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 Pointing Sales and Marketing in the Same Direction
Here's some good news in this perilous economic climate: The need to do more with less -- and faster -- is bringing sales and marketing teams together. More than a half of B2B companies are talking about aligning the two teams.
What does alignment mean in the real world? Sales and marketing teams working toward the same goal with shared resources and metrics -- that's the heart of alignment. Easier said than done; the two groups operate on different time horizons. Sales cares about the next two quarters while marketing is focused on the next six to eight quarters.
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The Ascent of Incent for Marketing
Sales people, cynics have said, are coin operated – driven solely by financial incentives. Marketing people, on the other hand, are generally salaried and have their attention fragmented across a range of different activities including some with only remote ties to revenue generation. Yet marketing and sales are co-dependent functions and their coordination is critical to any company’s success. One pragmatic way of bringing the two into line involves rethinking the approach used to compensate Marketing people who, like their counterparts in Sales, also respond to incentives.
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 Build, Buy, or Partner?
Three paths to product development
Getting innovative products to market can be brought about in different ways. FiServ product manager Desiree Wolfe examines three of the most common approaches and suggests how to weigh the tradeoffs of each.
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How Thomson Reuters Lightens Up Its
 Product Lines
Serious people like to have fun too
You don’t have to be a bleeding-edge technology startup to support genuine innovation, to make yourself memorable to customers, or to have a good time. The venerable Thomson Reuters information service has formalized a way to make it happen while pleasing some of the world’s most famously unsmiling clients. Product Management Director Michael Koppelmann explains how they did it.
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 IBM’s Tight-Fitting Middleware
Tailoring generic software to specific vertical industries
For more than ten years, IBM has directed its formidable resources toward making some of its underlying software a better fit for customers in different industries. That involves choreographing a whole horde of development partners. Lonne Jaffe, who leads that effort for the company’s Public Sector segment, explains how they do it.
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 Searching for Your Inner Google
Focus on authentic strengths
Particularly during tough times, a company’s ability to survive requires knowing what its core values are and then focusing relentlessly on building the business around them. At search giant Google, whose profusion of new products has been the awe of American industry, economic contraction has prompted the company to sharpen its focus on projects that match its core strengths. Google New Business Development Manager Robert Meese explains.
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Getting the Most Out of Field Interviews
It may look like a casual conversation, but it's not
Okay, so you've figured out who you need to interview to help develop ideas for product design. What now? Where do you go? What do you ask? And how do you get the most useful results? Tom Bonnell, Director of Industrial Design at Respironics, and Julie Gulick, Product Planner at MEDRAD, have been conducting field interviews for years. Contacted separately, the two offered insights which included strikingly similar recommendations.
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 Making the Case
Preparing and presenting your business case is serious business
Building a compelling business case for creating a new company around a breakthrough product idea is an essential step in securing startup financing. It’s equally important in securing support for resource-intensive development projects that extend existing product lines for established firms. So getting the case right is critical. But it’s almost always addressed to a notoriously tough audience – senior corporate executives and potential investors with famously short attention spans. At a recent Product Strategy Network forum devoted to building better cases, four seasoned executives, representing the receiving side of the pitch, discussed what worked for them, what didn’t, and why.
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Peer Learning 
Product Managers require a number of skills to succeed, but many have gaps in such critical areas as business savvy, market expertise, operational know-how, or entrepreneurial ability. As a result, the leaders of product management groups have to spend a great deal of their time coaching individual product managers on day-to-day tasks, frequently at the expense of other strategic priorities with longer-term implications.
