2. IN OCTOBER 2014, I ATTENDED A THREE-
DAY TRAINING SESSION IN BOSTON.
3. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
HERE’S WHAT I LEARNED
▸ Why this topic is relevant to Lean Startup Circle
▸ Who should care about it?
▸ What is Pragmatic Marketing?
▸ How you can apply it
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Credit / Thanks / Disclaimer: Most of the ideas and content in this presentation are taken directly from
Pragmatic Marketing, Inc. I wish they were all mine, but they’re not.
I found these ideas so useful that I created this recap to share them with people who might not have
heard of Pragmatic Marketing. I highly recommend that you take their training. pragmaticmarketing.com
4. IDEAS ARE CHEAP.
IT’S ALL ABOUT EXECUTION.
Lean Startup Fanboy
PRAGMATIC MARKETING 4
WHAT’S MISSING?
6. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
WHO SHOULD CARE ABOUT THIS RECAP?
▸ Product Managers
▸ Product Marketers
▸ Engineers
▸ User Experience Designers
▸ Founders
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AT COMPANIES OF ALL SIZES
7. TL;DR:
FOCUS ON FINDING AN UNMET NEED,
USE PRAGMATIC MARKETING TO REFINE, BUILD,
BRING YOUR SOLUTION TO MARKET
8. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
PRAGMATIC MARKETING, INC.?
▸ Yep. That’s the training company’s name.
▸ Established 1993
▸ Focus: Product Management & Product Marketing
at technology companies
▸ “Trained tens of thousands of professionals at
thousands of companies.”
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9. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
COMPANIES THAT ATTENDED MY SESSION (BOSTON, OCTOBER 2014)
▸ Acquia
▸ Backupify
▸ Best Doctors
▸ Blackboard
▸ Bloomberg
▸ Canadian Medical
Association
▸ Duo Security
▸ Equifax
▸ Everbridge
▸ IBM
▸ Ipswitch
▸ Polycom
▸ RSA / EMC
▸ Seagate
▸ Wolters Kluwer
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12. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
If you’re in the business of building and selling a product
Pragmatic Marketing is a proven model for how be successful.
▸ How to determine if a product should be built
▸ What to do to bring that product to market
▸ Who does what (PMM, PM, MKTG, Sales, …)
▸ When to do it, and how to do it
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14. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
WHAT IS BEING “MARKET-DRIVEN?”
▸ Market-driven means we base
our decisions on what that
market is asking for.
▸ It’s being outside-in.
▸ It’s not thinking inside-out and
focusing on what we can do.
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What is being “market-driven”?
Market-driven means we
base our decisions on what
that market is asking for.
→ Be outside-in.
It’s not: Thinking inside-out and
focusing on what we can do.
17. THE AIM OF MARKETING IS TO KNOW AND
UNDERSTAND THE CUSTOMER SO WELL THAT THE
PRODUCT OR SERVICE FITS HIM AND SELLS ITSELF.
Peter Drucker
PRAGMATIC MARKETING 17
18. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
SO, WAIT, WE DON’T NEED A SALES TEAM?
If it was only that simple!
‣ Marketing gets customer attention…
‣ But, some customers prefer working with sales,
and sales reps are often needed for large, complex deals.
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19. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
THE PRAGMATIC P’S
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Product, Price, Promotion, Place
What’s missing?
Problem
Which one do companies often put too much focus on?
22. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
TYPICAL APPROACH: EXECUTION-FIRST
Problems with this approach
▸ Activities have a lot of guesswork
▸ It’s really hard to make an impact
with tactics because we don’t yet
have a strategic view of the market
(a.k.a. we don’t know the problems
well enough, yet).
22
24. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
START WITH THE PROBLEM
▸ Get this right, and it will
multiply the effect of
every single other
activity.
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25. GOAL:
TAKE EVERYTHING THAT
YOU KNOW ABOUT THE
MARKET AND DISTILL IT
INTO ONE PAGE.
LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock
reidhoffman.org/linkedin-pitch-to-greylock/
26. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
TYPICAL SOURCES OF IDEAS
Loudest voices in the room
▸ Input from sales team, tech support, user groups, (some) execs
▸ This results in enhancement requests, special one-offs, etc.
Don’t do this!
▸ This is the noisy 20% of the market
▸ We should be focusing on the quiet 80%
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PROTIP: QUIET
DOESN’T MEAN
THEY’RE HAPPY
28. THE BUILDING IS FULL OF PRODUCT EXPERTS.
YOUR COMPANY NEEDS MARKET EXPERTS.
