Category: Product Demos
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Competitive Demos – How to Attack Your Competitor’s Strengths
Competitive demos are stressful, especially when you’re operating on very little knowledge or hearsay information about your competitor’s weaknesses. Here’s the thing about focusing on your competitor’s weaknesses. Just like you, they know their own shortcomings and there’s a good chance they’ve been schooled on how to neutralize them with some clever positioning or avoidance […]
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How to Be The Solution Consultant You Love Buying From
For all of you pre-sales solution consultants and sales engineers looking for new ways to differentiate your demos, step away from your products for a quick minute. Sure, the product is what prospects are buying in the literal sense, but with few exceptions, the biggest thing that’ll differentiate your products and your organization in the […]
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Product Demos: How to Sell Solutions Versus Products
Here’s a simple three-step approach for your product demos that will help you sell solutions versus products. It’ll make differentiation easier and improve your sales win rates. In many cases, the product silos that exist within product management become transparent to buyers during the sales cycle, creating the perception you’ve got a bunch of fragmented […]
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The One Thing That Simplifies Sales Enablement Most
Nothing eludes the ripple effect of your product management model, and sales enablement is no exception. Sales enablement encompasses a lot, but there’s one thing that still matters more than anything else when you’re a salesperson in the throes of the sales process. It’s the conversations you’re having with buyers at all levels, from users […]
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Product Portfolio Management – Market Strategy vs. Product Strategies
Going all the way back to my practitioner days, it was apparent then that as product management goes, so goes the rest of the organization. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise since everything revolves around the products. My goal with this 10-part series on product portfolio management is to highlight the strategic ripple effect […]
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How To Use a Portfolio Vision to Lead Products
Here’s why a portfolio vision is so critical to the success of your products and how it elevates Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams to plan and execute more strategically. Think of your portfolio vision as the ultimate “strategic goal/outcome” your target customers want from your portfolio of products. Then think of the […]
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Bridging the Gap – Strategic vs Tactical Customer Discovery
Market and customer discovery is the single most foundational skill for success in product management and product marketing. There are two things to consider when it comes to being more strategic in your discovery. One of them is obvious and the other is rarely if ever discussed. Let’s start with the obvious one, understanding what’s […]
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The 3 E’s of a Great Sales Demo – A Chain Reaction
When all three of these factors are present, it’s going to be a great sales demo. There are a lot of steps in the sales process that can make or break a deal, but buyer politics aside, the demo is the biggest hurdle to clear because the product is the centerpiece of the evaluation. The […]
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5 Great Career Paths for Sales Engineers & Solution Consultants
The career paths for sales engineers (SEs) and solution consultants (SCs) are wide open due to the blend of business and technical skills, sales skills and positioning expertise required to succeed in this role. If you think about it, those skills, to a greater or lesser degree, are required in just about any market or […]
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Qualifying Your Account Executives Before a Demo
If you’re a solution consultant (SC), sales engineer (SE), or any other role that does sales demos, there’s nothing more uncomfortable than going into a demo and not knowing what you’re aiming for. Qualifying your account executives prior to the demo is a practice that’s beneficial to everyone, including the buyer. The cold hard reality is […]