Episode 647 | Equipping Sales & Support With Critical Product Knowledge As You Grow

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 647, Rob Walling chats with Whitney Deterding about product marketing and how to equip sales, support, and your entire team with critical product knowledge as you grow. We dive into how to communicate all aspects of your product, from individual features to benefits and use cases. When you're one or two people, you're doing all of this as a founder, but the moment you have three, four, or more people on your team, you have to figure out a way to communicate how the product is changing effectively. Otherwise, your prospects, sales, and support won't know that. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover: 4:08 - What is product marketing? 8:56 - How do you implement cross team knowledge sharing? 14:54 - When should you start writing product or launch briefs? 16:35 - Training new sales and customer success people 23:05 - How to equip your salespeople 31:18 - Product positioning 35:13 - How to navigate positioning changes over times Links from the Show: Whitney Deterding (@WhitDeterding) I Twitter Coschedule Guru TinySeed TinySeed Applications Q&A on February 8 If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you. Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of startups for the rest of us. I'm your host Rob Walling,
0:04.5	and in this episode, I talk with Whitney Dieterding about product marketing. It sounds really
0:10.5	boring, but it's really cool. It's about equipping sales and support and the entire rest of your
0:15.6	organization with critical product knowledge as you grow. And frankly, there's a lot more to it as well.
0:21.8	It's learning not just how to drive new leads or new traffic to your website, which is
0:28.1	marketing, but it's learning how to communicate the aspects of your product, the individual
0:32.6	features, the benefits, what you can do with it, use cases, case studies, learning how to communicate that
0:38.3	to new people coming into your funnel, to your sales team, to your support team, to your success
0:43.9	team. And when you're one or two people, you're doing all of this as a founder. But the moment
0:49.2	you have three or four people on your team, you have to figure out a way to communicate how the product is changing.
0:56.5	Otherwise, your prospects and sales and support won't know that. And so we spend 30 plus minutes
1:02.5	talking through what type of resources to create. You know, is it a knowledge base? Is it a
1:08.0	wiki? Is it a Google Doc, and then ways of thinking about communicating
1:12.4	this to people. So this is definitely a conversation I wished I'd had many years ago. I remember
1:18.1	after exiting Drip, I didn't even know what product marketing meant. And learning that as we grew
1:24.0	to 50 and then 100 people was fine, but it would have been beneficial had I known
1:29.0	about it earlier. Before we dive into that, Tiny Seed applications are open now through February
1:35.2	at 19th, Tinyseed.com slash apply if you're interested in learning more. If you're looking for the
1:40.7	right amount of funding, amazing mentorship from world-class mentors,
1:45.0	a strong tight-knit community in our Slack group,
1:47.9	in-person gatherings,
1:49.3	and frankly, the support you need to grow your business faster
	...

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