The Product Marketing Advantage

What if mastering the deep knowledge of your product could be the key to elevating your sales team's performance and speeding up your sales cycle? In this first episode of season two the Blue Ocean B2B podcast, we chat with James Igglesden, a seasoned business owner and marketer, to explore the pivotal role of product marketers in B2B marketing. 

James offers practical advice on how New Zealand businesses can bridge the gap between sales and marketing by ensuring teams deeply understand both their products and target markets. 

With useful tips ranging from digital versus physical product placement to crafting customer-focused assets, this episode is packed with insights for anyone looking to sharpen their B2B marketing strategies. Tune in to uncover actionable ideas you can implement today.

For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz

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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.

Chapters

• 0:05 Product Marketing Tools and Strategies
• 11:53 Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Product Strategies
• 20:28 Transitioning to International Sales Success
• 26:46 Productizing Services for Market Success
• 35:20 Product Marketing Strategies for Success

Transcript

Dale Koerner: 0:05

Kia ora, and welcome back to e Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, new Zealand. I'm your host, dale Kerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you, from emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand. We are here to help the New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're a B2B marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place welcome to the B2B podcast by Blue Ocean.

Lee Hunter: 0:42

My name is Lee and today we're going to talk to an exceptional guest and colleague of mine, James Igglesden. James, you're a husband, a father of four, a business owner, an entrepreneur and a world-class marketer. Welcome.

James Igglesden: 0:55

Thanks, Lee, it's good to be here.

Lee Hunter: 0:57

Exciting time, so we're going to dig into your brain a bit today. But before we get into it, would you like to just share maybe two minutes about who you are and what you've been up to?

James Igglesden: 1:06

I think the first thing I want to say is out of the whole introduction there is thanks for pronouncing my name right. That is a skill that not many people possess around the world, so I really appreciate that. A little bit about me. I mean, I agree with you on the father of four. I definitely have four children, but I have been, I guess, working out of Tauranga for the last 25 years across a range of industries from tourism, it, medical devices, laundry, would you believe, and I guess I often just most describe myself as perhaps a sales guy that became a marketer. I think that's the way that I see myself.

Lee Hunter: 1:48

That's super interesting Lots of touch points, lots of different industries. So hopefully we can pull that apart today and dig in to get some golden nuggets out of you to share with the viewers. So, first of all, the only discussion we've had before today is there seems to be this topic of there's not enough well-versed product marketers, and we've recently just had a podcast by Mr Whitehead, who he basically said we don't have enough. Do you see the same thing? Are you hearing the same thing in the market?

James Igglesden: 2:17

I mean, I think I can only speak from my experience, um, which probably and I saw that podcast from Mr Whitehead and agree with what he's saying, but can only really give you an answer to that through my lens and I think the challenge is building a group of people, be it a sales team or a marketing team, who understand what the goals are around product and do they understand what they're selling and to whom they're selling it. And I think that's the first approach I take is what have we got, what are we actually trying to do and how are we trying to do it and can we scale that?

Lee Hunter: 2:57

That's a whopper of a question getting the sales team to fully understand what you've got as an arsenal. So, from a sales person, sales strategy background, let's get down to the basics. What is a product marketer? Because from me, there's two things. I've just understood marketing, the four P's. So what happened to the other three P's? And when I think of product marketing, I'm thinking of a box with a logo and a picture and some good content and someone's put it on a shelf. How, how far away am I from the what actually is a product market?

James Igglesden: 3:30

Look, I think that's a pretty good simple but simple is good explanation of what marketing a product is. But, as I said, my take is to try and see through the product that's sitting on the shelf and work out what else needs to go around it to make that successful. And I suppose what I mean by that is, you know, for a widget sitting in a box on a shelf, you've got its positioning and its price and you know. In this example we're talking potentially about retail if it's sitting on a physical shelf, or e-commerce if it's sitting on a digital shelf somewhere. But behind that there are other things that product marketers need to build for that widget product to be successful. So, put simply, I guess there's engineers and R&D people that create products and then marketers put them in boxes and set pricing and things like that.

James Igglesden: 4:28

And the good product marketers that I've worked with and that I've tried to be and tried to mentor understand that it's not just the product in the box, but it's also the brochure, it's the decision-making process that the customer goes on and making sure that there's assets around that product to aid the sale. And you're talking about this as a sales guy and I know you've got your sales hat on. How many times in your career have you been given a brochure by a marketing team or a marketing manager and said ", go sell this with this brochure". And the brochure goes in the backseat of the car and you never refer to it again. That is a failure of a product marketer coming up with a product that the sales team will use to sell the actual physical product. And I'm going to stop there because that felt like no, I love it.

