1.  Product/service description: Product Management Excellence training
We’ve worked with thousands of product managers, helping them build skills and improve results.  Our approach combines workshops and on-the-job, action learning.  It is based on over 14 years of research on the practices of the best marketing companies including Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Wells Fargo, 3-M, American Express, and others along with our work with our client-managers.

2.  Benefits: What your Product Managers will take away from this training
As part of this program each manager will apply best practices to:

Review their fact base and their understanding of their product, competitors and customers

1. Create an issues/opportunities/objectives matrix for their product
   
2. Develop a strategic positioning statement for their product
   
3. Analyze the payback from their management-approved strategic product plan
   
4. Define a comprehensive implementation plan and documentation for managing it.
   
5. Create a plan for tracking and measuring the effectiveness of strategies and initiatives.
   
6. Conduct cross functional dialogue on the strategic marketing elements of their product plans

3.  Brief description of how workshops/coaching works: We begin with a two-day workshop followed by 4 weeks of application of the principles and best practices of product management to each participant’s product,  service, or market.  During the fifth week, participants make presentations to their immediate supervisors on the fact-base they have established and their new understanding of the 3 to 5 most significant business issues that face their respective businesses.  After the fact book presentations, the second workshop is conducted focusing on world-class techniques for  addressing the business issues uncovered in the fact-base creation work. Then for 3 weeks, participants return to application of principles and best practices. During the ninth week, participants will make vetting presentations to their invited colleagues of their newly developed issues and product plans. Following the vetting presentations, Resultrek will conduct the third workshop on the topics of cross-functional leadership, world class execution and measuring to learn, not to punish.  Two more weeks of application will be followed by, each participant presenting final plans to senior management.

The topics to be covered in the workshops include: The Marketers’ WorkflowTM The world-lcass best practices for product management; Product Lifecycle; Product Economics; Positioning (including Market Segmentation and Competitive Analysis); TheCustomer Learning CurveTM; Pricing; Marketing Communications; Promotions; Sales Force Programs (Channels); The Plan & Dialogue; Cross-functional coordination; Implementation Planning; Measurement & Learning

4.  Client results/testimonials

Ian Chittick, JPMorgan Chase, London:  “We’ve been talking about some of these opportunities for 3 years or more.  The Resultrek process brought facts and clarity.  We’ve created a practical path forward to achieving the potential we always suspected was there.”

Dr. Phillip Kotler, Northwestern University  “Marketers frequently disagree on which of some dozen marketing tolls will deliver the biggest bang for the buck.  The problem is worse because each marketer has his or her own favorite tools.  The eight step Customer Learning Curve resolved the debate by presenting a rational customer-oriented framework for determining which tools and marketing investments will deliver the most impact on revenue and profit.”

Scott Waid, Senior Director BellSouth: “Resultrek’s coaching makes all the difference in the world.  Instead of being left on your own to apply marketing principles to your job, you have an experienced marketer who helps you solve your business problems.”

Frank Grillo, Chief Marketing Officer for Cypress Communications: “Would I say that the Resultrek program increased revenues by 10 times their fees?  With the power of these concepts, that’s a chip shot.”

Sean Gallagher, Senior Marketing Excutive, JPMorgan Chase, New York: “The Resultrek program increased revenue in just one product group by over $7.7 million this year.  And just as significant, we had over $1 million of expected revenue that didn’t materialize—and because we were tracking it, we were able to cut the programs and save the expenses.”

5.  Sample modules

Each product management workshop is customized for the specific goals and development needs of your team.  The exhibit shows a typical multi-phase program comprising three workshops and on-the-job application and coaching. 

Here are descriptions of typical modules:

 

The Marketer’s Workflow
We’ve benchmarked how the world’s great marketing companies produce superior results, year after year, and organized their secrets into the 6 activities they all perform and the five documents (in one form or another) they use to support the 6 activities.

 

This course will move your product managers from competency in marketing to world-class marketing excellence by showing them the Workflow used by the great marketers and giving them the job tools they need to move up to a significantly higher level of marketing performance. 

