Interview with Greg Prickril: Product Management and Marketing in B2B

Greg's links:

Prickril Consulting
Product Management Coaching

Watch the video here or read the transcript below if you prefer.

 

Samantha Tonge: Hi there! It's Samantha Tonge from Labrakita Marketing again; here with another one of my expert interviews. I've got Greg today, and we're going to be talking about product management, where that fits in with marketing, and where that fits in with your average marketing department. Greg, can you introduce yourself, please?

Greg Prickril: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Samantha. I've been doing product management now for over 20 years; I was a PM (product manager) in really huge software companies like IBM and Microsoft, then went to work for SAP. I'm American, but I've lived in Germany for quite a while now. And the last 10 years or so, I've had my own consulting, training, and coaching company. On the consulting side, I work almost exclusively with product management maturity. I help PM organisations to optimise their impact on the business. And then I coach all kinds of people. I do personal coaching mainly, but now I'm starting to do some group coaching as well. It's mainly career coaching for PMs and product leaders. I help people to basically treat their career like a product.

Samantha: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah. So, one thing that people may have heard about marketing is the original four marketing Ps, the tactics. And the first one is Product. Do you find, with the organisations that you work with, that marketers actually understand that, and understand that product management is part of the overarching world of marketing?

Greg: I think in most mature tech companies, the role of product management or the roles of product management and marketing are pretty well-understood now. There's some overlap and some confusion, but I don't think that's our biggest problem. If I think about, you know, us as partners trying to build a successful product business, it's not that we don't know what each other does or what we're supposed to do. I would say, the fundamental problem is that there is a lack of this continuous alignment. So, product people are off with their understanding of the market, developing a roadmap, which they then publish to marketing, which is way too late. Marketing gets involved in the process way too late. And marketing tends to be understaffed, I think. In my experience, very often. So, you know, we can think about marketing from a strategic and from an operational perspective. And I think, unfortunately, there's very little strategic contribution. I'll talk about that more.

Samantha: Okay. Yep.

Greg: And on the operating side, they're understaffed. I work mainly with enterprise accounts, and what I have noticed is what I call "the checklist syndrome". Marketing organisations know that for each product, for each launch, they got to do these seven things. And they do those in a perfunctory way, so that the real value, the real differentiation of a product, the really valuable information doesn’t make it into the positioning and messaging, which is really unfortunate.

Samantha: Yes. Oh, my word!

Greg: I would love to come back to differentiation later, by the way. But it's like, almost kind of ChatGPT-generated stuff, like: "Yeah, it makes sense. And nobody's gonna argue with this. But it doesn't really address the key value of the offering." That's my experience. And I have plenty of criticism on the product side as well, but, you know, the way I look at this problem is: I think about a product team as being kind of on-the-shelf people and off-the-shelf people. In a mature organisation, that's how it breaks down. Product management, engineering, Q is trying to get the right product on the shelf, at the right time, for the right cost. Then you've got these traditional GTM (go-to-market) roles, like sales, marketing, and customer success, who are trying to get it off this shelf and into productive use. And the key dysfunction, you know, I'm restating this here, is that these sides don't talk to each other very well, you know? By the way, marketing is special because it has a role in both on-the-shelf and off-the-shelf, theoretically.

Samantha: Yeah. It should. Absolutely!

Greg: Right? What I always wanted, or what my position is, is that marketing should be providing strategic insights into the market. They should help product managers understand the market: “What are the big opportunities?” That having been said, I can say it's almost unheard of in my career to see marketing doing that role, to really coming to product management, saying: "Hey, we did some analysis." There used to be a thing called the marketing requirements document. And I think that's what that thing was. "Hey, we looked at the market. We don't get all this product stuff, but these are the trends, this is the size, these are the big opportunities. Now, product people, go figure out what problems this implies and how you can solve them." But I never see that, unfortunately.

Samantha: Yeah.

Greg: It occurs to me now, in real-time, that that is probably the precursor of this gap. There's not a GTM role, really, that is much involved in getting it on the shelf, so there ends up being this late release, handoff to GTM folks. And we end up with a bunch of really smart, talented people running in different directions. I see that very often.

