In Silicon Valley, every company wants to produce white papers. They’re considered an essential part of marketing technology products, and they’re on the checklist for every product launch. Beyond the launch, Product Management and Product Marketing typically want to provide prospects and customers with a wide variety of white papers on product-related topics.

White papers have their strengths: you have several pages to describe your products, their benefits, and their underlying technology to an interested audience. Customers or prospects in the early stages of learning about your sector get educated about why their problems should be solved, different approaches to solving them, and how to evaluate these approaches. In the case of experienced customers, a good white paper can further establish your credibility and deliver convincing arguments about why your company’s approach is superior. Done right, white papers can be great marketing tools and often generate more qualified leads than any other source.

Unfortunately, though, companies often squander this opportunity. Most technical white papers are never read, even if readers actively sought them out. Typically, in the software industry, many readers stop reading part way through the first page, overwhelmed by verbose, jargon-filled content and wondering how it applies to them.

White papers can avoid this fate and be much more effective marketing tools if you 1) do some up-front thinking, 2) carefully craft your arguments and provide proof points, and 3) use a good writer.

In the case of point #1, up-front thinking, Sure Product Consulting asks clients who want us to write their white papers the following questions. Prior to our even bidding on the project.

1. Why do you want a white paper?
2. How should this white paper be different from your marketing collateral? Does it have different goals? A different target audience? Will it have different messaging? Different content?
3. How should this white paper be different from your competitors’ white papers?
4. What are you going to do with the white paper? Give it away at conferences? Offer it as a “freebie” to customers who subscribe to your monthly newsletter? Or just make it a website download for anyone who wants it?
5. How critical is it that customers actually read the paper, digest it, and remember its main messages? (This may seem like a silly question, but you’d be surprised at how often the real goal is to collect email addresses instead of truly communicating ideas.)
6. How will you measure the success of this white paper as a marketing tool? (Qualified leads generated? The customer’s ability to remember key messages? Sheer number of email addresses collected?)
7. Why do you believe a white paper is the most effective method to reach your goals?
8. How “neutral” do you want your paper to be? Neutrality increases your credibility. But it also means you must even-handedly discuss alternative ways to solve customer problems—perhaps even naming your competitors.
9. If there is just one message you want readers to take away, what is it?
10. What tone—informal or formal—should your white paper take? By “informal,” I mean using “you” and “we” and not worrying very much about dangling prepositions and split infinitives. In the software industry, most white papers refer to the company in the third person, rather than “we.” They talk about “customers,” rather than “you.” In our experience at Sure Product Consulting, most software companies prefer this more formal writing style, even though readers are more likely to actually read and retain the messages presented more informally.

If you get clear on these issues before you start to write, your white paper project will go much more smoothly. You might even eliminate a feedback round or two, which has been our experience. The result will be a better and more effective white paper.

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I am much delinquent in posting this, but check out the recording from the webinar, Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams, given by Steve Johnson and me on May 22, 2009.

You can hear/view it on Pragmatic Marketing’s website, or on iTunes.  Or, just check out the slides here.

It was really fun to work with Pragmatic Marketing and the super-funny Steve Johnson on this.  And I’ve really enjoyed chatting with some of the listeners in the aftermath of the webinar.

I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

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On May 22 at 10am PST, I’m giving a webinar with the always-hilarious Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing.

The topic?  Agile Product Management and “Five Common Challenges” organizations face when transitioning from a waterfall software development model to an Agile model.

Here’s the official blurb (also on Pragmatic Marketing’s website):

Agile is all the rage – developers are using it to deliver products more quickly and more reliably. But many organizations will find that their initial success with Agile is unsustainable unless they address how Agile impacts the rest of the organization, including product management. In this webinar, Sue and Steve will discuss five common challenges faced by newly “agilized” organizations and will propose solutions.

Interested?  Sign up here: Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams.

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I’ve been quite remiss in posting my slides from my “Charm School for Product Managers” presentation that I gave at P-Camp Silicon Valley.  Sorry about the delay.

In the session, we had a great discussion about how to handle sticky situations product managers find themselves in every day.  One example: how to handle a customer who demands a definitive release date and feature list when it is too early for you to know.  Another situation: dealing with situations when Sales has misrepresented the product to the customer.