Lee Hunter: 5:19

I feel like I've got a lot of brochures in my backseat here, and that it makes me remember all the times I've been given something and it's just sitting there that's not being used. So that's a really good point, something you touched on that fascinates me, that I'm gonna dig into a little bit more. There's two places for the product to live in a store or a digital store. How's that different from a product marketers thinking? Because the buying journey is's gonna be completely different. How do you differentiate the two? What's the thinking that goes behind? How a successful product marketer can look at those two different placements and go. I can make this a success.

James Igglesden: 5:57

I think for me and again this is just through my personal lens and experience of working for companies mainly in New Zealand selling to, for companies mainly in New Zealand selling to people mainly not in New Zealand is it's again understanding the journey that that customer is going on. So in New Zealand you've got a brochure in the back seat of the car that you're not going to use, but you are going to drive to the customer and do a presentation and build some rapport and offer up some value in return for, hopefully, some money or a sale or whatever. And when you want to take that sales process out of new zealand so you're growing internationally you can't necessarily do that. You can't necessarily drive to los angeles, you can't necessarily put a sales rep in a car with a brochure. So it's about working out the purest, simplest form of that journey of your customer understanding they have a need for your product, understanding, learning that that product solves that need and then going ahead to make the decision to purchase that product.

James Igglesden: 6:55

And how do you do that? In all channels, in all markets. We're talking omni-channel, I guess, but I find when you start to talk about omni-channel you're talking about all channels and the consistent experience all at once. I'm talking about the really specific actions that you need to convince a different customer in a different country to make the same buying decision, like just that one time. And then how do you multiply that by a hundred, resulting in omni-channel?

Lee Hunter: 7:22

if I'm correct, there's a lot of the question to you is how much sales is involved in product marketing, because listening to you I feel like you're in the sales role. You're actually looking at every step, every touch point a consumer has with a product. Would I be correct to say they're very much aligned.

James Igglesden: 7:38

There's absolutely a direct link between sales and marketing. One is creating demand for the product and the other one is closing demand or closing the sale from generating that demand, and you know those roles can flip. Sales are often out there creating demand, walking the walk, talking the talk, creating awareness for the product. So it's a very symbolic relationship. Similarly now, particularly in the e-commerce realm, you can have completely salespeople-free organizations that are selling direct to consumer or direct to dealers and don't necessarily have a high sales contingent in the mix. As someone who started in sales and sort of transitioned to marketing through my career is, marketing is constantly trying to bottle up sales and expand it through a bigger megaphone or through a wider reach or or whatever. And the simpler you can get that message to the person with the pain that needs or is going to want your product, the easier you'll find it to grow smack on, absolutely so.

Lee Hunter: 8:45

If we look at the product marketer, their skill set, what sort of tools would I expect that they're going to bring to the table? What's in their toolbox?

James Igglesden: 8:54

well, this I mean, possibly, where you won't get a an orthodox sales and marketing e-type answer from me, because, as I said, I sort of came from that sales box and that's what I bring to marketing is to try and unravel that secret sauce beyond the what's the tagline and what's the brand saying and what's the customer journey and all the things that we know that we have to do.

James Igglesden: 9:17

But what are the two or three things that we need to do exceptionally well to make that transaction happen? And so your typical R, your 4Ps, your 7Ps, understanding your products, other people's products, the price and the environment you sit in. But what I'm constantly looking for is that optimal customer that's going to pay or who's going to see the most value in your product, so that you can get the most value from them. In terms of that, and I think that's what you're looking for in a product marketer is someone who can make that value appear tangible, not just to the customer who's going to buy the product, but to the sales organisation, to other people in the marketing department, to the people that are generating the social media ads. The tighter you get that link, the more success you're going to have and the easier it'll be to translate a growth strategy from one country to another, from one demographic to another, from one culture to another, and so on.

Lee Hunter: 10:20

In today's landscape. If we look at product marketers, what problems do you think they solve? Who should be hiring a product marketer?

James Igglesden: 10:28

So I think there's a couple of different sort of ways to answer that question, lee.

James Igglesden: 10:32

The first is products get to a certain size in an organisation where they are a important part of the revenue pie or the P&L or what have you.

James Igglesden: 10:41

So you're definitely going to want a product marketer before you get to that stage to protect that part of the revenue and understand what the threats are to that product wherever it is in its life cycle.

James Igglesden: 10:54

And then the other place is, I think, where a business and there's a cost-benefit relationship here, so where a business has a product that's performing better than okay anywhere, it's a good time to look at a product marketer or potentially an agency to come in and work out again how do you bottle that success and move it into a new market where it's completely new business, new revenue, with, with minimal effort as I, globalising that product story and taking it to a different market or a different channel or finding an entirely new customer for that product. And so I guess another way to answer that is or maybe to turn the answer into a question is when is product marketing or a product marketer a better strategy than hiring, say, a business development manager into a business to find your business Product. A product marketer could certainly fill a business development Sort of strategic hole in a business.

