This part of the interview between Acquired Podcast and TSMC founder, Morris Chang, about the correlation between organization structure and customer gave me an explanation to my current role in product marketing facing a divisional structure.
Today’s surveillance is about solution selling as network camera and NVRs becoming a commodity. The increasing number of smaller retail stores adopting consumer security products, such as Xiaomi and Tapo, explains the fact that basic surveillance is no longer a technical barrier. Enterprise customers, on the other side, look for more curate business solution and services. Respectively, solution is a combination of overlapping mix of products.
Who should cover the ground of offering the solution if product development is in an divisional organization? The role often falls into the next role in line, be product marketing, regional product manager, sales engineer, pre-sales, and sales. This requires the next-in-line function team to be well versed in the product and customer pain point in order to build the solution stacks.
Product marketing, in this situation, is faced to be product first, marketing second to filter the influx products. Tactical implementations that gave me room to survive:
- Hire those with experience in sales or customer service.
- New member training program to build the fundamental understanding of all products.
- Framework of value proposition to streamline the specification into customer benefits.