If you are in product marketing, especially B2B software or Saas product marketing these are what I would consider “essential reading” regardless of how many years of experience you have.

Books Every Product Marketer Should Read

The classic that has stood the test of time, you can’t do product marketing without reading Al Ries and Jack Trout primer on product positioning. Even if the examples are from the ‘old days’ before Slack, Facebook, and Tesla the principles are still the same.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

The Heath Brothers give you plenty of examples in this book that shows what is great messaging and how to create stories that, well, stick in people’s minds. Essential for those responsible for creating content in any format.

Made to Stick

With the increasing focus on content marketing everywhere this book gives you the basics and a bit more. Here you have a good list of content types, how to create engaging content and how to think about your content marketing and content planning. Essential if content creation is a big part of your job.

Content Rules

Another classic that is a must-read for any product marketer that wants to grow. Geoffrey Moore introduced the concept of the chasm as it relates to new product launches and gives you plenty to think about as you create go-to-market strategy, segmentation, product positioning, and more. Although many examples in the book are quite dated, the same principles apply and the newest version has been edited and updated with some new content.

Crossing the Chasm

Here’s what I like about this book, is all about building trust which is the key to being noticed and attracting a following. Although the authors focus on personal brand-building the principles are the same for companies trying to create their online reputations. As product marketer you are responsible for product and company messaging/positioning and as such you can help guide the team on improving the company’s brand persona and in earning trust.

Trust Agents

Duarte ’ s first book, Slideology was a good Intro to creating engaging presentations. He Ported the whole book into a web version that gives you a richer experience as you can interact with the many examples the book provides.

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While Duarte’s first book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/slide-ology-Science-Creating-Presentations/dp/0596522347" target="_self">Slideology</a> was a good intro to creating engaging presentations, product marketers also need to understand how to deliver engaging stories which is all Resonate is about. If you work with company executives on building decks for investor presentations, keynotes sessions at different events, or even an all-hands meeting you need to understand how great presentations are delivered and this book is the best starting point.

Resonate

In many companies product marketing not just creates content for demand generation like white papers it also helps with sales enablement and sales presentations and demos. If your role involves this type of stuff then the research from CEB culminating in this book is a must-read. It will make you re-think the content you have created so far and help revisit your style and how you prepare and train your sales team.

The Challenger Sale

The company that worked with the CEB guys on the Challenger Sale research also created a book based on that material but while the CEB book focuses on the salesperson, this one focuses on the message itself. It presents a great framework for you to create content that will elevate the conversation with prospects and craft a compelling value proposition.

The Three Value Conversations

The sequel to CEB’s Challenger Sale is a must-read if you like the challenger approach. While the first book was very focused on the sales process itself, this one looks at how to influence the buying cycle, how to craft a commercial insight, and different ways to use content marketing to help lead customers to your commercial insight. Extremely interesting and thought provoking.

The Challenger Customer

Any business school student has memorized Michael Porter’s Five Forces model so if you haven’t been through an MBA this is the book to check out. Although the writing is a bit dry the principles are timeless. If you want to learn how to create a great go-to-market plan and have a seat at the product launch table, you need to understand what makes a market attractive and Porter’s model is the gold standard.

Competitive Strategy

The difference between a good product marketer and a great product marketer is in how each sees the role of product marketing and in the understanding of the business they are in. Great product marketers take the time to understand how each area of the business is connected so that they can better understand how to position the company, how to message the product, and how to coordinate among different departments. The business model canvas is a good framework to help you think about the business and what makes your company tick.

The business model canvas

I was sitting at a table with other marketing professionals at a recent event when one turned to me and said his company had just hired a junior product marketing manager and was wondering what books…

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The Product Marketer’s Essential Reading List | by Daniel Kuperman | SaaS Growth Strategies | Medium

The conventional theory about SaaS customer success goes something like this:&nbsp;<ul><li>Your solution creates value for the customer.&nbsp;</li><li>The value drives their success.&nbsp;</li><li>Their Success leads them to renew their subscription.&nbsp;</li></ul>

SAAS/B2B Customer Renewal

Customers who achieve phenomenal results have invariably adapted their processes to take advantage of the way the solution works. If you leave it entirely to the customer to understand and make the essential process changes you’ll naturally get highly variable results. If you are not crystal clear on how customers need to change their business process, they won’t be either. An essential role of the customer success manager is to be the agent of the customer’s business process change.

Deadly Fallacy #1: SOLUTION => VALUE

The value your solution creates must align with the customer’s definition of success. The most common reason why this link gets broken is simply the failure to truly understand the customer’s ultimate vision for their success. Only then can the customer success manager work to ensure the value created Aligns to drive the customer’s vision of success. Value+ Alignment= Success. Value+ Alignment= success.

Deadly Fallacy #2: VALUE => SUCCESS

The third fallacy is the idea that driving their success will be enough. But over time, delivering the same value has a diminishing impact relative to the customer’s evolving needs, perceptions, and alternatives. For every renewal there must be a story about how you are making an increasing impact on the customer’s success. If the account isn’t expanding, it’s dying, so you have to first secure the expansion, and the renewal will be a foregone conclusion.

Deadly Fallacy #3: SUCCESS => RENEWAL

<ul><li>Drive key process changes in the customer.</li><li>Ensure value is aligned with their success, and the impact is measured and materialized.</li><li>Continually find ways to expand your leverage against the customer’s success.</li></ul>

Customer Success: Phenomenal Results

Most people think that driving adoption is a big part of customer success. But it's actually the heart of one more deadly fallacy. If you’re not driving adoption, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.Broad adoption inside the customer is the outcome of success rather than the cause.