Samantha: Oh, my word. Same! Yeah, yeah. You do see that! So many organisations work in silos, which is the number one problem. And yes, a lot of times, certainly, in the engineering sector where I work, and I'm sure this is the same in a lot of other sectors, people, especially senior management, just think: "Anyone can do marketing!" And I think they think of it as the promotion part of the four Ps that we talked about earlier. They don't think about it in a larger way, and they don't value or realise necessarily that marketers should be strategic, which is where I quite often come in, especially for smaller companies. They have the promotions people, but they don't have strategists. And absolutely, we should be helping the product development cycle because the information should be coming from the marketing department to let you know: "What features are important to the target audience? What benefits them? What are the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they care about? What is it that's going to make our products be at all, you know, from the actual product point of view, be differentiated in the market?" Because otherwise, the product guys are just kind of guessing and thinking: "Well, I would like this. So, let's do this."

Greg: Yes, some product people are guessing. A lot of them are doing their own research. And we're overloaded. There are so many tasks that we have to do; actually making sure these things get implemented is more than full-time work, working closely with engineering and doing these other things. So, I believe it definitely represents a missed opportunity. And I would put a slightly finer point on that. What I would like to see marketing focusing on is what the key segments are for our market. This is another universal failure. We should have very precise segmenting of the market and figure out where we can be ten times better than anybody else. And then for the segments that we choose to target: "What are their biggest challenges? And which of those represent the biggest opportunities?" Just like an opinion, a stack rank list that said: "These are their biggest challenges. This is where we think the opportunities are." And then product people, good product people know how to take that and these kinds of requirements and turn that into a great product.

Samantha: Absolutely. I'm Chartered; I've done all my Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications. And this is like the first stuff we're taught at certificate level, you know. It's these basics that people forget to go back to: segmentation, targeting, and positioning. These are essential. And in order to get these basics right, that needs to go across the board, across all the other departments. And obviously, the product is absolutely key to that. If you don't have a product that a segment wants, if you can't position that, then you're not going to sell it. You've got a product, and you’ve spent an awful lot of money on its R&D, but it is just sitting on the shelf, and it isn't going to go anywhere.

Greg: Yeah, it's an interesting kind of thought exercise to think: "Would you rather have an average product with great marketing or a great product with average marketing?" You know, neither is ideal.

Samantha: Yeah.

Greg: But I tend to think, in brutal triage, I would rather have an average product with great marketing. I see a lot of things being sold that aren’t that great, but if you can somehow differentiate it, position it the right way, at some point the product can catch up, if you can get that adoption. You know what I mean? So, yeah, most product managers probably undervalue the potential contribution of marketing. In their defence, they're frustrated with the practical experience. And as I said, which I believe you touched on as well, marketing tends to be underfunded, I think. And that is insane. Because if you get the right people, the return on investment is just massive. If we think about person-hours, it's a fraction of what a product manager and engineering spent building the product. Right? Financially, it can be a pretty big investment, depending on what you're doing. But in terms of just return on investment, on people's time, it's such a no-brainer to hire great people. And an insight that I have had recently, this is something that, after, you know, 20 years, is just really hitting home with me, is that product managers, marketing, sales, GTM folks need to speak the same language. They don't. They talk past each other a lot, I think. And really, there is like one topic that everybody should be focused on, everybody should get, it should be a rallying point, and that is differentiation.

Samantha: Yes.

Greg: Right? You know, in tech circles, we talk a lot about innovation. But if innovation doesn't generate differentiation, it's a distraction.

Samantha: Absolutely!

Greg: We're commercial entities, right? We are not... I haven't worked for a research organisation yet. So, innovation for the sake of innovation makes no sense. And what I am trying to really coach product managers to do now, is to use that as this rallying point and go to sales, go to marketing, and say: "Look, guys, we all want to be differentiated; that is what is going to allow us to win in the market. So, let's actively manage it. Let's think about how we're differentiated today, and let's think about the messaging around that because they're often unaligned. We're claiming differentiation that doesn't really exist, and prospects and customers see through it instantly." And it ties in with all the other things we've talked about. If you want to differentiate, that should be a segment-by-segment analysis. There might be some general kind of differentiation, but ideally it is something specific to each segment. By the way, as I started thinking about this, and started talking to people, what I realised is that product people tend to focus on functional differentiation: "What are the new features I can build? What are the new products?", and that tends to be very short-lived. Those things don't last; your competitors will find an alternative, and they will just copy you or whatever. It's things like branding that really stick. You know, I worked for these power vendors, and without a doubt, our biggest differentiator was our brand. Prospects would rather do business with us than other people because of the company’s reputation. So, yet another argument for having really strong marketing people who understand the brand and can build this kind of sustainable differentiation. By the way, I call this non-functional differentiation; the way we go to market, our brand, the way we handle support, social impact, all these things are really important, but they're undervalued by product people who want to build stuff. And it is, again, just another argument for funding strategic marketing folks who understand that at the portfolio level and can encourage the team to focus on how we differentiate and then make sure, obviously, that sales can message that the right way. But, as I said, I see tons of people talking about innovation, okay? My new thing is differentiation. And I think it's going to become a thing. My goal is to make it a thing.

