Effective product marketing usually won’t help you make your numbers this quarter. But it can provide long-term benefits…if properly executed and maintained.
A Cautionary Tale
In a down employment market such as the one the tech industry is experiencing right now, the common wisdom is that if a company isn’t hiring new employees, it can definitely use independent consultants.
Sometimes the common wisdom is faulty.
One of Bredemarket’s former clients (whom I will not name) illustrates the gaps in the common wisdom. I had worked on projects for this company several times…until I didn’t.
- Because of a company reorg, my contact at the company changed, and the new contact sent a project my way.
- Halfway through the project I was asked to stop work with no explanation.
- When a direct report to my new contact reached out to get to know me, the report assured me that the stop work order had nothing to do with me.
- My contract was about to expire, but the direct report said it would probably be renewed. (Admittedly the direct report had no decision-making authority).
- A month later, I found myself unable to log in to the company’s contractor website.
- I reached out to a third party (not employed by the company) who managed its contractors. The third party confirmed that my contract had not been renewed.
- I executed my offboarding process for removing confidential company information and informed my company contact. I received no response. (Not surprising. Many people, rather than delivering or confirming bad news, will say nothing at all—ghosting.)
- I subsequently learned that the company was performing multiple rounds of layoffs, in a “the layoffs will continue until morale improves”style.
If Properly Executed
If I had provided said company with top-notch content-proposal-analysis work, would those laid-off people have kept their jobs?
Probably not. Content, proposal, and analysis work is not a quick fix.
- Content, for example, often takes as many as 17 months to bear fruit.
- The proposal process is only part of a long-term effort, which may start years before a Request for Proposal (RFP) is released, and may not end for years after a proposal is submitted in response to the RFP.
- And analysis itself is just the first step in a long process. After you analyze something, you have to decide what to do with the results.
While not a quick fix, doing the work now will benefit the company in the long run. Even in the short term, setting the strategy communicates to everyone, including both internal and external stakeholders, the direction in which your company is heading.
If Properly Maintained
But you can’t just treat this as a one-time oroject and be done with it. Looking at the content portion alone, you have to regularly revisit your content and update it as needed.
This is a trick I learned back in my proposal days. Some of my former employers used proposal management software packages, many of which used a “timeout” feature on standard proposal text that required someone to review the text by a certain date.
Does your proposal text state that your software supports Windows 10? Perhaps it’s a good idea to mention Windows 11 also.
Or you may need to revise your standard proposal text to mention that new feature…or new benefit. Any proposal text for a health application that was written in December 2019 definitely required an update in December 2020.
What this means for your company
If you haven’t laid the groundwork for your company’s product marketing, Bredemarket can help in a variety of ways. After asking questions (starting with “Why?”) about your needs, we can jointly decide on the most critically important things Bredemarket can do for you and your company.
To find out how John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket can serve as your “CPA” (Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional), go to my CPA page.
Postscript
And no, I’m not going to share an Eagles song. I’m going to share a Madness song.
(AI wildebeest “Keep Moving” image from Google Gemini)
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