Lee Hunter: 11:59

That's a fascinating point. So instead of doubling down on the sales force getting it out there, you actually bring in a product marketer to understand the barriers from purchase, the barriers from getting a customer to actually buy that product.

James Igglesden: 12:12

Yeah, absolutely so. I think One of the things I look for in any Organisation, whether I'm a part of an internal team or coming in from the outside, is where are the force multipliers? So if you've got 10 reps and five of them are bringing in 80% of the revenue, how do you make that the standard rep and multiply that number up? Or if you've got 10 reps that are all doing a good job, can you bring in a single product marketer and get all of those reps doing a better job by just arming them with marketing assets that are better than a brochure that sits in the sales bag or sits in the backseat of the car? What a product marketer can bring to those situations is a shorter sales cycle, more conversion on leads, more appointments, because a product marketer is there to help them get through the sales process that is such a good point.

Lee Hunter: 13:06

I've never thought about it that way, so my next question leads on then to how do you become a product marketer? Is it better for a marketer to then specialise in being a product marketer? Was it better for a sales BDM person to learn marketing and push themselves into becoming a product?

James Igglesden: 13:22

What's that journey, which is the Look, I don't think there's any right answer to that. I think that's an entirely different podcast topic and probably I mean it's the discussion of the ages. Right, you can't sell without sales and you can't create demand without marketing. You have to have both. Sometimes you can find it in one person. Sometimes they're very separate teams with very different roles and responsibilities.

James Igglesden: 13:47

I've seen it work really well both ways. I've gone into a startup organisation as the sales and marketing person and then grown a team out from that individual role into the many functions, and in fact that that's how we met. You were one of the first hires into um outbound call centre back in those days, um, and then, conversely, uh, I've worked in much larger organisations where you go in and you are a product marketer for a single category of products, operating as part of a 20 or 30 strong marketing team and um. For me it comes back to that and maybe it's sort of a continual thread here is you've got to adapt your strategy to whatever is working for your business already and there's a bit of find new stuff that works that you haven't done before. But really it is easier to build on your strengths and expand an already successful, already working strategy and often cheaper than starting from scratch bring it back just a little bit in terms of I'm fascinated by the approach that you bring on a product marketer.

Lee Hunter: 14:56

You're going to enhance that sales team, you're going to enhance the sales process. Love it, because you're both on the same line in terms of how do we get to the angle, how do we convert more customers, how do we get them to buy more products and help each other remove those barriers? What I'd love to know from your perspective, being in both shoes, what's the difference between to a five-year-old and marketer versus product marketer? What's the key differenti to a five-year-old, a marketer versus a product marketer? What's the key differentiators between the two roles?

James Igglesden: 15:24

again, I probably don't have a textbook answer for you there, but I would say that a product market marketer focuses on what you wrap around a product to ensure the product success, and perhaps your traditional marketers are working around a company or a brand that has multiple products. So you're telling a brand story, building trust. You know Apple is a fantastic, well-trusted, well-loved brand. Their marketing team, if you want to call it that, seldom put a foot wrong in talking about their why and, you know, think different and it's all about making sure that what Apple does for any product category is consistent and within line with their, with their values and their brand.

James Igglesden: 16:15

A product manager, on the other hand, whilst operating within that belief system, is going to be all about the product. It's deep knowledge of a category, deep knowledge of a vertical, deep knowledge, maybe not of cups and glasses, but just cups and maybe just cups with handles and maybe just blue cups with. Like. A product manager will dial down and be an absolute subject matter expert on all things product to understand all things a customer will want from that product and then, as I say, build a story around that. That will aid the sales team better, aid the website, converting the, converting sales at the checkout better, and and so forth I love it.

Lee Hunter: 16:58

I mean it's so aligned with sales. Which then leads me to there's been an underlying problem in the market for 20, 30 years sales and marketing alignment. I heard about it 20, 30 years ago and I still hear about it today. Do you still think it's a problem? And, if so, why do you still think it lingers around? Why do you still think there's this huge disparity between the two teams, when there's so many courses, there's so much advice, there's so much proof out there that you need to integrate the two, why do you think it's still around?

James Igglesden: 17:31

uh, because there's a lot of information and a lot of examples and a lot of right and a lot of wrong and there's just there's just a lot and there's more than one way of skinning a cat. The best sales person can go out and sell ice to Eskimos because they have the ability to build rapport and tell a good story and so on, and the best marketing can do the same thing without a sales person present. So they're different sides of the same coin. That's my generic general answer. So that's my generic general answer. My experience has been more in taking New Zealand products into other markets, and so one particular company I work for is called Triodent.

