Product Marketing Training, B2B marketing needs for buyers and companies continues to change.  All you can do is listen and react.  Oh, yeah – now you need a mobile strategy.  Product Management just got more fun.

• Challenges aligning execution teams to launch goals.
• Issues getting agreement on the right market messages.
• Continuously reactive to the needs of sales?
• No common agreement on activities own by a given marketing role?
• Limited or no ability to track marketing’s ROI

If these are items you are experiencing then many training options exist from general b2b marketing training, product launch training to strategic marketing seminars which will aid in identifying best practices in b2b marketing.

Sales cycles are longer in a down economy.

Under adverse economic conditions, buyers are less inclined to purchase – plain and simple. Even when there is a clear business challenge and a solution with real ROI, tight budgets create hesitation on the part of the buyer. Therefore, sales professionals are faced with increasingly risk-averse prospects whose buying time frames are longer. Marketing automation tools supporting drip marketing campaigns and lead nurturing can build relationships with buyers during a longer sales process.

Although, building a set of tools was the end game, not the start of the process. Here are 5 realizations which make for good marketers:

1. Good Marketers Trust Their Teams – One of the critical success factors for marketers is whether they can lead their organization to meet the demands of the market AND the business. To be able to support both, marketing leaders will need to enlist support from every part of the business. Too often marketers and product managers get mired down in trying to drive EVERY component of their products activities in the market and inside the business operationally which isn’t the best approach. Sometimes you need to delegate and trust the experts in each area to do their jobs effectively.

The other 4 decisions or realizations you need to make to be a good marketers can be found here

Whether you do B2B marketing in our out of technology, your buyer persona is critical to getting the message right and launching a product into the marketplace.

For a private company it’s a bit harder.  In this post we’ll discuss a technique that can be used to estimate the enterprise value of your private company. Enterprise value is a financial concept that describes the amount of money the market believes your business to be worth.  It is often referred to as the ‘takeover value’ — the amount of money required for an acquirer to buy your company at it’s current market price.  A public company’s market capitalization is equal to the number of shares outstanding multipled by the current share price.  Enterprise value is a more comprehensive measure of a company’s value since it also includes the amount of cash, debt, and other items associated with a business.

To figure what your company valuation, there are multiple options. And some myths.

Go here to read more on private company valuations.

Google’s hiring process has been talked about online by many folks and the experience of being a member of Team Google is varied from a great freakin thing to just a bad experience.   While the interview below is fiction, I did have a strange call with Google HR myself in 2005 which I only remember as odd.

So in the spirit of trying to think how I might have actually done with some of the questions which could be thrown around during a product management interview at Google, this is my take on being interviewed by 3 folks at Google.