Strategies for Generating Quick Wins

How to deliver incremental revenue and gain customer insights

You notice a new pattern in conversations with your team:

• How long until this generates revenue?

• Which customers will buy this?

• Can you put priority on writing a reference customer article?

• Can you present the product to a customer next week?

This is quite a change from conversations about backlog priorities, customer satisfaction issues, business cases, and investment decisions! 

These are subtle signs that your focus is needed on short-term improvements that can generate revenue quickly.  How do you pivot from regular product management work to generating revenue?  How do you do this if you have no sales or marketing experience?  Don't worry!  Your product and market knowledge are what the organization needs.  Let's discuss how you can apply your product insight to bring in more business while continuing to develop your product.

In this challenging time, you can't over-rotate to sales mode and abandon key product initiatives.  Here are small changes you can make while keeping your product roadmap healthy:

• Analyze your pipeline for potential areas to provide support

• Take a close look at your customer onboarding with a focus on the acceleration of service activation

• Work with marketing and sales for a new reference customer

The side benefit is these actions provide many opportunities for customer conversations.

Analyze Your Pipeline for Opportunities

 Review your pipeline for these types of acceleration opportunities:

• Technical decision maker that is looking for product or business information

• A well-qualified opportunity that is forecasted to close in 4-6 months

• A well-funded organization with a use case that you know

After finding these types of pipeline items it is time to start contacting account teams and offering assistance.  Try approaching the account teams with curiosity instead of pushing for acceleration.  Take a few minutes per opportunity to construct a short email with these points:

1. Summary of the opportunity you spotted

2. A short idea of a way you could help

3. Ask if this type of help would benefit them

Here are examples:

1. You notice there is a sales opportunity where an architect or CTO is involved

   • you offer to review how other similar customers are using the product or demonstrate a new feature.

2. You notice an opportunity has a good probability of closing next quarter because the customer needs to test the product for 4 months

   • you offer to discuss the test plan with the customer.  You contact your QA/test team ahead of time and get their help with a test plan.

3. You see a few leads from your latest marketing push on new features that are waiting on a sales engineer

   •  you offer to contact the customer with the account team on copy to discuss their interest in the new feature

Be sure to contact the account team that is handling each opportunity.  Don't blast out a generic email offering your help.  Instead, take 10 minutes to write your email on a specific opportunity.

Accelerate Service Activations

The sooner a customer is onboarded and using your product, then the sooner they will expand their usage.  Generating revenue from your installed base is easier than capturing new customers.  The first step is understanding your typical customer onboarding process by:

• Talking to a recent new customer

• Reviewing support cases opened by new customers

• Reviewing your install guide

• Talking to customer success managers about the typical onboarding experience

The next step is to diagram the steps from the customer's perspective and pinpoint areas that hold back customers from activations.  Below is an example diagram with notes on 4 issues:

You take steps to resolve these issues by:

• Adding a checklist to the installer and installation guide

• Training the CSMs on providing software and login instructions

• Document a pre-sale checklist about the compatible HW

These steps free up sales to focus on closing more deals and reduce the time to activate customers.

Work with Marketing and Sales on a New Reference Customer

Survey your product marketing and sales engineers to discuss how customers are using your product.  In parallel determine a few low-cost ways for customers to use your product in a non-production environment.  Next, create a marketing program for new and existing customers to try your low-cost version of your product.  Be sure to ask the customers if they are interested in providing feedback.

Taking a short-term feature to your Marketing team for customer volunteers followed by working with Sales on new customers

Here are two examples:

1. New Feature: Your engineering team has a new storage compression feature and needs to test it on a real database to check if the system performance is affected.  Marketing finds customers with a non-production lab and access to a database.  The customers agree to test the new compression feature and provide performance results on the compression savings.  Marketing creates a solution guide and develops reference customer material as a result.

2. Customer Use Case: Your customers have built scripts to automatically deploy your software to new users.  These scripts need to be updated and tested on every software update.  After software updates, there is a delay in expansions while the customers update their scripts.  Your test team has similar scripts.  You work with engineering to package their scripts and document best practices in using the scripts.  There is a resulting jump in the use of the latest software version as your user counts accelerate.

Conclusion

As business conditions change, you might need to focus on generating revenue over your roadmap.  With care, your short-term features can be added in a way that gives customer insights while preserving your long-term vision.  Using these strategies can generate effective short-term features:

• Scrutinize your pipeline and look for ways to help

• Assess your onboarding process for time savings in service activation

• Partner with marketing and sales on a new reference customer

With these approaches to short-term features, you can deliver incremental improvements to boost revenue and gain customer insights.

---

Interesting Links

• Making an engaging product If your customers are not actively and habitually getting value from your product, they won’t continue to pay for it - at least not past the next renewal milestone - so usage-based retention must be a strategic priority. Focusing efforts on engagement creates an opportunity to influence growth in multiple ways. Great suggestions from The Product Led Geek

• Explainer on Product-Led Growth vs Sales Led Growth If you’ve wondered about the fuss over Product-Led Growth, Sales-Led Growth, and traditional Marketing-Led Growth, then this article from Elena Verna explains the pros/cons of each growth strategy.