Appleton Greene & Co Global – Product launch is just the beginning!
Product Management by Appleton Greene & Co Global – San Francisco San Diego Denver Austin Boston Technology Consumer Goods Retail Telecommunications
Appleton Greene & Co Global – Your organization has spent a significant amount of time, effort and money to launch your product into the market. While it is important to celebrate this successful event with your team, realize that launching a product is just the beginning. What you do now can make a significant difference both short term and long term depending on how you manage the product through its lifecycle. Best-in-class companies tend to ensure at least three things happen post-launch. First, they capture what they learned during the product and launch cycle through immediate post-mortem analysis to enable continuous improvement of those processes. Second, they have robust current product management policies and processes that work to maximize revenue, enable rapid response to unexpected defects, identify and respond to competitors’ tactical moves, and fine tune demand generation. Third, and perhaps most overlooked, they have a core value of continuously learning over the product lifecycle to capture next generation requirements, gain insights into how competitors react, and continue proactively improving their product lifecycle processes and policies. Product management is more than a job title, it is a cross-organization discipline; and Appleton Greene’s Product Management consultancy will work with you to assess your post-launch product lifecycle processes, identify best practices and potential gaps, and work with you to ensure your organization is positioned to learn from and capitalize on each product’s lifecycle. – Appleton Greene & Co Global
Keep it sold!
Appleton Greene & Co Global – Your brand promise is valued by potential customers, your marketing has moved them through the purchase decision process and they have purchased your product. But is the product truly sold? At this point your mindset should be that the customer has only put down a deposit to take your product for a test drive. Whether they decide to keep the product begins when they start to unbox it and actually experience your product’s brand promise. To maximize net unit sales requires particular attention to their experience as they unpack, install, learn and use your product. This is where having a robust total customer experience definition process is a critical success factor in preventing returns. Think about your last technology, electronics, or personal telecom purchase. As you unboxed the product was your perception of the product value and company’s brand improved, maintained or damaged by the experience. If you installed the product yourself, how easy was that? In the case of an installation requiring a technician (e.g. a cable or satellite TV service provider), how did your experience with that person affect your perception of the product and company brand? After installation, was it easy to learn how to use the product? As you use the product, can you accomplish what you intended in an easy and straight-forward manner? If you required support, did you count that as a negative for the product and what was that subsequent experience like? Unfortunately, many companies fail in this post-sale phase and, using short-term thinking, make returning a product onerous in an attempt to minimize returns. Best in class companies strive to ensure the customer experience with a new product does not generate a return. Even in the case where a product is returned, they appreciate that a positive experience will help prevent or at least mitigate dismal product ratings being shared on social media. Additionally, a positive experience at any phase can translate to additional future sales. Product management is more than a job title, it is a cross-organization discipline; and Appleton Greene’s Product Management consulting service will work with you to develop or enhance your Total Customer Experience processes to ensure you deliver on your product and brand promises to keep your products sold.
Ensure alignment with a robust product lifecyle process!
Appleton Greene & Co Global – It happens in any business. Your cross-functional product team is not efficiently or effectively delivering to customer expectations. This can occur when a new team is created, an existing team has lost current team members, or even the nature of the business has significantly changed and impacted the effectiveness of an existing team. Regardless of the particular situation, most cases are not a talent issue but a lack of clarity issue due to reliance on informal “tribal knowledge” instead of a clearly defined and documented product lifecycle process. Lacking a documented product lifecycle process causes teams to be distracted wasting precious time and effort solving the mystery of internal expectations, sequencing and deliverables via trial-and-error versus having their time and focus on generating insightful and timely deliverables that enable meeting or exceeding customer expectations. A robust documented product lifecycle process removes the mystery by clearly showing roles and responsibilities, big-picture guideposts, examples and/or templates for deliverables and sequencing of efforts required to drive success. Product management is more than a job title, it is a cross-organization discipline; and Appleton Greene’s Product Management will work with you to assess your current product lifecycle process, identify best practices and potential gaps, and work with you to document a robust product lifecycle process that enables product team success.
When is just as important as what!
Appleton Greene & Co Global – All businesses have an internal cadence typically driven by their fiscal year for business planning and other internal efforts. Fewer have a cadence for their customer-facing and channel-facing efforts that address product planning, account planning, budgeting, product launch, marketing mix strategy and tactics, and product transitions to name a few. And this externally focused cadence must be driven by customer seasonality. For FedSLED this seasonality typically is driven by fiscal years. For consumers this may be driven by holidays, calendar events (back to school, graduation) or seasons. And while overall B2B may not be as dramatic, this sector usually is not purely linear and can also see volume peaks and valleys depending on the solution category and their customers being driven by the seasonality factors listed above. So why does this matter? Having the right customer-focused cadence allows you to: maximize sales at your maximum price; preserve competitive advantage to the last possible moment; maintain sales velocity by adjusting your marketing mix to the season; actively and collaboratively capitalize on your channel’s planning and actions as they follow their targeted customer segments’ seasonality; actively manage your inventory to reduce cost-of-capital and price-protection exposure; and preserve profits during product transitions. Product management is more than a job title, it is a cross-organization discipline; and Appleton Greene’s Product Management consulting service is ready to work with you to use your customers’ seasonality to define and implement a customer-facing business cadence and processes that enables optimal product and product portfolio results.
