September 12, 2017

Product Marketing – Inside Juicero’s Demise, From Prized Startup to Fire Sale

The shuttering of the much-ridiculed Silicon Valley startup was the culmination of unsustainable costs, slow sales, poor media relations and a bungled product launch. $134MM in funding from top names in venture capital couldn’t save the $699 juicer from the fundamental problems we product marketers would have been able to prevent. Here’s the story of so much going wrong, so fast.

Sales Enablement – How to turn 18 year kids into lethal selling machines

Nick Kozmin started selling during his summer breaks in college. He was able to pay off his entire tuition bill ($50,000), go on vacation and buy a brand new BMW. In this case study, he explains how he took a fin-tech software company (AdvisorStream.com) from $0-$1mm ARR in a few months using inside sales. Rep ramp time to full quota was only 1-2 weeks despite a complex product with buyers who were highly educated financial advisors. The secret? A script. How are you partnering with your Sales org to develop a winning one?

Pricing – Psychological pricing: A secret sauce to more sales

In this case study, Bold Commerce talks about how psychological pricing led Amazon customers to buy one lamp over the other, and how you can adapt these theories for SaaS products. Remember, though, no amount of psychological pricing makes up for cheap products and poor customer service.

Soft Skills – 5 tactics to win a negotiation, according to an FBI agent

As product marketers, whether we like it or not, a large portion of our job is building consensus. use psychology in your favor to make sure you’re not splitting the difference with your internal customers. (Storytelling expert Andy Raskin recommended this book to me last week in Boston.)

Career – How to forget about work when you ‘re not working

We know if we work too many long days in a row we’ll find ourselves doing what I affectionately call “fake work” — sitting at our desks without actually accomplishing anything. The hard part is that while you may agree with all of these benefits of getting away from your work, you may still have trouble doing it.

Summit Updates

NEW SPEAKER: Derek Pando, Product Marketer @ Zoom Video Conferencing

Derek is a seasoned product marketer who’s also worked at Salesforce and LinkedIn. He played a heavy role in the the NPS program and LinkedIn and built the Zoom’s program from scratch. His session details how product marketers can start or improve an NPS program, whom they should partner with, cadence of measurement and how to successfully action on insights.

Our call for speakers is now open! If you ‘re a product marketing leader with an impressive track record and interested in speaking, email justin@productmarketingsummit.com!

Jobs

Appcues is looking for a Product Marketing Manager!

Appcues grew revenue over 250%+ in 2016 and is on track to grow 4x in 2017 due to extremely strong inbound lead generation and a highly engaged free trial base. It’s the Product Marketing Manager’s responsibility to accelerate and refine our go-to-market strategy for today and tomorrow’s Appcues products. Please apply here.

Hiring for that perfect product marketing candidate? If you’re interested in getting your job listing in front of hundreds of product marketing people, send an email to justin@productmarketingsummit.com.

This week’s sponsor

With Appcues, you can create in-product experiences (user onboarding, feature announcements, etc.) without writing any code. We believe it’s the non-technical people who oftentimes have the best information about a user’s needs and desires. And we give them the tools to act on it and improve user engagement.

We are based in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston, MA and are actively seeking talented and passionate people to join our team.

Looking to be a sponsor? Send an email to justin@productmarketingsummit.com. Slots fill up quickly!