Samantha: Excellent. Excellent. These are definitely things from my world. And, as you said, it all comes back to getting that segmentation, targeting, and positioning right in the first place. Because there's your differentiator. You make the products or design the services that are aimed specifically at them, and you understand them, and you understand what their pain points are and how you're going to solve their problems. And, like you say, sometimes it might be the same product. You talk about an average product and getting the brand and marketing right. Sometimes, it's the same product that's actually appropriate for several different segments, but they care about different aspects of that product or what that product does. So, for example, you may have a product that's extremely accurate, but it also saves energy. And different markets may care about different aspects of that, just as a random, simplistic example.

Greg: Yeah. Actually, I think both marketing and product people fall into this trap of trying to serve a whole market, which is just a thankless task. They are trying to please everybody and fulfil every possible requirement, and it goes through the entire chain. So, I have to understand the segments I should be targeting, because it's expensive to understand their needs. It's expensive to develop something specifically for them because it can add a lot of complexity. And then there's also this dynamic of product people, who are working very hard to get something to kind of the launch point and simply walk away, and then they’re shocked that nothing happens. Because they built it and people didn't come, you know? So, we also have to have this other hand clapping, of: "Now that we have it, we have to message it the right way and to the right people." So, this idea of segmentation allows all of us to focus. If we can express differentiation at that level, now we've got something. If we can get product people, marketing, and sales aligned around this idea of differentiation at the segment level, I really believe it would revolutionise a lot of businesses. I’m not saying it would happen overnight, but you know, rapidly. There would be much greater progress than if you were to double down on just Product or double down on GTM. It's the alignment of these things at the segment level that we're probably missing.

Samantha: Yeah, I see that a lot. And I have to admit, I was guilty of this to a certain extent myself until fairly recently. I'm a lot better at giving advice than following my own advice. And I recently went through this. Well, not that recently, but relatively recently, I went through this myself; I was a bit woolly in terms of my segmentation, targeting, and positioning. But now that I'm very much positioning the business towards the engineering sector, it's so much easier to look at what Labrakita Marketing's differentiations are in that segment. It's a service rather than a product, but it's the same principle.

Greg: Absolutely.

Samantha: And yeah, you can see some very quick results, working with clients, thinking about the strategic level of marketing, not just jumping straight in and throwing mud at the wall.

Greg: I mean, that's how most people think about marketing that I've come across: “It's a bunch of people writing nice copy.”

Samantha: Yeah.

Greg: Which really is a shame. And I think that is a key takeaway from this discussion, that product management tends to be heavily engaged with engineering. We have to be, to get things out the door. If I think about the GTM disciplines, that tends to be very exceptional communication, like when there's a launch, or there's a customer problem, or there's an event coming up, it's not in due course. I think product managers have to be the hub of the product team, so I encourage them to step up and find a practice that allows them to have strategic conversations with go-to-market particularly. And there's a practice that I took away from my work at these companies called a business review, where product management and GTM folks sit down. This might be held quarterly, or three times a year. The agenda here is clearly strategic. So you go around the room, each person talks about what they're up to and what their key challenges are, then we look at the product strategy, we look at how we're executing, we look at what is holding us back, what are our impediments, but that we force ourselves to have some strategic conversations. And again, it is a simple practice. This isn't like a 30-minute meeting; it’s probably more like a half day or a few hours. A lot of people resist it; salespeople, you know, are always busy, blah, blah, blah. But I gotta believe just this simple practice could really change businesses. You know, within a year or two, you will start seeing just like magic happen as these people align.

Samantha: Absolutely.

Greg: Because I guess leadership in a lot of cases has no idea how unaligned these disciplines really are and that they are creating incentives for them to be misaligned, right?

