When Product Marketers Fail

What's going on? Why are some product marketers falling short these days? It's a conundrum - well not really but I like the word. The reasons are straightforward and fixable.

Lack of Deep Customer Understanding

One of the fundamental responsibilities of product marketers is to understand their target audience. Unfortunately, product marketers in some sectors rely on surface-level market research or make assumptions without conducting thorough customer research. For instance, there is a huge disconnect between the customer expectations companies are attempting to deliver and what customers need.

A survey by Accenture found that two-thirds of consumers want companies to understand their changing needs and respond to them quickly. But 88% of corporate executives say that their customer's needs are changing too fast for them to keep up. To address this, product marketers and their colleagues have been oversimplifying segmentation and underestimating the impact of external pressures on behavior. This has led to this chasm in expectations vs. reality.

How to fix it?

Yes, simple is better than complex but if segmentations and customer needs are oversimplified, then organizations will never meet their customers where they are - multifaceted, complex, evolving, and doing their best to adapt to the vicissitudes of life. They must build ethnographic machines to have specific and actionable information on the state of customer needs. This machine needs to churn out analytics on customer needs continually. AI-based analytics can accomplish this.

Ineffective Collaboration with Product Management

Product marketers and product management teams should be tight-knit to ensure the right products are built to meet customer needs. However, in some organizations, there is a disconnect between these two teams.

A Google search on "product marketing and product management" yields a lot of content and most of them address the differences and how they should work together. It sure suggests that this is a divisive and poorly understood topic.

This lack of collaboration makes it difficult for them to create compelling messaging and positioning strategies that resonate with customers. Many product managers and product marketers reported that misalignment with marketing causes delays in product launches.

Cursory Competitive Analysis

Staying ahead of the competition is vital (duh). Product marketers are responsible for conducting thorough competitive analyses to understand market trends, identify strengths and weaknesses of competitors and how to leverage them, understand their product and business strategies, and take this information to power both sales and product efforts. But, are they looking at the right competitors? Focusing on direct competitors while straightforward, barely scratches the surface.

What about your indirect competitors; those that offer similar capabilities but with an entirely different approach? Think Canva v. Photoshop; both have the ability to customize images for instance, but they use fundamentally different approaches. But what happens when an indirect competitor starts evolving some of the approaches in your product stack? Wham. They are now a direct competitor.

What about potential competitors? They may not be competing with you now but 12 months, 16 months, 24 months from now? A product marketer being caught with their proverbial pants down is not a pretty site.

Getting Sales and Marketing To Work Together.

Sales departments often think that marketers are out of touch with the real world, while marketers see salespeople as narrow-minded, too focused on individual customer experiences, unaware of the broader market, and oblivious to the future. As a result, each group tends to underestimate the contributions of the other, leading to a lack of coordination that hurts organizational performance. Surprisingly, few companies actively analyze and improve the relationship between these essential functions.

Sales and Marketing strains stem from economic (budget allocation) and cultural (personality types and approaches to success) differences. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to Sales-Marketing misalignment, but there are a number of best practices to improve the relationship, including:

• Clearly define roles and responsibilities.
• Establishing regular communication and collaboration between Sales and Marketing.
• Creating a shared understanding of the company's goals and objectives.
• Measuring and tracking the performance of both functions.
• Providing training and development opportunities for Sales and Marketing professionals.

Final thoughts…

As a product marketeer, it was painful to write this post. But, ya can't fix what you don't see. Without deep customer understanding, relying on surface-level market research or making assumptions without conducting thorough customer research, brands quickly use touch with their customer base. Ineffective collaboration with product management and sales leads to a lack of product-market fit and go-to-market coordination. Not taking an analytic/data-driven approach that analyzes the right data (not the data provided by IT) really does relegate the entire marketing function to a sales-support function. Next step: take a long hard look at both your internal relationships and collaboration points. Determine if they are working as envisioned. If not, sales, marketing, and product need to sit down and redefine their scopes and product marketing needs to be re-engineered to address these scopes and collaboration points.