations can increase revenue

For many software companies there is a real challenge in continuing to develop the software to keep pace with changes in their sector. To be successful you need a business strategy that makes sure you meet the needs of customers in your target market . . . and it’s here where Product Partners play a crucial role.

Product Partners are different to straightforward channel resellers who include your software in a portfolio of other solutions to sell to their target market. Instead, Product Partners have created software of their own which adds value to your existing solution. They can help you to offer a functionally-rich solution, create better revenue opportunities, position your company as the strongest supplier, and create new active and passive income streams.

There are four main different types of software Product Partner, all of which need to be carefully managed to make the business successful:

1.      Advocate partners – this is where you would recommend a partner product and company to your customers in return for remuneration, but would remain in control of the sale from proposal through to closing. It’s a low-touch partnership to add value to your solution.

2.      Strategic partners – these are high-value relationships between your company and the Partner, working together for common goals and revenue-share incentives and aligned around the same values and messaging.   This involves working in true collaboration and allows your business to position itself as a leading supplier in a given deal.

3.      Technical partners – partners who pay a fee to pass information between their product and your product, but their product does not feature within your portfolio. This can represent a separate but active revenue stream for your company.

4.      Referral partners – you would pass leads to Partner companies in exchange for commission remuneration, either per lead or per sale, and allow them to lead the sale through to closure. This is more of a passive income partnership where you are allowing partner companies to capitalize on your customer base in exchange for % revenue.

Whichever Product Partner strategy you go for (and it can easily be a combination of all four) it’s important to keep the main goal of any partnership in mind; both sides must get value from the relationship.

Why you need to stop being so Customer-focused (and what you should be doing instead!)

Many organisations would claim to be Customer-focused and, indeed, hold it up as their USP and a reason to do business with them. In truth, to say you’re focused on your customers should really come as standard. Keeping customers happy and giving them the products and services they need is basic business common sense.

However, being just Customer-focused is the old way of doing things; to be truly successful you need to start being Customer-centric – an entirely different approach.

Customer-focused organisations

Customer-focused organisations address customer needs as a way of addressing business goals. They look at how they can get more business by creating a product or service that is ‘better’ than the competitors (and in the software industry this often means ‘has more functionality’) or is cheaper than the competitors. The reasons for being Customer-focused are about maximising revenue and this often comes across as a bit self-serving.

Customer-centric organisations

Customer-centric organisations aren’t just responding to customer needs. They spend time properly understanding their needs and creating a strategy that brings long-term mutual benefits. And they do all of this while delivering a great product to the customer and creating an easy and positive experience for their customers to buy. The revenue which results from this approach is a result of the degree to which their customers have been satisfied.

Customer-focused organisations make decisions that superficially address customer expectations, driven by their desire for improved profit performance. Customer-centric organisations make meaningful changes in order to address their customer’s expectations.

And it’s the Customer-centric approach that results in increased engagement, support, loyalty – and essentially profits – from a happy, expanding customer base.