A recent issue of the newsletter was called TLC for the RFP. It was all about creating materials along with a system and roles that would allow a company to generate high quality RFPs with less effort. A subscriber writes in with an interesting question about the best length for answers to RFP questions. Many questions ...

When that lucky time comes where your company is drawing up a contract with a soon-to-be customer, the whole team is in a state of heightened anxiety. People are worried, tempers flare. What if we botch this sale? Are we being too picky? Are we betting the farm? If you're lucky, as Product Manager you have ...

One of the biggest headaches for software companies of all sizes is the creation of RFPs. RFPs are labor intensive, exhaustive and exhausting efforts to tout the product. The effort to produce RFPs can be a drain on precious resources in Sales, Marketing, and Engineering. And Product Managers get involved more often than they wish ...

Remember the good ole' days, the days of the dot.coms? People didn't just build software. They set out to build the best transformational software ever. Development groups held meetings that never had action items and talked excitedly about how they were going to apply cutting edge technologies. They didn't plan to upgrade the existing software (when ...

One of the key contributions that a Product Manager can make is to provide regular, bite-sized input to the sales force about product benefits and competitive advantages. So often, sales reps are thrown into quarterly (or even less frequent) product training sessions consisting of more than an hour's worth of material poured into a single hour's ...

Of the myriad responsibilities that Product Managers take on, probably the most challenging one is training the sales force. It's like teaching at a troubled inner city school. You have to create all your own learning materials. You get no support from the people who run things. The class is disobedient and out of control. Then, ...

Lots of people give software demos to prospective customers, business partners, investment partners, and the media. Usually very uninspiring demos. In meeting rooms and on show floors everywhere, your competitors' prospects are sitting through boring presentations as they try to figure out how on earth the discussion even relates to them. None of these prospects is ...