B2B Product Management: 4 Essential Strategies for Success

TLD; DR: You can manage your products more effectively by conducting market research before launch, setting clear objectives to quantify success, and utilizing feedback to identify when your products have reached the decline stage. This will boost profitability and enhance motivation amongst your team. 

Business leaders worldwide say that if product management were optimized at their firms, profitability would increase by 34.2%. This emphasizes the significance of B2B product management, highlighting the need to utilize customer insights and product feedback to build what’s right. 

What Is B2B Product Management?

B2B product management is the guidance of a product’s entire lifecycle with a special focus on how that product will appeal to the company’s audience of business customers. 

Effective B2B product management is particularly important in B2B industries, where customers are usually hard-won yet will turn to competitors quickly if they feel that better products are on offer. Finding ways to level up your B2B product management game is crucial if you want to ensure you’ll retain top users and protect long-term profitability. 

Adopting B2B product management strategies like product discovery can help you develop products that resonate well with users. This is crucial, as almost all B2B products eventually become obsolete due to industry-wide progress. Even “staple” products, like screws and lights, go through refinement periods and are re-engineered for improved performance. Through robust B2B product management initiatives, you can ensure your products strike a balance between customer needs and business needs. 

The Difference Between B2B vs. B2C Product Management

The difference between B2C and B2B product management comes down to the differences between businesses and everyday consumers. B2C customers are influenced by a wide array of factors, while B2B customers are more niche-focused. 

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To ensure products appeal to B2B customers, you must understand what drives professionals in the industry. A professional buyer will have a very specific problem your product can solve. Therefore, B2B product management relies first and foremost on thorough market research to create buyer personas. 

Keep reading to learn more about effective B2B product management protocols that your business can implement today. 

1. Market Research in Product Management

Conducting market research should be one of the top priorities for efficient B2B product management. An effective market research plan sets your product up for success and informs your growth journey. This is particularly important if you’re a new entrant to a B2B industry and need to ensure that your product will appeal to potential clients. 

Before you start investing cash in R+D or content creation as part of your B2B product management strategy, aim to gather customer insights that will enhance your understanding of the market. You can do this by using primary or secondary research to gather data points related to: 

• Purchasing patterns
• Customer behavior
• Emerging market trends
• How your product type is being used
• What needs are not being fulfilled currently

B2B product management relies heavily on this research. You can gather these insights by utilizing market research techniques such as: 

Reviews 

Gather a blend of qualitative and quantitative data by offering feedback forms that ask customers to rank the effectiveness of your product while also giving them space to include their thoughts. 

NPS

Net promoter score (NPS) establishes how likely a customer is to recommend your product to a peer. A low NPS is a sure sign that your product needs serious refinement or risks being supplanted by competitors. 

User Testing

Before launching a new iteration of your product, have users test it for you. This will expose any flaws before launch and give trusted clients a chance to pinpoint actionable adjustments. 

Voice of the Customer

If you’re a growing business, you should also consider gathering data that helps you capture the Voice of the Customer (VoC). Today, the VoC is quantifiable, thanks to apps and services that can quickly gather data from sources like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and HubSpot. This helps you create useful feedback loops that support product growth and improve profitability.  

2. Setting Launch Objectives for B2B Product Management

Effective goal setting is at the backbone of B2B product management. Without a clear idea of goals and objectives, you’ll fall short of expectations and struggle to motivate your team in the build-up to launch. Rather than hoping to achieve goals after launch, set some clear KPIs to help you along the way. As a B2B business, these could include: 

Stickiness

Stickiness (Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU)) is an indication of your active users. As part of your B2B product management strategy, you’ll want to establish a high rate of stickiness following your launch. Evaluate your efforts toward keeping folks engaged with your product or service. 

Customer Acquisition Cost

How much will you spend to gain one client or customer? If CAC is too high, the lifetime value of your product will be undermined. 

Bounce Rate

If you sell a digital product or service, effective B2B product management means ensuring your website’s bounce rate is low before launching your product. A high bounce rate indicates there are errors on your site and folks will turn away before even considering what you’re offering. 