James Igglesden: 18:22

We sell dental products to dentists, mainly to fix teeth in the back of the mouth, posterior teeth, the big molars. They get holes in them. You need to fix them. That's what Treadent did. Did Treadent do a bunch of other dental products?

James Igglesden: 18:26

No, we really just were really really good at fillings in the back of the mouth and what would happen as we took our story to you know, mainly America English speaking market full of people with teeth was we got that story really good? And then we took that story to England where the local sales teams would tell us that is, it's different here. It doesn't work that way. We don't do dentistry we like like that, we do dentistry like this.

James Igglesden: 18:52

So for me it was like well, what are the commonalities of that? We've got two sales people in two different countries that are different cultures, different accents, different training, and then we've got the human race with teeth that are pretty much consistent the world over, and so it was trying to find a way to standardize that message so that the marketing that we were generating out of a small town in New Zealand was translating to better fillings for patients in countries with quite different beliefs around oral hygiene and oral health. So I think that dilemma that you talk about, the continual fight between sales and marketing is really more of a team building conversation than a is it sales or is it marketing? It's is your strategy aligned and are you working together as a team?

Lee Hunter: 19:41

is it marketing? Is your strategy aligned and are you working together as a team? Absolutely, and touching on that because you were smack on there talking about the product market is there to empower the sales team, but you also sound like you're very close to the consumer, understanding what they need. So the product market has probably got one of the hardest jobs because you have the C-suite and you're going to do what they want. You've got your product that you need to take to market to the consumer, but then you've also got the sales team. So what processes or what have you done in the past that you really get all three of them on page? I mean, is it just a sit-down meeting or do you have a structured approach to getting all three on the same page?

James Igglesden: 20:19

So I think that comes back to the crux of what product marketing is for me, and that is that the product isn't necessarily always the widget sitting in a box. Again, coming back to the Truden example, now, that company got acquired by one of the biggest manufacturers of dental products in the world Dentsply Sirona I think. Even now they make one in four dollars of dental products manufactured by Dents by Sirona. So as part of that acquisition, I transitioned from being a big part of a small team to a very small part of a very big team, and one of the immediate challenges that we faced was that we had 10,000 product lines and my product was all of a sudden one in ten thousand. Instead of being the best dental filling system in the world, we were now just one of ten thousand really excellent products being manufactured by this, by this huge brand, with a huge marketing team sitting behind it.

James Igglesden: 21:14

So at that point my product shifted. We already had the best matrix system in the world for doing fillings and lots of dentists and lots of patients had experienced that in in countries all around. My product then shifted from being the matrix system to being the sales system that sales reps would use and I switched from selling a system that did great fillings to selling a system that helps sales reps, help dentists do great fillings. So I had to step back from my customer, which was the patient, through the dentist, to the sales team and actually develop a product which was a training program for regional sales leaders to adopt and train their teams on. And so I think that's the difference perhaps between a traditional product marketer that's all about the product to one that will sit back and go okay, hold on a minute.

James Igglesden: 22:05

For my product to be successful, what are the wraparound assets that aren't actually my product, that are a product manager's product? So, as I said, r&d people you know there are fantastic engineers, designers coming up with these amazing, amazing products and those products belong to them the, the patent holders, the IP owners and so on. A product managers job is to build around that core idea and with all their products, which are email lists and brochures and sales funnels and training kits for sales reps, and at the end of the day, you want to make sure that, wherever your product is sitting in the customer journey whether a sales rep needs to take it out of the bag in the boot to demonstrate to a potential customer or whether it's being searched for on google and seo, that you've got a way of meeting that requirement. Because if you don't get the product in front of the salesperson or the channel in front of the customer, then you won't succeed absolutely brilliant point.

Lee Hunter: 23:06

Brilliant point you mentioned trident, so I have to ask we both work there. Um, thanks for hiring me back then. One one thing I'd wanted to dig in. When I started, we all knew that you guys took a product maybe a bag of 20 to the US market and I think you're selling the whole bag for 50 to 100 US dollars. You came back, repackaged the product and sold one of them for $99. How on earth does that happen? Like, how do you go from selling a whole bag of something at a low price to a premium product at a premium price? What's their journey?

James Igglesden: 23:45

Really really good question and a couple of things that I want to correct you on. To start with, the product was always a premium product and so we didn't do anything to make it more premium. The product itself didn't change the insight that I had from the first few trade shows that I went to and, as I said, I was a lot closer to my sales career at that point in time than I was to my marketing or business development career now. I mean, we're going back nearly 20 years and it's a fantastic story actually. So the founder of the company said you're not going to believe this, james. We're on the plane to a trade show in Chicago. You're not gonna believe this. People come up to the booth and they just buy the product and they don't even ask how much it is.