Thanks to Enthiosys for putting on such a great event.  I met a lot of great product managers and product marketers at P-Camp Silicon Valley – over 350 were in attendance!   Looking forward to the next one…

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OK, you know you have to do Win-Loss Analysis. We talked about this earlier.  It’s one of the best ways to make sure you correctly understand the market and its problems — upon which you based, well, everything.

But unfortunately, it is very difficult to get these customers/former prospects lined up for Win-Loss interviews, and even rarer for the interviews to actually happen. Why? Because the Win-Loss interview usually benefits only the vendor and not the interviewee.

I’ve done many Win-Loss interviews, so here’s my advice for getting these interviews to happen.

1. Ask for Win-Loss interviews about 3-4 weeks after the deal closed or was definitively lost. You want them to clearly remember why they did or did not pick you, so don’t wait too long. But if you approach them too early,  lost prospects might decline from fear that you are really trying to re-open the sales process. Or you might unknowingly introduce doubt in the mind of a “won” customer who hasn’t yet paid for your product.

2. Make the following exceedingly clear in your request for an interview:

1. The interview will last no longer than 20-30 minutes.
2. You will not be attempting to re-open the sales process. You are not in Sales, you are in XXXX (i.e. Product Management, Marketing, Development, etc…).
3. Your main motivation is to make sure you correctly understand the market, and can build the best product for that market.

3. Promise some degree of confidentiality. Obviously, you want to share the results of Win-Loss interviews internally and can’t provide complete confidentiality. But to get honest feedback about, for example, whether a personality conflict with your sales rep was a factor in a loss, you should give interviewees the option to request that certain remarks be “off the record.”  Explain that for “off the record” comments, you might include the remark in an aggregate report that covers many customers, but only if it can’t be traced back.

4. Offer something in return. All the above suggestions make it less painful for customers/lost prospects to participate in Win-Loss analysis interviews, but there’s still nothing it it for them.  By making the Win-Loss interview an exchange, even a very lopsided one, you significantly increase your chances of landing an interview.

For “won” customers, offer something that will help them become more successful with the product more quickly. This might be a white paper, access to a special web-based training session, or something similar.

For lost prospects, it’s tougher to offer them something without the appearance of impropriety — as if you’re trying to buy your company back into the game.  To avoid this, one possibility is hiring an outside consultant, and having him/her say “thank you” to interviewees with gifts of nominal value, such as low-dollar-value Starbucks or Amazon gift cards.  Another idea is to thank them by donating $100 to a a charity they choose or to a neutral charity like United Way or the Red Cross.

5. Be persistent but very nice. More than likely, you will have to work hard to set up a full schedule of Win-Loss interviews with customers and lost prospects.  If they don’t call you back, call again later  and send and follow up with an email.  I typically call five times before I give up.  Each time, be as nice as possible.  Remember, you are asking for a favor!

6. Be prepared for last minute cancellations and postponements. It’s going to happen. Your Win-Loss analysis is much more important to you than to your customers and lost prospects, so many will blow you off. Expect this, but immediately try to reschedule for a specific time and day.  If your target interviewee declines, ask if there is someone else at the company you might ask who has a deep understanding about the factors that drove the purchase decision.

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Today, enterprises and consumers alike, expect to try out your software (or online service – see note 1) hands-on before making a purchase decision.  Thus, the necessity of Product Evaluation Guides that:

1. Get prospective customers up and running with your software as quickly and as easily as possible.
2. Give positive, low-risk product experiences, so prospective customers have the confidence to start tackling real problems with your software — all prior to purchase.
3. Make it clear how the software is better than the competition’’s.

Sounds simple enough, but many Product Evaluation Guides fail due to simple mistakes.  Here are the three most common mistakes that product marketers make when writing Product Evaluation Guides:

1. Not providing detailed-enough step-by-step instructions.

I’ve seen too many Product Evaluation Guides with hyper-brief instructions like: “1. Create a new project.  2. Create a new workspace,” without any explanation about HOW to do these tasks.

Where’s the icon the user should click to create a new project?  What should the user input into each field in the “New Project dialog box” that pops up?  What’s a workspace anyway?   Explain please.   Otherwise, the user will get frustrated and conclude your product is unusable, when in reality it’s just your Evaluation Guide.

Remember, most users of Product Evaluation Guides are unfamiliar with your product and your lingo, because, after all, indoctrinating those unfamiliar users is the main purpose of your Evaluation Guide!  Assume they have scant knowledge of your product or similar ones.

