Agree completely with you, Mat. Part of what grea...

2010-08-05T10:54:07.560-05:00

Agree completely with you, Mat. Part of what great product managers do is gain an understanding of the different types of buyers, what makes them tick, and what challenges they face during the buying process.

But it's important to recognize a fundamental premise behind Buying Facilitation®: A prospective buying organization is a system. Sitting outside that system, no matter how hard we try, we will never fully understand its unique and idiosyncratic circumstances and personalities. Furthermore, there is no need to understand it. Instead, by asking facilitative questions, we help our inside agent - a buyer within the system - navigate the people, processes, and politics.

The model of product management assumes that we must know. Buying Facilitation® assumes that we need not know, at least not everything. To me, for this reason, the ways product management can leverage Buying Facilitation® are not obvious or trivial.

That said, Sharon Drew has suggested a product team (internal, not having anything to do with external buyers or users) can and should use "decision facilitation" to make product decisions. Just as a buyer has to navigate a system to get buy-in for purchasing decisions, a product manager has to navigate his product team to get buy-in for product decisions. Facilitative questions can help the product manager get this buy-in.

Great post. As product managers, we absolutely mu...

2010-08-05T10:29:18.306-05:00

Great post.

As product managers, we absolutely must be considering Buying Facilitation®; especially in the enterprise market.

This topic obviously spans the PM and Sales roles, but as PMs we should be thinking through the typical buyer personas; stepping into their shoes and understanding their hurdles; enabling them with information that can help them build an internal business case.

Additionally, we should be enabling our sales force by educating them on the typical buying organization, citing the buyers, influencers, users, approvers, gatekeepers, etc.

Practical deliverables from this exercise could be formal buyer persona profiles, pricing strategies to meet the OpEX/CapEx positions of potential customers, ROI calculators, or win/loss analysis which includes a depiction of the buying process.

Comments on Cauvin: What Is Buying Facilitation®?

Agree completely with you, Mat. Part of what grea...

Great post. As product managers, we absolutely mu...