You should also set some milestones during your launch planning. Product development milestones help you monitor deadlines and identify potential bottlenecks before they halt production. This improves team accountability and gives you an easy way to boost morale following milestone completion. When considering your milestones, consider the following: 

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• Setting fewer milestones. Make sure the milestones you set are clear and easy to understand. This reduces micromanagement and helps your team see the big picture.  
• Assigning tasks on workflow management sites like Asana or Trello ensures product teams stay accountable for their milestones. 
• Once you’ve established some milestones, ensure they’re manageable. Unrealistic milestones are demotivating and will take the wind out of your team’s sails. 

As you move through the product lifecycle phases, reassess the relevance of your milestones. You may need to move the goalposts a little to protect morale, but you should make every effort to stick to the goals you establish at launch. 

3. Lengthening the Maturity Stage 

The product lifecycle consists of four main stages:

1. Introduction 
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline

You’re likely to incur higher costs during the introduction and growth stage, as this is when you’re researching your product, developing your parts, and marketing your new release to the world. As such, you need to make every effort to lengthen the maturity phase for as long as possible, as this is typically when your product is most profitable. 

Get the ball rolling by taking steps to future-proof your business and product line. This will ensure that you’re able to respond to emerging developments like AI. Future-proofing protects your profitability during the maturity stage, too, as you’ll be less likely to incur costs associated with employee errors or negative PR. 

You can future-proof your business today by investing in employee upskilling programs, analyzing data from similar organizations, auditing and updating the technology you use, and identifying external threats that are relevant to your industry. This will reduce the risk of human error and protect your business against threats that would otherwise undermine your brand image. 

You can also make use of a product feedback loop to lengthen the maturity phase and improve profitability when your B2B product hits its stride. Feedback loops can enhance customer satisfaction by showing that you authentically care about the experience folks have with your product, too. This increases client retention and can boost your NPS score. Setting up feedback loops can help you identify signs that your product may be entering the decline phase and needs proper phasing out in order to retain your profitability.  

4. Navigating the Decline With an Agile Product Management Strategy

Accepting that your product is entering the decline phase of the product lifecycle is crucial if you want to protect the long-term profitability of your business. Unless you sell a “cash cow” product that will be around for decades, you need to pivot towards more effective products when the industry moves on. 

You can retain the profitability of your existing product range while successfully shifting away from services that are on the decline by embracing agile development processes. Agile development is all about giving yourself room to adapt to shifting trends by streamlining your operations and responding to change quickly. 

This means you should have the financial means to pivot away from products that are no longer working and can quickly raise funds should you need to develop a new product or service in the face of shifting market pressures. 

Product Discovery Is Essential to Successful B2B Product Management  

Successful B2B product management emphasizes product discovery during development. Therefore, product discovery is extremely important during the decline phase. This is a crucial time. Your audience is either looking for something different from your product or ready to move on to a different product or service. 

Incorporate product discovery best practices into your B2B product management strategy from the get-go. Doing so will prepare you to pivot seamlessly during the decline phase. That’s because you anticipated the customer’s needs. Product discovery should include:

• Careful research on your customer’s needs
• Extensive data analysis and predictive analytics to identify how a business’s needs are likely to change 
• Surveys to determine what customers love and don’t love — must-have features versus those that provide little to no value
• Attention to minute details that can influence a customer’s decision to move on
• Attention to product pricing 

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On this last point, the best B2B product management strategy may incorporate a product or service tier that is either free or very low cost. Analyze customer needs and determine which additional features are most likely to promote them to upgrade.   

Conclusion 

B2B Product management is crucial if you want to build products that align with your customer needs and achieve maximum profitability. After establishing a product management team,  you can start off by setting milestones before you launch, which can significantly improve your ability to manage your products properly. You’ll need to gather plenty of qualitative and quantitative feedback during the product life cycle, too, as this will help you identify threats and make improvements to your company.  

You can leverage product management tools to streamline your product management efforts. Zeda.io is one such tool that can take care of gathering the voice of the customers, analyzing them, and providing actionable insights that can help you decide what to build next. It empowers you to build products that cater to your customer needs as well as drive revenue outcomes. Get started with Zeda.io for free today!