James Igglesden: 24:29

And, as a salesperson, alarm bells went off for me and thought well, if no one's asking the price, we're clearly not priced correctly. They want what we have so badly, but we haven't articulated what they're getting. And so, after a couple of trade shows and actually talking face to face with customers and listening for what it is they wanted, they didn't actually want a range of nine wedges that we had in. They only needed three to do the job, and what we worked out was it was a lot easier to talk about three wedges than it was to talk about nine, and the main thing that they wanted to do was basically do better fillings, which they didn't need that big kit to do.

James Igglesden: 25:06

So we actually simplified the offering, took away all the noise, took away all the free stuff they probably weren't going to use, and then set the price at a price that would get them to pay attention. The price point, I think from memory, was $249 or $279 for the sort of intro pack, and at that price our customer, who is a dentist you know these are high-income individuals, very, very clever, clinically trained, they've all got degrees just by virtue of the fact they're at the show talking to us. They were going to spend more on dinner that night than on the intro kit that was sitting in front of them that we were talking to them about. So selling them the intro kit wasn't actually the problem. The problem was they got back. They needed to open the intro kit and they needed to retrain on a procedure and change the way they did things permanently, and so we needed to charge an amount of money that made sure that they were committed to see that habitual change through.

Lee Hunter: 26:06

I think the fascination is even looking at you as a product marketer is that connect between the consumer and the sales team. So you did mention you took a New Zealand product to the US. How do you, from little old New Zealand, empower a team in a whole different country? You're not there to have the one-on-one chats with them where you mock up a brochure or give to designer. How do you empower international sales team to deliver what you want as a product marketer here in New Zealand?

James Igglesden: 26:37

great question. There's so many different ways to skin that cat for for trend. If we stick in sort of the real life stories.

James Igglesden: 26:46

It started off where we would hire contractors to work with us before a trade show. Never met them before. They'd be recommended to us by customers, so we we had a good inkling that they knew what they were talking about and they came recommended and we would literally train them for two hours the day before the show over pizza and soda or sometimes beer or whatever, and then they'd basically be learning on the job through a two or three day trade show and we'd be honing their skills with them and then sometimes they'd continue with us and some of our most successful sales reps actually went from two hours of sales training before a trade show to actually being with us long term and it was about making the most of that window of opportunity at the trade show. This the slickest, shortest, most to the point demonstration dentists are busy people and they basically have a whole trade show to see, so we needed to make use of the few minutes that we had with them. But also there's only so many people you can see in 72 hours of the show, so it was making it more efficient for us as well.

James Igglesden: 27:46

Once we knew the story that we had to tell to their face. It was simply about again bottling up that, um, that secret sauce to make sure that we were providing brochures and flyers and promotions that really helped tell that story and that that was. So. We were really using trade shows to field test our sales approach, to go through traditional sales teams in the market with brochures and website pages and stuff after the events let's look at getting a better understanding of how, from your perspective as a product marketer, you've just been hired in your job, been brought on as a product manager.

Lee Hunter: 28:27

What's the first 90 days look like? What are you looking for, what are you investigating? What are you pulling apart to get your 90-day plan put together?

James Igglesden: 28:35

For me it's often a deep dive. It's the known, known unknowns, and if you find some known unknowns then you'll come across some unknown unknowns as well. It depends on how much subject matter expertise you go in with. I've gone into a lot of roles in either nascent companies or nascent industries where no one really knows everything there is to know, and so that 90 days is a learning curve and you're trying to learn what's working really well. That comes naturally to the company and plays to its strengths, like what does the product just do really well? And then what competitors and what distribution channels are doing with products. And you're looking for low-lying fruit For two reasons.

James Igglesden: 29:25

One, particularly in New Zealand, you might be in a 90-day trial or you want wins on the board Any salesperson, any marketer, place to win and so in that 90 days you're sort of working out hey, where is the quick wins to prove that not just I know how to do my job, but also I like to win? And then the second one is you using those quick wins to then work out where the longer term wins, what are the longer term things that you're going to put in place? What do you learn in the 90 days that you can then continue to expand on through 180 and 360 days turning around just a little little bit.

Lee Hunter: 30:02

We've spoken about the product, the widget in the box. What can a service firm learn from the school of thought from product marketing being they don't have a tangible asset to make look good, to wrap around in brochures and to put on the shelf to make look good? What can service companies take away from what you've done in the past?

James Igglesden: 30:22

so I think there's a inherent um.

James Igglesden: 30:28

There's another leg to the stall, right when you're talking about sales and marketing um, a common third leg, which normally sits under sales and sometimes marketing, is your customer service leg as well, and customer service inherently tends to know the role it plays for a sales team or for a marketing team, and I think the opportunity for a service firm is to productize their service, and so the company that I'm working for right now I founded back in 2016.