2. Not providing  context or explanation about why these are the steps.

On the flip side, I’ve seen Evaluation Guides filled with detailed, step-by-step instructions — but they never explain WHY these are the steps.  This leaves the reader uncertain about how to apply the same “step template” to his own problem.  What parts of the instructions are “template” and applicable to other similar problems, and which parts are specific to just this example?  The user is left guessing,  frustrated, and unable to move forward with using the product to solve his problem.

One way to remedy this is to smartly divide the document into sections and sub-sections of related steps.  At the beginning of each sub-section, briefly explain the high-level process and why these are the steps.  When describing each step in detail, note if this particular step is specific to this example and how it would be changed for other situations.  And finally, at the end of the section, recap why these were the steps and provide some more context about how to adapt them if necessary.

3. Including too much marketing-speak.

It’s very tempting to load up a Product Evaluation Guide with lots of puffery and claims of your product’s status as the “leading high-performance platform for scalable, synergistic ,and secure social networking” (or something like that).

However, remember your goal is to get the user successfully using your product — hopefully with his real-world problems — as quickly as possible.   Marketing-speak slows the user down.  It requires him to use too much of his brain to understand what you are saying — brainpower he could have applied to using your product and figuring out how he could apply it to his own situation.  Plus, many of today’s users are just turned off by the usual marketing blah-blah and will think less of your product for using it.

Note that by “Marketing-speak” I am not referring to “good marketing”  language the clearly states what your product is, what it is not, its benefits, and its unique differentiators.  I mean language that – intentionally or not – is buzzword-laden and ambiguous.

Conclusion

Writing a great Product Evaluation Guide can be a tricky business.  But if you keep the main goals in mind and avoid the three common mistakes, you’re on your way.

————–

Note 1 - To avoid awkward language in this article, I use the term “software” generically to encompass online services, enterprise software, and consumer software.

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Once upon a time, as far back as 2004, enterprise software Product Marketing Managers and Product Managers spent time creating “Product Reviewer Guides.”

These documents were intended to step technical journalists through the process of installing and using the product, all for the purpose of getting the journalist to write a smashing review of the product and publish it in the likes of InfoWorld, Information Weekly, or some similar trade rag.

Because these documents were geared toward reporters, certain shortcuts could be made.  Since reporters only had limited time — a few hours tops — to work with the product hands-on, PMMs could create pathways through the product that were not typical, but avoided broken functionality or other ugliness.  They could skip directly to the sexy stuff in the product by using pre-baked examples and sample databases.  Further, these documents had a lot of “marketing-speak” — in hope that the reporter would just parrot it directly in their article.

Well, those days are gone.  The “Product Reviewer Guide” for reporters is no longer very relevant.  Instead the “Product Evaluation Guide,” for actual potential customers, is what’s needed.

What are the differences between Product Reviewer Guides and Product Evaluation Guides?

1. Evaluation Guides are geared toward potential customers, where Product Reviewer Guides are geared toward reporters.
2. For Evaluation Guides, the goal is getting potential customers using the product so successfully that they start using the product for real world tasks and even integrate it into their business — all prior to purchasing.  For Reviewer Guides, the goal is to support a favorable product experience  — basically a demo — that lasts a few hours.  After working with a Reviewer Guide, the reader is usually not ready to start using the product for real world tasks, but is ready to write about the product’s benefits and how it compares to competitors.
3. Evaluation Guides get readers using the actual product successfully in their own environment by stepping users through the typical ways to use the product, and by starting with step one.  In contrast, Product Reviewer Guides carefully step around ugliness in the product, even if it means showcasing the product in an atypical way.  Further, Reviewer Guides often skip the (necessary, but sometimes ugly) first steps by having readers use pre-baked examples and sample databases.
4. Evaluation Guides take a matter-of-fact tone and are generally free of marketing-speak, in support of the goal of getting users productive in the real world as quickly as possible.  Marketing-speak makes this more difficult, and can be very frustrating to users that are simply trying to learn if a product can do what they need. In contrast, Reviewer Guides usually have lots of marketing-speak because the company hopes reporters will quote it verbatim in articles.

Why are Product Reviewer Guides on the way out?

For one, the influence of traditional technical media is shrinking as the clout of social networks is increasing. Spending time on Reviewer Guides is not necessarily a good use of marketing dollars anymore.

