THE CUSTOMER PITCH

If you’re new to product management, or thinking about getting into this field, you’re likely aware of the immediate responsibilities of a PM. You’re either very focused on a single product or a single feature of a product if the product is large or complex. You will primarily work with engineers, customers, and your peers. As you work with customers and customer proxies (salespeople, sales engineers), you’ll respond to questions about features, timelines, requests for enhancements, bugs, and questions about your feature or product.

In time, you’ll become aware of a different kind of customer engagement where a customer wants you to tell them your overall company and product story. As an entry PM, you probably won’t be asked to do this. You might not even know this goes on since the people that do this in the product organization are your senior team members. These meetings come in a few varieties that I collectively call ‘the pitch’. To grow as a PM, learning how to perform these pitches is a critical skill set. As you reach more senior PM roles, it’s also an expectation of the role. Being able to pitch and represent the company correctly and with confidence, is a door-opener for next-level roles.

ROADMAP VS VISION

Most often I see two different kinds of pitch engagements. The more straightforward of the two is the product roadmap. This is usually the one to one and a half year future view of what you’re going to build. In the context of your own feature or product this should be something you know intimately. As you gain experience, you’ll be asked to present the roadmap for the entire product. If you’re a multi-product company this will take research and study as you may have no operating experience with the other products. It is very useful to know all your products outside your own, even at a superficial level, because your customers don’t know and frankly don’t care where your area of expertise begins and ends. If you’re on a call with a customer as a product leader, you are providing their opportunity to ask questions about anything your company does.

The second engagement type is the story and vision. This is the ‘why do you exist’ and ‘where are you headed’ story. These are almost always combined and are delivered by more senior people. This is due to two reasons. The first is that it can take years to intimately know your product line, then the other products your company offers, or the range of solutions and context in your industry. E.g. Let’s say you just joined a cloud computing company like Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. These companies have wide datacenter product lines, many competitors, and a massive ecosystem of other products from other companies which your customers concurrently use together. In addition, customers often have legacy environments they still support. Note: The term ‘Legacy’ is code for old or really old. E.g. 43% of all banks still run on COBOL, a programming language which was designed in 1959. This amount of context takes years to acquire and weave where appropriate into the your story and vision where needed for your customer. Often when a very large Fortune 500 customer wants this update, your CEO or senior executives themselves will handle this part of the engagement.

WHY THE PRODUCT PITCH MATTERS

One thing we didn’t cover yet is, why are we doing this? There’s a quote I like that essentially says, ‘everyone is in sales’. You are supporting the sales function. Customer leads and existing customers want to know the vision of your company and your roadmap because they are making decisions where they will invest potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Enterprise products are very expensive. Your customer will be living with this year’s purchase decision for the next four or more years. You also have competition. These customers want to know if you are the real deal. Do you have the features they need? Moreover, are you selling to them today, or are you on the journey together with them for the next five years? The roadmap and the vision pitch are only partially about product details for the most part, they are about conveying confidence to your customer.

The purpose of the pitch therefore, is to get to the next meeting. You do your part to make the customer comfortable so that the account team can get to the next call, and one step closer to a sale. Enterprise sales can sometimes take months, even years to compete from prospect to sale. Your roadmap matters, but you’re not there to teach your customer how your product works in detail. You’re there to leave them feeling confident that you are the right company investment for them. If you succeed, the account team takes the next step closer to making the customer happy and getting to a purchase. By the way, if you perform poorly and lose customer confidence, that sales team will probably make sure you don’t present to their customers again.

OVERCOMING FEAR

When I was in the sixth grade, we were required to recite “The Road Not Taken” from memory in front of the classroom in our English class. Like many, I found it to be a nerve-wracking experience but I managed it. I can still remember a good portion of that poem from memory. I find that many remain terrified of public speaking as a life long phobia. For myself, despite also taking a university level public speaking course, I only became comfortable with it in my mid-30s. To grow in product management, speaking to audiences is an indispensable skill to hone. You will need it frequently as you speak to internal teams, customers, trade shows, are on booth duty, and more.

A few months ago I quipped to a nervous team member that only the first 100 times they presented the roadmap would be bad. I was joking but not by much. As you start to tackle this task, you will never get to an expert level without actually doing it. It’s a bit like dancing. You must get on the floor to improve. Fortunately, there are ways to get better quickly. As a new PM, the existing roadmap will have things you don’t know on it. Ask your colleagues in advance and use Google. You can also practice. If you ask, friendly colleges will also likely sit in a conference room as your audience while you practice live. If public speaking itself is what terrifies you, there are classes and organizations like Toastmasters that can help you.

BECOMING BULLETPROOF

Once in a room in front of customers, it’s your time to shine. If customers come to your office to meet you and the team, you will find yourself in a conference room with your laptop, a dongle to connect to the overhead projector, and a captive audience. In attendance will also be the account manager and the sales engineer. As a PM of a single product, you are probably following another PM or exec on the agenda who also just presented. It is your time to command the room. If you’re lacking in confidence, you may feel that this is a you against them battle. In my view, this is a self-defeating way to think about it. You are a guide leading the customer to safe ground which they are grateful to find. Of course along the way there could be some hard and unexpected questions. Here are some techniques and tricks to succeed and become bulletproof.

