Manage Your Customers, Manage Your Product

As though being a product manager was not tough enough, it turns out that not only do we have to manage our products, but we also have to manage our customers. Customers don't particularly want to be managed and so they are not necessarily going to make this an easy task for us to accomplish.
What You'll Find Inside:
PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW HOW MUCH TIME TO INVEST IN A PROSPECT PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO UPGRADE CUSTOMERS PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO LEARN TO K.I.S.S. THEIR CUSTOMERS PRODUCT MANAGERS NEED TO MAKE THE PRODUCT PURCHASE PROCESS PERFECT In order to manage customers, first we need to have customers. What this means for a product manager that we are going to have to come up with ways to transform prospects into paying customers. Customers come with a lot of customer data. If we want to have any hope of understanding who our customers are or what they want, we're going to have to come up with a way to get all of that customer information into the same database.
All too often product managers like to point out their most loyal customers as one of their most valuable assets. However, it turns out that these customers may not be very profitable. Instead, we need to allow all of our customers to show us how our product can become even better.
Every customer starts out as a prospect. In order to turn them into a customer it is going to take both time and effort. The big question that product managers face is just exactly how much time is it worth to put into a given prospect in order to turn them into a customer? Once you've successfully landed a customer, they will start to use the current version of your product. When you upgrade your product to the next version, it's going to be the product manager's job to find a way to get your customer to also upgrade.
In order for a customer to make the decision to buy your product, they are going to have to carefully evaluate all of the product information that they have. Successful product managers know that in order to speed this process up, they have to be careful to not give their customers too much information.