Samantha: Yes. Yes. And I often run workshops that are quite similar to what you're talking about. There will be product people in the room, segment people, and salespeople, but we're usually looking at the brand proposition for the entire organisation. But it could be done at a product level, actually. And yeah, I've been in a few situations where I've seen senior people in the room going: "Shouldn't they already be talking to each other?" Or the same people might go: "I didn't know our products did that!" or "I didn't know that our customers were focused on that area." And sometimes it's the marketing people saying that. Now, that’s a worry. But it's really important to get together in that room to understand the customers, understand their needs, understand what differentiates you and, therefore, what you should be saying to the market. It's one of the basics. But it doesn't happen if you don't get in the room together. And far too many organisations work in silos.

Greg: Sure. And that is part of what good leaders should be doing, getting the on-the-shelf and off-the-shelf people in a room periodically. And leadership should be asking: "Tell me what you guys are doing to stay strategically aligned. Describe it to me." And that is a tough question the first time, because the answer is probably nothing. There will be a lot of stammering and looking at each other. As a leader, what you can do is first ask the question, raise awareness, and then use your experience to help develop this practice, where every once in a while, we put all the operational stuff aside and make sure that we are aligned strategically. And there are a lot of other practices around validating strategy and validating roadmaps, where we can have this strategic conversation and what I believe should be explicit sign-off, where marketing and sales say: "Okay, I like this roadmap. I get it. I am confident that if we do this, we will be successful." And I can tell you probably not 1% of organisations in the world do this.

Samantha: That's a scary thought. Another thing I’ve seen, I don't know if you've ever come across this, but people are given personal development KPIs or targets to hit as a requirement to get their bonuses or pay increases, and so on, that sometimes contradict each other in different departments. So, they end up kind of working against each other. I think that's a leadership thing as well, where they need to make sure that people's targets are aligned at a strategic level.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely. And probably the most prominent example of that is encouraging salespeople to just sell anything they possibly can. And to a certain extent, it makes sense, but there's some nuances required. So, in their defence, a lot of times, there's not an explicit strategy to manage sales, in which case, product managers find themselves in a position that they can't really push back. So, they have a strategy, at least in mind, but they can't execute on it, because sales is just all over the place, selling to people they shouldn't be selling to. It makes their numbers, which is all well and good, but over the lifetime of the product... I recently responded to a post about this. Maybe it was a post from you, actually. Most organisations don't really capture how much it costs them to acquire and keep a customer. They have no sense of profitability at the customer level. So, if we're not careful, we can easily sell to people that it is not in our best interest to sell to.

Samantha: Yes. Absolutely.

Greg: It is in sales’ best interest, because they make their quota. But now we have this customer, who is a poor fit, a mess, a very squeaky wheel that drains a lot of resources, and creates a lot of confusion. And yeah, it all comes down to this root cause: we are not encouraging people to do what’s strategic.

Samantha: Yes. And, sometimes, like you say, it's the KPIs. They're just way too simplistic for the sales guys. And I think sometimes it's because they don't have that coordination with the marketing department. They are not given the information they need to make those strategic decisions. So, they're just: "Oh, well, I guess I've got to sell as much as possible and that's about it." I think that's part of it, as well. But yeah, the KPIs often are very simplistic. I've seen that as well, sometimes the KPIs are so simplistic that they'll try and argue discounts because their target is purely on volume, to the point where they're trying to argue for something that would be a loss.

Greg: Yeah. Absolutely.

Samantha: Which is a scary thought. They need to be given KPIs that consider profitability, not just volume.

Greg: They need to be incentivized to do what's strategic, and sometimes that means selling something that's new, which is uncomfortable. And I get it, like, this is a touchy situation; it takes a lot of hands-on leadership, but just leaving sales to generate revenue by any means necessary, has a significant cost. And, you know, I see organisations all the time that are almost purely reactive, you know? They are waiting for some disruption from a big prospect or from the market or something that dictates their roadmap instead of thinking about, you know: "How can we win? How can we win as a team? How can we pick the right segments, the right offerings? How can we position those in the market the right way? How can we close the deals so that we're not just trapped on this treadmill?" Where, by the way, I think everybody is miserable.

Samantha: Yes. Oh yes, absolutely. The grind, rather than the “Work smart, not hard.”

Greg: Yeah.