1. Stand up in the front of the room. If you want to command the audience, stand up, face the room from the front with the display screen behind you, and pitch. Look your customers in the eyes. Don’t sit down and hide while you all watch the screen. Standing in front is more engaging for them, keeps you on your feet and alert, and prepares you for bigger rooms and opportunities.
2. Listen and hear your customer before you launch into your slides. At the start of these sessions following introductions, customers often tell you what they do and what they want to learn. If they don’t you can ask them directly. Listen to them. Most of the time they tell you exactly what concerns them and you can immediately tailor your discussion points making your session land with greater effectiveness.
3. Know your story arc. Lay out your story in a compelling narrative and keep them engaged. Don’t just read the slides. That will be the death of their attention. Also don’t wing it unless you’re already a pro and have several arcs memorized which you can link into as needed.
4. Know the details. When presenting the roadmap, know what is on your slide.
5. Be ’T’-shaped. Customers will ask you anything they want regardless of what you know or what topic you’re presenting. E.g. Is your product compatible with other companies’ products, products that are unrelated to what you work on, and products from competitors. Getting T-shaped means knowing your product deeply and knowing many other related topics broadly but superficially. For questions outside your area of expertise, sometime you only need to know 2-3 sentences about them and move on.
6. Catch and deflect challenges. Customers have questions. You won’t always know the answer so relax and learn to gracefully handle them. E.g. Ask the SE in the room to see if they know. Ask the customer what they actually need to see what’s behind the question. Sometimes they don’t even need what they are asking about. Call in a colleague if you can. Or, simply say, ‘That’s an interesting question’, and offer to get back to them. If it’s truly important, the account team will add it to their notes and follow up later.
7. Adjust on the fly. If midway through a presentation you hear about a customer’s real pain point, focus on that and refer to how your product can help them. You don’t really need to hit every point on your slides. You need to let your customer know you hear them and your company and product can help.
8. Ask them questions. Is there something on the roadmap you’re working on? Ask them for feedback. Don’t just drone on. Make the meeting interactive and keep them engaged. You can also get a validation point for something in flight. If they are really excited about it, ask the account team for a follow-up direct customer meeting. As a PM, always be researching and validating.
9. Post-meeting, reflect and think about what could have been better. If you were embarrassed about missing a point, look it up and learn it. You will have many opportunities to keep improving.

COME PREPARED BUT UNAFRAID TO SUCK

No one said this was easy, but sharing the roadmap and vision is a privilege. When the company puts you in front of a customer, it’s because they trust you know what to do and can deliver the goods. They want you to do a great job, but good managers know it will take some time to grow that skill. A great way to learn is to shadow your manager and peers. Hear how they do it. Listen to how they absorb and redirect questions. See how they bring it back to the point and recognize customers’ concerns. Shadowing is easily done in person or by a web conference call. No one will bat an eye if they hear another PM is in the back of the room. They will watch the speaker. Take notes, ask questions, repeat. After a few times of this, have your mentor sit in the back of the room while you take the lead. They will cover for you if you get stuck on a challenging question. Don’t fear the possibility of failure. Rest assured it will happen in some small way. Learn from it and keep going.

STEP IN FRONT, STEP AHEAD

Learning something new and stepping out in front of the room can make you a little nervous. It’s uncomfortable to not be the expert you were in a previous role. Doing so, however, will help you learn and grow. And yes, it will suck a little bit before you get good at it. In time, this is also an enabler to grow into more senior roles. When your manager and your executive briefing center team ask you to pitch the roadmap and story to customers, it’s because they need you to do it. Importantly, it’s also because they trust that you can convincingly share the company story, vision and needed details to customers.

This nuanced skill set is a career enabler. I know a lot of people who can do it, but there are a few in my personal experience who are memorable for their command, comfort, and grace who make it look downright conversational. These are a joy to witness. I had the pleasure to watch the elegance and precision of Steve Herrod when he was the CTO of VMware, Sudheesh Nair when he was the head of sales at Nutanix, and Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. As you get better at these, you will find yourself in front of larger customers and larger rooms. With practice you’ll eventually cooly handle rooms with hundreds of people in them.

STARTING FROM ZERO AGAIN

I am much better at speaking today than I was 15 years ago. These days I don’t get palpitations and I feel I’m pretty good at handling an audience. It took time and many opportunities in the front of the room. If you read this and think, ‘It must be nice he has it figured out’, rest assured that any time you learn something new you will reset.

Four years ago I started learning piano as a new, screen-free hobby. I take weekly lessons and fit in practice in my available time. Just last weekend I had my first in-person recital. Despite a lot of practice on the Theme to Swan Lake, I quite embarrassingly made many mistakes in front of a small audience and wanted to sink between the cracks in the floor. It did not feel great. Afterwards, however, with this post in draft on my computer I had to reflect and face the irony of writing about learning new skills. This is just part of the learning process. I will play in front of people again, and it will be better.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.