James Igglesden: 31:00

And it is taking a service that traditionally you'd have to walk down a high street and go into a store and get a face-to-face quote, and we actually analyze the market and standardize the service to work for sort of 80 90 percent of people out there and fix the price and turn the service into a product. So, instead of being a conversation and a variable price and an unknown what you're getting, we said, look, the price is going to be x and the outcome of this service is going to be not just the service, but we're going to. We're going to package it up this way for you and we're going to take care of all the variable stuff and take the take the guesswork out, and so, for a service firm, it's about bottling that service to understand that you're delivering a variable you know often time based service but what are the tangible outcomes that you get?

Lee Hunter: 31:47

and then packaging that up to basically look and feel like a product you mentioned a couple of times that the key there is to bottle up the package and then make it loud and take it to market. What processes do you have in place to make it easy for even some of the viewers to take what they processes? Do you have in place to make it easy for even some of the viewers to take what they have and go? This is how to package something up. What are the key ingredients that you look for when you're pulling it together?

James Igglesden: 32:10

Really good question. As I said, my approach is typically to start with what's working. So if you have got a sales process that's quite manual, that involves someone coming in and going through three or four manual steps, how do you shorten that process? What steps can be combined or packaged, to use those words to make the sales process and the receipt of an intangible service feel more tangible, like what are the touch points and so on? And then you've got gotta test and measure.

James Igglesden: 32:44

So start with a hypothesis that a customer that has this conversation and does this two or three things gets us $250 to $500 or whatever that could be two and a half thousand to $10,000 or more and then hypothesize that if we combine these two or three things up, we can get a higher sales rate or a higher price or deliver it at lower cost.

James Igglesden: 33:06

So those are the variables you either wanna increase the price, increase the conversion or lower the cost of delivery. And then you try it and see if it works. And I think that the two things that I say to my teams is you go to Jerry Maguire, show me the money, come up with a plan to take the amount of money that we're getting for the amount of effort that we're delivering and show me the increase in efficiency or the increase in revenue, or the increase in whatever, or the decrease in cost to do it. And the other one is if you can't, jerry Maguire, it fail as fast as you can Fail fast. Getting things wrong is expensive and the sooner that you can learn from that mistake or learn that that's not going to work, pick yourself up, try something else.

Lee Hunter: 33:50

I'm going to bring it into real world because I'm dealing with a customer right now and they sell a bit of technology and what they're about to do is go to market everyone who has this technology. They're going to come out with three price points for the software licensing. Obviously, each bit of software licensing, they get different features and different benefits. I'll bring it to you today on the table and say look, you've done this for a while. You've done it for different customers. What are the do's and don'ts when I'm about to take this to market? Because, ideally, if I get all my customers to tier three, I'm banking it. Equally, they're going to see the most value out of me by going to tier three because I've invested in all these features that are really going to make my product stand out. What's your do's and don'ts? What should I be looking for? How do I get to knowing I've got a product marketer patting me on the back saying you've done a good job?

James Igglesden: 34:46

I, I think, um, there's a few people that you that you need to consider in this thing. You've got really, really clever software engineers who are writing lines of code and developing the coolest features at the pointiest end of the product offering, and it's their jam. So you've got to be careful not to lose your product engineers that are delivering this amazing value to your customers. But really you need to look at it from the customer's point of view and people will pay for pain relief and if you're not selling pain relief, then you need to be selling convenience. So it's looking at the feature set of, let's say, those three tiers of product and trying to work out where the value is. And I always say for the 80%. But and it's sort of a it's that cliched 80-20 rule. It's just a cliche because it's sort of a. It's that cliched 80-20 rule. It's just a cliche because it's true, right.

James Igglesden: 35:37

So it's having a look at each product group and going what are 80% of the people in that group getting from this tier and what would they need to jump? And focusing on the big opportunity. And there's no rule of thumb in software whether you wanna push 10% of users to the most expensive tier and focus on them, or make sure that you get the 80% working on the free tier and give the sales team something to upgrade over time. As I said, it's really where's the low-lying fruit. How do you get the most people happy with the easiest to deliver lowest friction services? Because some of these software features can take a lot of customer service to deliver onboarding and so on and it has to be a return on investment based decision. So, trying to look at through that lens of what am I actually saving the customer, which customer group that we can get to the easiest gets the most out of this and what can we charge them and focus on that?

Lee Hunter: 36:38

And have you in the past. Is it crucial to go and test it with a few clients? I mean, is that something that you've done before and it's gone? Yes, no, or does it really matter? Do you have to take it to pre-market testing?

