You've led a team to launch a new platform or service. You get many interruptions to explain the platform as it rolls out to customers. How can you get ahead of these many demands and focus on growing your platform?
Your market is very fast paced and your platform is cutting edge. Unfortunately not many people in your organization know much about your platform or the technology. As part of the launch, there was customer training and sales training. However, there probably wasn't training for internal teams that need to handle customers, sales and marketing.
There are a few steps to start training the team about the platform:
Prepare an internal overview of the solution and technology
Enable a few people to answer questions
Create an internal web page of key information
Internal Product Overview
Create a master slide deck of your best material for easy use when you are invited to present to internal teams and to customers with technical questions. The sources for your initial master deck are:
Marketing launch materials
Overview from technical documentation
Readouts you did to stakeholders
Market analysts' material on your industry
Add to this deck as you get questions when you present it.
Enable Peers to Answer Questions
Look around for people that are eager to learn about the product and technology. Help your peers see the benefit in learning your new product. Some good reasons for your peers to invest in learning are:
They can do their regular job faster - sales can close faster
They gain key knowledge for their future work - a senior product manager gets exposure to your customers
They develop new skills - an associate product manager learns how to prioritize a backlog
Avoid doing tasks alone and bring one of these peers with you for on-the-job training. After they understand the basics, then step back and let them answer questions.
Internal Web Resources
Create a landing place for all your product information. Encourage the whole team to contribute and use this site. Some of the key items to put on this site are:
Overview slide decks with presenter notes on the key talking points
Frequently asked questions and the answers
Sales guidelines and how-to-order examples
Links to recorded training
Links to key industry and technology training
Who to contact for support
Updates on new features
Scheduled "Open House" calls in which you explain a hot topic and answer discussion questions
With this material in a single place, you can easily refer people to sections of this site to find answers to their questions.
Conclusion
While it is hard to break the treadmill of responding to urgent requests, in the long run training others in your organization about your new product has big benefits. You can gather key materials between meetings by dropping them into a shared folder. You can take a few time outs or skip a few standing meetings to create the baseline master deck and web site. You can turn co-workers from asking questions to finding answers. The end result is a ground swell of people supporting your product.
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