The Customer Learning Curve
The Customer Learning Curve is a unique strategic marketing tool developed by Resultrek with two robust components:  a technique for developing deep insight into customers' decision-making, and a practical financial model to use in determining marketing leverage points and the returns on alternative marketing expenditures.

The Customer Learning Curve identifies leverage points in both mature and new businesses.  It fosters integrated marketing, supports fact-based creativity and focuses attention on improvement, not blame, freeing up even more creativity for what really counts – building the customer base, sales, and profits.

Product Lifecycle
The main message of the product lifecycle is change:  The strategies that made you successful last year may actually hasten your downfall this year, if your product is moving to the next phase in it’s lifecycle.  Each phase has its characteristic strategic marketing theme: 

Lifecycle stage, Strategic marketing theme, Introduction

Make it real:  Find innovative and early adopter customers; make the product service operations work; move toward streamlining processes and focusing marketing
Growth, Get your share.  Keep up with demand.  Understand your business model and achieve profitability.

Maturity                
Differentiate or die.  The toughest strategic marketing problems.  Positioning is key.  Find high profit niches and flank main brand with “fighter” brands

Decline                 
Decide:  Harvest; invest to dominate; revitalize with new and improved; kill the product.  Requires the most fundamental strategic marketing thinking

This course gives you insights to determine where your product is in its lifecycle and tools to address the next set of challenges you’ll need to face.

Positioning
Great product positioning increases Return on Investment.  It’s the essence of strategic marketing.  This course covers the 4 elements of positioning:  1.Strategic market segmentation and target selection and profiling.  2. Competitive analysis and defining your unique point of difference (POD). 3. Making your POD credible with supporting evidence—unique product features.  4.  The name of your product.

The course also illustrates the difference between mechanically going through the motions for each step and taking a fresh, creative look that gives your position the “plot twist” it needs to create competitive advantage.

Promotion
Prospects can’t buy your product unless they know about it—and know why they should buy your product rather than the competitor’s.  Still, many prospects may know about your product and actually intend to buy it, but need a little extra push to move them to act.

These are the two issues this course helps you address by: 1.Producing effective marketing communications; and, 2. Creating non-price promotions that compel your prospects to act.

Marketing Communications (MarCom) is often thought to be the realm of the “creatives,” incomprehensible to business managers.  However, in the great marketing companies, MarCom is grounded in business strategy.  This course shows how you can manage MarCom to make sure it is on-strategy and produces results.

Promotions are too often synonymous with price discounts.  But these are the most expensive programs, easy to imitate, typically ineffective, and always destroy brand equity.  This course shows how to diagnose the real barriers prospects face to buying your product and helps you create non-price promotions to get them over these barriers.

Pricing
Pricing is arguably the most strategic element of your marketing mix:  All other elements create value for the customer.  Pricing captures some of this value for your company.  Yet pricing is often treated as a short term tactical decision.

This course shows you how to increase profits by objectifying pricing and creating a strategic context that balances the long term and short term pricing forces. The course covers the 5 C’s of pricing:  Customer, Competitor, Cost, Control, and Change and their implications for setting prices and increasing profits. It provides practical checklists for fighting a price war, raising prices, managing your price band, and responding to short term pricing decisions.

Product Economics
If you are going to be the general manager of your product—if you are going to really own it—you must start with an understanding of your product’s economics—how your product makes money.  This course breaks down abstruse economic terms and concepts to accessible, usable illustrations and exercises that will give you the understanding you need to manage your product’s P & L.

Channels
Marketers need to take responsibility for leading the “multi-organization marketing system” that delivers the whole product—the basic product augmented by complementary products and services like installation, financing, service, education, etc. to enable customers to receive full value from our offerings.

The concept of a “super-organization” or an organization of distinct departments and companies is increasingly important as our traditional methods of selling and distributing are being turned on end by e-business.

This course provides concepts and tools that the marketer can use to analyze, optimize, and make practical progress toward more effective channels.

Implementation/Measurement
Marketers know that implementation is job 1.  This course shares the secrets of successful implementation used by the world’s great marketers.  It also shows the ways they use measurement to learn how to improve their marketing effectiveness and improve results.

For any questions or to set up an appointment, please Contact Us and we will be glad to help assist you.

Call 770.993.7343 or Email us at info@resultrek.com