James Igglesden: 36:51

I think you do. Test is another cliche measure, twice cut once you do not want to mess up your existing business model. So having that hypothesis that we've got this, we're going to do this and this and this is the result we expect, then you prove that you have control over your product marketing process and that can give a business whether it's the head of marketing or whether it's the CEO, whether it's the board the decision to back major changes. And when you've got a product sitting in a channel that is potentially doing $5 to $10 million worth of revenue and you want to make a major change to that product line, you need to have that track record of understanding the impact of those product decisions. And so software startup with minimal revenue, multi-million dollar, post-acquisition, you know product company test and measure Absolutely.

Lee Hunter: 37:52

That's phenomenal. Look, I mean, you've solved me. I think I now know why everyone's saying we need a product marketer. I mean to enhance the sales, to unite the team, to deliver better, high conversions, better ROI, better process. It sounds great. I think what most of the viewers are going to want to know the ones that don't have one is two things. In the hierarchy of an organization, you've got the c-suite, the marketer, sales team. Where does product marketer sit within that hierarchy of a business? Do they? Are they under marketing? They're above marketing? Are they friends with mark or do they sit in the sales camp because they're the sales best friend? Based on what we've just discussed, they can help them do better. You own a business. If you hired a product market, where would you put them?

James Igglesden: 38:35

there's a lot of it depends in there. Some companies, the you know the product person is the founder of the company and often, oftentimes, the CEO. They invented a fantastic product. That was certainly true of treeden. Yeah, dr Simon McDonald still turning out the world's best matrix systems to help us get better fillings in our teeth A product.

James Igglesden: 39:00

It's about strategic alignment. So wherever you need that product marketing focus is the correct level. So in organizations now you'll often see a chief product officer or a chief innovation officer sitting in the c-suite. It's not so much where they sit, although the letters in their name. In my opinion, it's how aligned is the strategy? If you have a person responsible turning out good product, what are you measuring that good product on? Is it your net promoter score that customers love the product, or is it that it doubles the company's revenue in within two years of launch?

James Igglesden: 39:39

One of the big challenges that we've had that you know in various different roles that I've had, is the product marketing ideas that you say no to because they are a distraction from the product marketing ideas from previous that are actually working really well and making sure they have the right level of impact. So product marketing, I think, sits um at the highest point of the company, because it is the um, it's the secret source that is going to allow that kind of scale. But does it sit in the ceo or in a chief product marketing officer or report up through a head of global marketing? Um that that comes down to making sure that that expansion strategy, that sales and marketing strategy is, is dialed in, and that that's the role of the ceo. So I think you just got to put um product in the in the right place in the strategy put it where it matters eh absolutely now we're going to have sales people out there listening going cool, I want a product marketer.

Lee Hunter: 40:41

We're going to have marketers going cool, this is great value we had. You can't just go and get a university course on become product marketer right, you've either well versed in it or you're not the people that aren't. They want to get there. Where what's that journey? Where do I go? You? You've either well versed in it or you're not the people that aren't. They want to get there. Where what's that journey? Where do I go? You? You've been it, so you've lived it and you've had your own journey. But what's your advice to others? Where should we start?

James Igglesden: 41:04

I mean you can go and get a marketing degree and cover product marketing as a um, as a semester or a paper um. As I said, I think, if you're sitting in an organization now, whether you're in the sales camp or the marketing camp, and you're thinking we need to be doing product marketing better, then write it down. And I'm not talking a 20-page plan, it's a one-page plan of where is our product today as defined by the company or the marketing manager or the sales manager, or a team or individual, and where are we going to take it. And just that's an a B test. We're at a, we're going to change two or three things and get to B and you just get started. I think you've been.

James Igglesden: 41:46

I feel like you've been trying to pin me down on who is a product marketer and how do you become a product marketer. I think it's the function of product marketing in an organization and having the sales and marketing teams both and customer service and R&D understand the role of product and their individual contributions to it. So the R&D team can change the type of plastic or a type of hinge. The marketing team can change the price. The sales team often have control over discounting, but it's all of those things that make up product, and if you don't have a system in place to manage that in the business, then you're not doing product marketing at all.

Lee Hunter: 42:23

And that's where I would start that's fascinating point because it's not just about the person, it's about the product marketing theory, it's about understanding those different levers within the organization. So have you gone into businesses in New Zealand that have had that theory well versed and just need someone to run it, or do you think people are looking for that theory over the people? What's missing the people or the theory in New Zealand?

James Igglesden: 42:47

I definitely have felt that and it's not a New Zealand thing, it's global 100 person person company, 15,000 employee company. You need a system for handling changes to product. Medical device happens to do it very well. Most of the industry is regulated and you're using something like ISO 13485 or another quality management system. I think for marketing and sales purposes. You don't need at that level. You might have a bit of price control in a cms or an erp.