However, the more important reason why Product Evaluation Guides are rising as Product Reviewer Guides wane is that most software companies now offer free product trials to potential customers, even for enterprise-grade products with multi-million dollar price tags.  And while free product trials are not exactly new, they are now offered earlier in the sales process than ever before, often prior to any contact with a sales rep.

So, next time someone says they need a Product Reviewer Guide, think twice.  A Product Evaluation Guide will often have bigger impact for the same effort.

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At most companies, everyone agrees that Win-Loss Analysis is very important.

After all, without understanding why you are winning deals and why you are losing, how are you to know what you’re doing right and what you need to change?  Are your sales people blowing it by not properly qualifying the deal or understanding the prospect’s problems?  Is your product a true winner or is it deficient in critical ways?  Are your products priced competitively?  Are you lacking in other components of the big picture, such as professional services or customer support?

However, for some reason Win-Loss Analysis rarely gets done… especially when the economy turns, jobs get cut, and the surviving staff all end up with far too much work and very limited time.  The product managers and product marketing managers, who are traditionally responsible for Win-Loss, tend to be especially busy and overloaded.  Often those job functions are hit disproportionately hard compared to Sales or Engineering.

But there is hope. Win-Loss Analysis is a perfect job for an outside consultant or contractor, and can often be done extremely cost effectively while freeing product management and product marketing staff to focus on similarly high-value tasks that cannot easily be done by outsiders.

In fact, a consultant might get better and more accurate results that employees because the lost prospects are more likely to be honest with an outsider.

Why? Because:

1. They don’t have to worry about offending the sales person, the product, or the vendor as a whole.
2. They don’t have to worry about the consultant using the Win-Loss conversation to try re-opening the sales process – a decision prospects are often loathe to revisit after a protracted selection process.  This fear is a major reason lost prospects turn down requests for Win-Loss interviews.

A Win-Loss consulting engagement usually involves interviewing a majority of the customers and lost prospects from the last quarter or half.  The consultant has a short conversation with the internal account team for each customer or prospect to learn their take on why the customer was won or the prospect was lost.

Then, the consultant interviews each customer and prospect, delving into the areas most likely to provide actionable feedback.   Depending on the account, topics might include the business problem driving the product purchase, product fit (or lack of) with the problem, competition, account team dynamics, and the customer’s internal decision-making process.

If done right, these conversations — without fail — uncover distinct patterns across several customers.  Follow-on conversations — both internally and externally — dive into the causes and effects of these patterns.  Finally, the consultant works with internal employees to identify specific initiatives and actions to improve the situation.

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Sure Product Consulting is proud to sponsor the “Second Annual P-Camp Unconference for Product Managers.”  There are two great things about P-Camp:

1. It’s FREE
2. It’s chock-full of education, networking, and learning about software product management best practices from your peers and product managment thought leaders.

 Here’s the official blurb:

Join more than 300 friends, colleagues and perfect strangers at the second annual Silicon Valley P-Camp Unconference for product managers. 

 What is P-Camp?

The world’s largest free get-together of product managers.  Based on the successful BarCamp and Open Space formats, it is an intense ad hoc gathering of product folks to share, present, network, learn, laugh and discuss.  Much of the agenda will be created by you on the morning of the event, so bring ideas for discussions that you want to participate in.

When:  Saturday, March 14, 2009, 9AM to 4PM

Where:  Yahoo! headquarters, Building C, 701 First St, Sunnyvale

Cost:  FREE!   Includes lunch and a P-Camp t-shirt

Registration: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=168526

More information: http://www.enthiosys.com/news-events/pcamp09/

Volunteers and Sponsors:  contact Sergey Gorbatov, sgorbatov@enthiosys.com

 Partial list of proposed talks and panels so far:

 Nancy Frishberg – Innovation Games session.
Erin Kinikin – “Working With Analysts” – panel
Chris Sims – “Agile 101″
Joy Montgomery – “If You Want to Hit the Deck Running, There Has to Be a Deck!”
Nils Davis – “What do you use for requirements management?”
Meghan Ede – Topics TBD
Jim Holland / Michael Hopkin – Market Sensing – a Case Study
Rich Mironov – “How Agile Changes The Way You Do Product Management”
Ross Mayfield -”Using Social Media and Wikis in Product Management” – panel
Mara Krieps / Linda Merrick -”Agile Product Management: The Rosetta Stone”
Catherine Connor – “Agile Product Management and CRM”
David Taber – “Design your customer before you design your product”
Luke Hohmann – “Shaping Your Products With Prune The Product Tree”

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