Manage Your Customers, Manage Your Product: Techniques For Product Managers To Better Understand What Their Customers Really Want

by Jim Anderson

Overview

As though being a product manager was not tough enough, it turns out that not only do we have to manage our products, but we also have to manage our customers. Customers don't particularly want to be managed and so they are not necessarily going to make this an easy task for us to accomplish.

What You'll Find Inside:
* PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH TIME TO INVEST IN A PROSPECT
* PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO UPGRADE CUSTOMERS
* PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO LEARN TO K.I.S.S. THEIR CUSTOMERS
* PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO MAKE THE PRODUCT PURCHASE PROCESS PERFECT

In order to manage customers, first we need to have customers. What this means for a product manager that we are going to have to come up with ways to transform prospects into paying customers. Customers come with a lot of customer data. If we want to have any hope of understanding who our customers are or what they want, we're going to have to come up with a way to get all of that customer information into the same database.

All too often product managers like to point out their most loyal customers as one of their most valuable assets. However, it turns out that these customers may not be very profitable. Instead, we need to allow all of our customers to show us how our product can become even better.

Every customer starts out as a prospect. In order to turn them into a customer it is going to take both time and effort. The big question that product managers face is just exactly how much time is it worth to put into a given prospect in order to turn them into a customer? Once you've successfully landed a customer, they will start to use the current version of your product. When you upgrade your product to the next version, it's going to be the product manager's job to find a way to get your customer to also upgrade.

In order for a customer to make the decision to buy your product, they are going to have to carefully evaluate all of the product information that they have. Successful product managers know that in order to speed this process up, they have to be careful to not give their customers too much information.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940154016916
Publisher:	Jim Anderson
Publication date:	02/13/2017
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Dr. Jim Anderson is a talented engineer, teacher, and marketing professional. Born in Iowa City, Iowa his family moved many times during his childhood eventually settling just outside of St. Louis Missouri in Edwardsville, Illinois. Dr. Anderson went on to earn four college degrees: three in Computer Science including a doctoral degree and an MBA in marketing. He has worked in the IT industry for over 25 years for both large companies (Boeing, Siemens, Alcatel, and Verizon) as well as at some start-ups during that whole "dot com" thing. Dr. Anderson is now the founder and President of Blue Elephant Consulting. Blue Elephant Consulting shows technical professionals and groups how to use their business communication skills to change the world. By using its Clear Blue Knowledge Systems Blue Elephant Consulting shows them how to become successful communicators and set their ideas free thereby changing the world. Dr. Anderson provides consulting, coaching, speaking and training products and services to help in 5 key areas of business communications: public speaking, product management, IT team management, IT department leadership, and negotiating. Based on his experiences with many different customers, Dr. Anderson has taken the lessons that he's learned in the real world and has documented both the issues and their solutions in the books that he has written. Each book is filled with a unique set of real world challenges that product managers, CIOs, negotiators, IT managers, and public speakers encounter on an almost daily basis. In clear, easy to understand language, Dr. Anderson lays out exactly what the challenge is and then how to go about easily solving it. In addition to running his company, Dr. Anderson has had the opportunity to teach college courses at multiple universities. While doing this Dr. Anderson discovered that his students had a real need for information on how to get their first job after they graduated. His after class one-on-one discussions about the tips and techniques that today's college students could use to simplify their job search lead to speaking engagements and eventually to the book "Making The Jump: How To Land Your First Job After College!"