Samantha: I see that all the time. And I've had conversations with people where they're just so frustrated because they don't have the right tools to do their job as effectively as they should. Instead, they're just: "Okay, if I do this number of visits, I'll get a tick box." Sometimes marketing is guilty of this as well, where they’re pushing the product that is the responsibility of the loudest product manager, not the product that is the most profitable or the one that at this specific moment in time makes sense from a strategic point of view to push towards a specific segment. I see that as well. It's about who shouts loudest, not about what's best for the business.

Greg: Yeah. And accountability for addressing these issues lies with the leadership. I would encourage leaders who are listening to this, to not just assume people are talking to each other in a rational way. They don't have the same commercial perspective that you do. You are probably incentivizing them to optimise locally inside their silo. And it is you who has to stand up and move things in the right direction. It doesn't happen by itself. The right incentives have to be there, the right encouragement, the right coaching. But there are a lot of people, I hope, who will listen to this, who have this big opportunity: You don't have to come up with some new product, you don't have to hire a bunch of new people or radically change your sales compensation scheme. You need to get people in the right room and get the right kinds of conversations happening, get people aligned around the things we're talking about: differentiation at the segment level, for your business to change. And nobody else is going to do it. Everybody is overworked. Fatigue has questionable morale, you know, in the enterprise. That's reality. That's the 80% case. So, as a leader, you have to get beyond your own operational challenges and demands on your time and invest in making these relationships. And it's very front-loaded; once you get these people talking and they understand how they should relate to each other and how they need to align, you will be involved exceptionally only, you know, to check on what's happening to resolve conflict, whatever. But there are a lot of people who are probably listening to this who can invest two or three months of intensive time, getting these folks aligned and would see a significant change in their business.

Samantha: Absolutely, absolutely. You can maybe get someone like you or me in to help them.

Greg: Yeah, that's right. It's very valuable to have a third party. I'm not shy about saying that probably that’s my biggest value to an organisation. As much experience as I have, and as much as I can bring to the table, frameworks and tools and all this, fundamentally, a big part of my value to an organisation is that I'm a third party. And that changes the way that messages are received. It's that simple. So, it could be a really inexpensive investment to bring somebody in to look around, leverage their experience with a lot of organisations, and, basically, deliver a bunch of semi-obvious messages to people, but it definitely has an effect. There are less wise investments one could make.

Samantha: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And sometimes, it's just that the people in the business have been too close to the business for so long that it's almost: "Why change?" Even if, as you say, they're miserable. It's the grind. There's a better way of doing things, but sometimes you're so involved that it's hard to take that step back. Whereas someone like you or I… We're already a step back.

Greg: Yeah, we don't really have a direct skin in the game. And these organisations have histories which cloud judgment and create mistrust. So, bringing in somebody that you trust, who knows what they're doing, on the surface, may seem a little expensive. (I've seen a lot of price sensitivity.) But if you look at the size of the business, it's a drop in the bucket, and the impact that it can have, is huge. Again, the high order bit is to, as a leader, make sure that people get together and talk. Bringing in somebody who can help you underscore that message and use examples from their previous experience... Yeah, businesswise, I think, is a no-brainer.

Samantha: Yeah, I agree. And this brings me to my final question. Do you currently have anything to plug?

Greg: Let's see. I always have stuff to plug. So, I do maturity assessments for big organisations. I have a structured framework. I grab a bunch of data, calculate a maturity score for your organisation and create a backlog to move towards a kind of continuous improvement. That's a big offering. I have just started doing group coaching, where I coach people at all levels. But I am definitely moving towards doing product leadership coaching. And soon we'll announce something around group coaching for product leaders because being a product leader can be a very lonely business.

Samantha: Yeah.

Greg: So, hearing from others and sharing experiences is very helpful there. So, people can go to gprickril.com to see the consulting side of my business. For coaching and training, they can go to coachpms.com. I have a nine-week programme that I've developed for product management organisations. So, no shortage of things to plug. Take a look at my sites. I think they do a pretty good job of laying it out. So, thanks for asking.

Samantha: Fantastic. I will put your links on my website when I publish this, so people will be able to find you. If you have discovered this on YouTube, I'll put them there as well. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Greg. I think it's been a really good conversation.

Greg: Great. Thanks so much, Samantha. Always great to talk to you.

Samantha: And thank you, everyone, for watching. Bye for now.

 

If you need help with breaking down silos in your organisation, contact me on 07791 521439 or email me at samantha@labrakita.co.uk

Interviewer: Samantha Tonge, Managing Director, Labrakita Marketing