Adoption and Success

Getting employees to use the solution is a primary driver of customer success. Success drives adoption when all the elements of the causal chain lock into perfect alignment. When all the elements are there and aligned, success, adoption, expansion, and renewal seem to take on an energy of their own. If you’re interested in driving superior results, sign up for my weekly Email to get more of my Counter-Conventional insights. Click here to learn more about me and what I do and what I do,

Bonus Fallacy: ADOPTION => SUCCESS

This is the chain of causality in the conventional thinking about SaaS customer success. Here’s how I drew it in my notebook: I know this looks like perfectly sound logic, but it’s not. In fact, it’s…

The 3 Deadly Fallacies of SaaS Renewal

Obtaining clean and correct data, however, is often the true challenge. No integration is ever simple, or “just a small code Snippet”. Churn ANALYTICS tools,

How to hack your analytics with  Segment  .io

Segment.io is a revolution in the tracking world. Launched in 2012 after a passage at Y-Combinator, it already raised more than 44 M $with funds including Accel partners, Kleiner Perkins, General catalyst and others to fulfill their mission. The true power of segment lies in two-way data binding. You do the integration only once, and that’s it.

One SaaS to rule them all

The data wheel sends data back and forth, allowing you to track and automate pretty much anything. Popchef created Facebook ads with a CPC of less than 0,04€ by retargeting users who added meals to their cart and left without buying anything. The good news is you can pretty easily hack it with other tools like Zapier, Webhooks, write Keys and simple Urls, without being a programmer.

Two way data-binding — or how analytics can actually play a role in marketing :

Guillaume Cabane is a Growth-Hacking guru in Paris. He has created a perception of human time that is far superior to the truth. By having ultra personalized Emails sent automatically, you can create a perception of human time spent that is far superior to the truth. The difference between the perceived human time spent and the actual time spent is the growth Hacker’s margin. He gets more than 70% Open-Rate on average in his automatic Emails.

Conclusion : hacking human time

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”

The difference between the perceived human time and the actually time spent is the growth hacker’s margin.

Time Is Relative

First off let me say that I have no shares in Segment, nor do I actually know anyone who works there. But I found a way to divide my marketing costs by almost 10, and it’s all thanks to one niftly…

How to hack your analytics with Segment.io

Aha moment is when a new user first realizes the meaningful value in your product. This moment <a href='https://productled.com/training/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">turns users into happy, paying customers</a>.

Three things happen when you (or a user) "feels" an aha moment:<ol><li dir = "auto">You understand exactly how a product can help you.</li><li dir = "auto">You experience the core value of a product.</li><li dir = "auto">You’ve achieved something very quickly that might have taken you hours previously.</li></ol>What aha moments look like in real life, for real companies.<ul><li>For <a href='https://www.airbnb.com/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Airbnb</a>, it's making your first booking.</li><li>For <a href='https://www.google.com/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Google</a>, it's finding an answer to something complex.</li><li>For <a href='https://www.facebook.com/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">Facebook</a>, it's connecting with your friends.</li></ul>

What does an aha moment feel like?

They are the ones who become amazing at whatever it is that your product enables them to do. Your mission when speaking to such users is to identify what a success story looks like for this type of user. The easiest way to contact them is via email. Also, talk to your churned users to identify the value gap (discrepancy between what a customer expects from the product and the value received or perceived) The gap could be due to the customer not understanding the product’s capabilities or how to use it, negative mental or emotive response to the product, or friction.

Talk to Power users

Look at the customer behavior of both your good and bad customers. Doing this will help you to identify <a href='https://productled.com/blog/how-to-build-a-user-journey-map/' class="idea-content-link" target='_blank' rel="noreferrer">successful user journeys</a>. Follow the 5-step process<ol><li>Put a list together of all your product's features.</li><li>Pick a list of your most successful customers and analyze what features they used early on, continue to use regularly, and stopped/didn't use.</li><li>Write down what features got adapted and didn't.</li><li>You need to find the behaviors that, when performed, best correlate with continuing to use your product for an extended period of time.</li><li>You want to lead with the features that get people to upgrade.</li></ol>

Look for patterns

Here are a few to get you started…<ul><li dir = "auto">Using a specific set of features.</li><li dir = "auto">Achieving a particular outcome within a product.</li><li dir = "auto">Using your value metrics.</li><li dir = "auto">Using the product several times in the first week.</li><li dir = "auto">Watching an onboarding video before diving into the product. etc</li></ul>Prioritize experiments and keep track of them. Organize your potential experiments to test in an Experiment Log.

Shortlist and test potential behaviors

The aha moment is when the user realizes the value of a product. This is a complete guide on how to identify your aha moment, with examples from top companies like Slack, Zoom and Airbnb.

11th Oct - 17th Oct

How to Identify Your Product's Aha Moment

Think about<ul><li>Users</li><li>Pain Points</li><li>Ideas</li><li>Vision</li><li>Feature Prioritization</li><li>Pitfalls</li></ul>

Product Design Framework

G - GoalsA - ActionsM - MetricsE - Evaluations

Product Execution Framework

Open with TL;DR - 1 linerS - SituationT - TaskA - ActionR - ResultImagine discussing with your best friend.

Behavioral Framework

<ul><li>Frameworks and Flow</li><li>Mock Interviews</li><li>Treat interviewer as a partner and resource</li><li>EQ for mistakes and modifications</li></ul>

Product Management Interview Tips

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