George Koenig

This is the most important step before you demo. The best advice I was given: When you see your Dr., she won't sit you down and go through all medications (your features) available. The Dr. will ask, "So what brings you in today?". The Dr. listens and then asks multiple follow up questions to truly understand the problem. Hopefully, you can understand the bottom line impact as well. This has to happen prior to showing your solution. On the first demo, you only go through 1-3 features that are directly related to the prospect's identified challenges. If they leave the call knowing that the solution can solve their top problems and understand the ROI - then it was a successful demo.

If you listened, understood their pain, defined the business impact, and identified their dream scenario - then the sense of urgency and clearly defined next steps should have been completed before the call ended. That is a hot prospect. If not, they're not.

Your thank-you note must recap their pain, the impact to the business, and why you're the right guide to deliver them to their dream solution.

Ongoing auditing and monitoring of your live retailer PDPs is critical as it’s common to have content changes without your knowing.

It’s critical to have the specific content requirements for each of your retail channels to use while defining your content requirements. Your PIM selection should have the ability to convert your data to a retailers requirement. For example, if you use “ounces” in your PIM, but retailers use “oz” - you don’t want your team to have to manually translate that as it eats resources and slows down time-to-live.

If we’re discussing “product” content, then the initial assessment should include the auditing of your live product pages for two reasons. First, many companies haven’t used a PIM or similar management tool. They end up storing their content on spreadsheets. By auditing and collecting (scraping solutions) the content from live PDPs, they can build a fuller picture of what they have. Secondly, if they have used a PIM, collecting the live content allows them to compare Live vs Master content to see where they have gaps. These gaps are hurting their online sales and causing costly returns.