James Igglesden: 43:18

But, as I said, it's it's documenting down what that truth or reality is for the company and having a process for tweaking it out and changing it and getting that message through to wherever it needs to go. You know, I've been in situations where I inherited a new product portfolio and the sales team just inherently knew, not even believed. They were adamant that you had to discount our product 20 to 25% to be competitive. It wasn't enough to just go in and go. You're wrong. I'm right. You can't discount anymore. I didn't have control over pricing that came out of sales. I was in the marketing camp so I had to build a whole new product, explain, educating not just the sales team but the customer why they should pay more.

James Igglesden: 44:06

And it takes time. And it takes time to get the message through and I wish that you could just megaphone from the head of sales or head of marketing to go from now on. This is the way forward, but it doesn't work. You've got lots of individuals, lots of personalities, lots of latitude and leeway that people can use, so product marketing is about getting everyone to sing from the same hymn sheet and I think you know trying really hard not to take away from the individual flair and expertise that sales people can bring. You don't want to handcuff the, the guy behind his back who's selling ice to eskimos, but you do want to take the thing that he does better than everyone else and work out how to get everyone else mimicking and learning that from them as well that's really good.

Lee Hunter: 44:50

I mean, most of the time you're right. I was looking to define a persona of what these people look like and the value product marketers deliver, but now that you've uncoupled it into, there's actually a theory behind it. There's actually a thinking process, a structured way. Organizations don't just bring these people in, but bring the theory in to make it work. I think it's phenomenal. Now I'm going to end with you've worked for a range of different companies, both New Zealand international, and I've pushed you a few times on this. What are some of the key lessons that you've learnt that can help New Zealand businesses who are wanting to go global? They're wanting to take that next step. What do you see? Some of the barriers or some of the key lessons you would like to share that we haven't touched on?

James Igglesden: 45:54

I think the first thing is just to repeat you know, finding things that you can execute outside of New Zealand borders and improve out quickly and cheaply so that you can actually get going in a new market. There's a lot of support out there from the likes of mb and the callahan group and so on people a fantastic network of people that really know how to get into new markets. But I think the key thing is, if you are a new zealand focused business looking at getting out of um new zealand, then you need to stop looking at getting out of New Zealand, then you need to stop looking at New Zealand and pick up a much bigger market to reframe your, your product lens. There's some fantastic things about New Zealand and we all know what they are. You know we're clean, we're green number eight wire mentality, we're innovators, we're executors. We we live on the very bottom of the world and that means that you know for any entrepreneurs out there, we get on a plane and go and make stuff happen, because no one comes to to new zealand, to um to do business not in, not in most industries, um, so you have to really um reimagine your business as an american business. Uh, you know, treedon, we're sitting out there in katikati population back then of 3 000. Really reimagine your business as an American business. You know, treadent, we're sitting out there in a catty-catty population back then of 3,000 people and we're recruiting people out of Taronga and out of Auckland and you know other places. And it was like understand that we're the best in the world at what we're doing. And, yes, we're based in a town of 3,000, and there's lots of you know, know, kiwi fruit and avocados and stuff around, but we are the best matrix manufacturing company in the world and we're taking that global and having that that global mindset.

James Igglesden: 47:24

The biggest danger to a new zealand company is thinking too small. We took our current business, my dress box, from new zealand to australia, not with the plans to double our business, but to actually 5x it. There's five times the population where we're a consumer product there. If, if we didn't at least 5x in australia, then our expansion strategy would have failed. And so now, um, australia is sitting at sort of six, seven times bigger than our new zealand business and what that's signaling to me is that the New Zealand business is now lagging somehow and needs to catch up. So finding those performance indicators that actually tell you how well you're doing. If you go from population five million to population 300 million and you don't have a growth story to sort of match that, then think bigger and really challenge yourself to scale.

Lee Hunter: 48:19

That's some great advice. Especially you think most people just expand just to one exit. But yeah, population size, market size well done. Thank you so much for sharing. I've certainly learned a ton about it. I'm so keen to get you back to dig into more of the theory side of it. But thank you for sharing. Great to be here. Thanks for having me learned a ton about it.

James Igglesden: 48:36

I'm so keen to get you back to dig into more of the theory side of it but thank you for sharing Great to be here.

Dale Koerner: 48:43

Thanks for having me. That's that. Thanks for listening to. We Do B2B by Blue Ocean. Now brace for CTAs. If you want to join and grow the community, make sure to subscribe. Wherever your eyes and ears absorb information, Don't forget to switch on notifications so you know when the latest episodes drop. And for more B2B goodness, be sure to follow Blue Ocean, the B2B agency, on LinkedIn. Now look, you know how this next piece works. The more reviews we get, the faster this thing grows. So please do for us what you hope your customers would do for you Leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's stay connected and keep the B2B marketing conversation going.