Introduction

I’ve been at the forefront of helping high-profile B2B technology clients position their complex products and solutions at Fortune 1000 accounts for the past three years.

At a former company, I worked with the founder to launch a print deliverable called the Quickstart report which expanded our client base by over 200% after just a year and a half of its inception. The offering resonated with the everyday challenges of sales and marketing teams trying to break into enterprise accounts.

Product

Quickstarts are print deliverables with custom ABM research into our clients’ key accounts, built with their solutions and goals in mind. These reports are a great launching point for marketing and sales to understand key business priorities and identify valuable prospects within their accounts and tailor their message and outreach programs.

Customer Pain Points

The overarching goal of the Quickstart product was to shorten the B2B sales cycle for technology sales and marketing teams.

We addressed two major pain points for our user base:

First, Quickstarts would shorten the time it takes account managers to get up to speed on accounts. The average sales turnover rate is 35% - nearly three times the average employee. So, accounts are getting assigned, reshuffled, and reassigned – a lot! Bottom line, a good portion of an account manager’s time will be dedicated to researching and prospecting unfamiliar companies, preventing them from spending time doing what they do best – sell!

Second, Quickstarts would be custom – tailored to client solutions. On average it takes about 130 dials to secure 1 prospect meeting and with average click-through rates hovering around 2-3%, securing meetings with cold emails offers similar issues. Finding prospects, cold calling, and sending email after email to no avail can cause serious headaches for any sales team, but doing those things with generic, boiler plate account information is certain to cause headaches and is counterproductive. Quickstarts would offer custom sales intelligence and information that is relevant to the positioning of the client’s technology and that resonates with the pain points of their own users.

User Research

Once these customer problems and the underlying pain points were identified, I set out to validate our assumptions around those pain points with user research and MVP experiments.

The company had a customer list and I understood what a typical buyer and user looks like – and our users are typically not the buyers. The account manager is the primary recipient of the deliverable and who the report is geared towards. However, the Field Marketer or Marketing Head is the one who will pull the trigger on the purchase because they have the budget and provide the sales enablement content.

Here is an example of a user and buyer persona – simplified for demonstration purposes:

User Persona


Buyer Persona

MVP Experiments

With these user and buyer personas built out, I had a very good idea of who our users and buyers were. What I needed to better understand was the pain points they were dealing with and how they were overcoming them, if at all – so that we could determine if our deliverable offers a viable, valuable solution.

First, we laid out the product idea, which was described above.

Second, I needed to identify the assumptions we were making about user problems to validate them. Here are a few that are inherent in the product ideation:

Account Managers do research on their accounts before attempting to prospect and sell

Account Managers find it inconvenient to undergo the account prep for new accounts assigned to them

It’s time-consuming to get an overview of potential opportunities at a target company when you have several high-stake accounts

Data offered by Marketing teams to Account Managers about accounts and prospects are scarce and outdated

Account Managers will trust a third-party partner to find and recommend valuable prospect targets and account-specific selling strategies

Marketing Heads believe Account Managers should understand the specific accounts they are assigned before trying to sell into the account

Marketing Heads would be willing to pay for a product that allows their sales teams to shorten account prep and get to the selling

Choosing the assumptions that have the highest risk for the company and the product but require the least amount of effort to test, I fleshed out a hypothesis with which to run an MVP experiment.

Hypothesis
We believe enterprise account managers don’t have or don’t spend enough time researching their new target accounts because they want to get right to speaking to prospects and the selling phase. If we offer them custom, actionable sales intelligence through the Quickstart product to help them position their company’s suite of solutions at their target accounts, marketing heads will see value in the product and purchase it to support sales teams, which in turn will help drive the expansion of our client base.

Landing Page MVP
To begin, I ran a Landing Page MVP experiment, where I drove traffic through social media ads about the offering. Skipping over some of the A/B testing here, I created copy and graphics to pitch the product’s benefits, offered a free downloadable preview, and had a call to action to capture interested party’s contact information.

Email MVP
I paired this with an Email MVP, reaching out to individuals who opted in. I crafted emails with messaging and value propositions that explained what the product would offer and hit on proposed pain points – saving sales manager time on account research and providing account intelligence with selling strategies. The email also offered a pilot program. We wanted to get at least 10% to respond positively and agree to a small pilot program. This was our MCS – minimum criteria for success.

The result of the experiment was encouraging! We were able to receive verbal confirmations for 4 new pilot programs within a span of one month, which exceeded the MCS by 30%.

Outcome / Achievements

User research and carefully constructed MVP experiments allowed me to validate assumptions about our user pain points and uncovered serious interest from buyers for the Quickstart product. The results gave us confidence to forge ahead to make it an official offering. We invested additional time in getting customer feedback on these products with select groups, created blogs, additional ads, and were able to appeal to a broader customer base. Over the next year and a half, we increased client logos by 200%. And in fiscal year 2018, the offering accounted for 50% of the company’s total revenue.

Additional note: An important step of this Quickstart product launch which I did not cover here is the cost to reward comparison. For privacy around workers compensation and business expenses, I won’t share detail other than to say our analysis found reward substantially outweighed cost and was a driving factor in developing this new offering.

Wrapping Up

This peek into the Quickstart launch should offer insight into my experience managing and developing products and the specific processes and methods I employed to drive the success of a new product offering. I gained valuable product management experience, starting with product ideation, identifying assumptions and their level of risk, building hypothesis around those assumptions, establishing a minimum criteria for success, picking MVP strategies, and then moving to executing the strategy and iterating with the use of qualitative and quantitative data.