Ah, pricing. Always a thorny topic for product managers as it’s one those more subjective areas of the job. I’d love to have some kind of oracular spreadsheet that foresees how much customers would be willing to pay for my new product. Ironically, I would pay good money for such a thing…
I was reading Ian Lunn’s recent post, “Judged on the success of your product“, on Product Focus’s new blog and it reminded me of a story:
I once worked with a chap who managed an online service, which charged by amount of data stored. The service was popular and growing its revenues, however the P&L model assumed that data was stored compressed, when in fact the reverse was true. Thus, the more popular the service became, the more it lost money on running costs…
A few months ago, I co-presented a short speaking slot at this year’s Satmetrix Net Promoter European Conference. I’ve reproduced an excerpt from their official blog of the event for posterity.
You can see the full article in its original form at Satmetrix’s European Conference Blog 2010.
There are many reasons why Sales may be holding back on your new product. As we all know, Salespeople are by nature shy, retiring types, who need constant reassurance. You need to encourage and nurture them, delicate little flowers that they are. Or at the very least, restrain the urge to run screaming at them with a baseball bat held aloft.
Here are some of the blatant excuses reasons I’ve found so far:
Hello all, hope you’re having a lovely, restful Sunday. I’ve finally got around to sharing with you the useful Product Management and Usability / User Experience bookmarks I’ve been accumulating.
I’ve found them particularly useful, I hope you will too. I’ve also thrown in a few of my friends’ sites and blogs and urge you to read the beautiful, insightful and occasionally disturbing things they say.
Ah, emails. How did we manage without them? Personally, I think quite well. Now we appear to be unable to tear ourselves away from them.
They taunt us in our inbox, begging for attention. They follow us on our mobile devices, so there is no respite. Most importantly, they’re categorically not suited to all situations. Move a bit closer to the screen – I have some valuable advice for you…