PRAGMATIC RULE
29. IN EVERY MARKET
SEGMENT, WE HAVE Potentials
Evaluators
Customers
Market Segment: A group of individuals or
businesses that share a set of problems.
30. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
CUSTOMERS
▸ People who have gone
through the process to
evaluate solutions to a
problem they identified
they have, and they have
purchased something.
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Potentials
Evaluators
Customers
Our customers
Customers of our
competitors
HOW ARE YOU REACHING
YOUR COMPETITORS’
CUSTOMERS?
31. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
EVALUATORS
▸ People who want to do
something about their
problem, but haven’t
purchased anything, yet.
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Potentials
Evaluators
Customers
HOW ARE YOU REACHING
EVERY EVALUATOR?
33. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
DEFINE YOUR MARKET SEGMENTS
Market Segment: A group of individuals or businesses that share
a set of problems.
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▸ Bad Examples
▸ Fortune 500
▸ Global 2000
▸ Mid-tier
▸ Wireless
▸ Good examples
▸ Organizations that must produce
regulatory reports
▸ Field salespeople that need to
update the home office from the road
34. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
USE SEGMENTS TO FIGURE OUT YOUR POSITION
▸ For each segment, identify:
▸ Your distinctive
competencies
▸ The competition
▸ Barriers to entry
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▸ Align with strategy
▸ Sales channels
▸ Development teams
▸ Technology direction
35. THE ANSWER TO MOST OF YOUR
QUESTIONS IS NOT IN THE BUILDING.
PRAGMATIC RULE
PROTIP: SPEAK WITH A
CUSTOMER EVERYDAY
36. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
INTERVIEW EVERY TYPE, IN EACH OF YOUR MARKET SEGMENTS
▸ Customers tell us the past
▸ Evaluators tell you about the present
▸ Potentials tell you about the future
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Potentials
Evaluators
Customers
37. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
FIND THE QUIET 80%
▸ Training classes
▸ Conferences
▸ Associations
▸ Executives and colleagues
▸ Social networks
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38. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
ASK… CUSTOMERS AND POTENTIALS
▸ What drives you crazy about your job?
▸ What drives your buying decisions?
▸ What do you think of my company / product?
▸ Who are my competitors, and what do you think of them?
▸ What great products have you seen lately?
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39. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
OBSERVE
▸ Start with an open agenda
▸ Understand “a day in the life”
▸ When do they pick up a pencil?
▸ How do they survive without your technology?
When in doubt, listening is better than talking.
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40. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
MANY INPUTS, ONE PROBLEM
Problem Statements
▸ “I need a file-indexing database, coupled with a
complex query engine, which would allow ad-hoc
search and retrieval of documents by random
criteria.”
▸ I look bad when I waste time looking through 20
directories and I can’t find the one file that we need.”
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Bad.
Good!
41. YOU CAN LISTEN TO WHAT PEOPLE SAY,
BUT YOU WILL BE FAR MORE EFFECTIVE
IF YOU LISTEN TO WHAT PEOPLE DO.
Seth Godin
PRAGMATIC MARKETING 41
42. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
EVERYONE IS A PRAGMATIC MARKETER
▸ My buyers tell me that…
▸ I have a neighbor in our industry and she said…
▸ I met a competitor’s customer on the plane…
▸ I recently attended a conference and met…
▸ I made a cold call and heard…
▸ Our user group said…
▸ While visiting our clients I learned…
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43. ONLY BUILD SOLUTIONS FOR PROBLEMS THAT ARE
URGENT, PERVASIVE AND THAT THE MARKET WILL
PAY TO SOLVE.
PRAGMATIC RULE
46. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
ACCOUNTABILITY
▸ Product Team: Collects and quantifies the problem
▸ Development: Solves the problem
▸ Marketing Communications: Promotes the product
▸ Sales Channel: Helps people buy
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HOW WELL IS YOUR
COMPANY KEEPING THESE
RESPONSIBILITIES
SEPARATE, TODAY?
47. IF THE PRODUCT TEAM DOESN’T DO ITS JOB,
OTHER DEPARTMENTS WILL FILL THE VOID.
PRAGMATIC RULE
51. PRAGMATIC MARKETING
IN CLOSING
▸ Discover and validate market problems
▸ Focus on markets and problems to identify the best
opportunities
▸ Create market-driven artifacts (personas, buying process, etc.)
▸ Clearly define the lines of each team: product, dev, comm, sales
Run the product like a business of it’s own.
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52. Brian Kelly @resetbrian
Ann Arbor LSC Meetup Feb 2016
THANKS
Now, go take
this training!
pragmaticmarketing.com