Maximize your channel success!
Appleton Greene & Co Global – It has been a disappointing day. You have just come from a meeting with one of your most important channel partners and instead of a collaborative meeting, it had a more adversarial feel with discussions centered around execution issues, missed opportunities and a lot of pushback from the account on almost everything discussed. If this sounds familiar, it may be due to the current state of your account planning process. The good news is that both parties have a shared goal to make money today with your products and even more money in the future. The breakdown may be that your internal and shared account planning and execution processes are failing to deliver the alignment that makes that happen. To understand if this is the case, some of the questions to be answered can include: are your internal metrics aligned to how your account measures your category; are the right people interfacing regularly and proactively with the account; is your team clearly demonstrating their market, category, and product expertise; is your account planning process a basic one-size-fits-all or tailored to the value of the account for your business; are your planning cycles aligned with the account’s planning cycle; are your product launches and/or transition processes synchronized with account resets; are your promotion proposals outside of the account’s lead time; and for your critical accounts are you doing joint product planning or at least soliciting their feedback during the development phase? Product management is more than a job title, it is a cross-organization discipline; and Appleton Greene’s Product Management consultancy will work with you to assess your account planning and execution processes, identify best practices and potential gaps, and work with you to ensure your organization is positioned for account and channel success.
Are you generating demand for your competition?
Appleton Greene & Co Global – Your product development team has outdone themselves in generating your next product including a superior feature set, aggressively managed production costs to enable the correct pricing and excelled in delivering customer ease of use. Additionally, you are confident that your channel strategy has placed product where your customers want to buy. However, your sales numbers are not meeting expectations and you are losing out to your competitors. If this is happening, there is a good chance that your demand generation process is not aligning correctly with your customer’s purchase decision process and, worst case, could actually be enabling your competitors to poach the sale. In a purchase decision process there are generally three decision-maker roles: financial, technical, and end user. Each of these roles is evaluating different criteria about the purchase decision. From a financial perspective, is the value (benefits) delivered enough to justify this purchase? From a technology perspective, is this product reliable and only require minimal or reasonable technical expertise? From an end user perspective, does this product do what the user needs/desires easily and consistently? These roles can spread across an organization, a family, or even all reside in an individual decision maker. Regardless of the number of actual decision makers, these three roles require specific information in a logical sequence to allow them to traverse the decision process from initial awareness to actual purchase. A robust demand generation process focuses on maximizing sales and accelerating positive customer purchase decisions by: identifying key demand generation deliverables; setting the reach and frequency of putting compelling deliverables and calls-to-action in front of decision makers; and the sequencing to help ensure your prospects do not enter the decision process with you and then escape to the competition due to your process gapping out. Product management is more than a job title, it is a cross-organization discipline; and Appleton Greene’s Product Management consultancy will work with you to assess your demand generation process, identify best practices and potential gaps, and work with you to ensure your demand generation efforts are optimized for your business’ success.
Mr. Lumb BSCS Accredited Executive Consultant (AEC) at Appleton Greene
Appleton Greene & Co Global – Mr Lumb is an approved Executive Consultant at Appleton Greene and he has experience in production, marketing and management. He has achieved a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and is a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt in Transactional Process Improvement. He has industry experience within the following sectors: Technology; Electronics; Consumer Goods; Retail and Telecommunications. He has had commercial experience within the following countries: United States of America, or more specifically within the following cities: San Francisco CA; San Diego CA; Denver CO; Austin TX and Boston MA. His personal achievements include: Americas and EMEA regional business unit design and management for consumer technology products; global marketing management, strategic business planning and execution; global delivery of consumer and commercial technology products; new product category creation, multi-channel product lifecycle management and cross-functional organizational design and management. His service skills incorporate: strategic planning; product planning; portfolio planning; product lifecycle; go-to-market and organizational effectiveness.
To find further information about the Product Management service through Appleton Greene, please CLICK HERE.
20 Consulting Service Examples
There are currently some 650 Accredited Consulting Services (ACS) provided by Appleton Greene worldwide. Here are 20 examples.
01. Business Administration
02. Business Development
03. Business Optimization
04. Crisis Management
05. Customer Development
06. Energy Management
07. Entrepreneurial Leadership
08. Investment Consulting
09. Marketing Optimization
10. Marketing Transformation
11. Process Excellence
12. Product Management
13. Risk Analysis
14. Soulful Leadership
15. Sustainable Development
16. Transitional Growth
17. Value Innovation
18. Retirement Planning
19. Change Strategy
20. Product Lifecycle
For further information about Appleton Greene, please CLICK HERE.
For further information about the Product Management service, please CLICK HERE.
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