Updated Framework from Pragmatic Marketing

The team at Prag­matic Mar­ket­ing has just updated their 15-year-old mar­ket­ing frame­work – a “market-driven model for man­ag­ing and mar­ket­ing tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts.” This is a big deal, as they’ve trained 60,000+ peo­ple under their pre­vi­ous model. The hyper­link above takes you to the page where they explain what’s new or different.

The revised frame­work looks like this:

What’s Changed

The new frame­work is now more business-oriented and strate­gic — the key changes from my POV. There’s more empha­sis on buy­ers and their deci­sion mak­ing processes.

In the strat­egy area of the framework:

• They’ve broad­ened the mar­ket plan­ning activ­i­ties to go beyond oppor­tu­nity siz­ing to mar­ket def­i­n­i­tion and “frame of ref­er­ence” setting.
• They’ve iden­ti­fied the need for prod­uct plan­ners to define routes to mar­ket and the dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­egy – based on an under­stand­ing of how cus­tomers want to buy and the sorts of pre– and post-sale ser­vices they expect.

Also new to the frame­work is the need to research and under­stand both the buy­ing process and the buyer per­sonas – not just user per­sonas. For considered-purchase prod­ucts, in which mul­ti­ple peo­ple or busi­ness func­tions may play a role in pur­chase deci­sions, this change in the frame­work is crit­i­cal. It’s par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant for B2B marketers.

Even with B2B clients, I’ve often see way too much focus on user per­sonas, to the exclu­sion of buyer per­sonas. This can have unin­tended con­se­quences for sales enable­ment, caus­ing those pro­grams to miss the mark and fail to ori­ent sales­peo­ple as needed. Moti­va­tions, needs and wants for buy­ers can dif­fer from users so fail­ing to under­stand the needs of that buy­ing ecosys­tem can be fatal for big-price-tag prod­ucts and services.

I now won­der how much of the myopic focus on user per­sonas in product-centric orga­ni­za­tions has resulted from the lack of empha­sis on buy­ing processes and buyer per­sonas within the ear­lier ver­sion of the frame­work. Was this an unin­tended con­se­quence of Pragmatic’s pre­vi­ous frame­work? Their frame­work has been enor­mously influ­en­tial among the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of prod­uct man­agers and prod­uct mar­keters, so it’s pos­si­ble that prac­ti­tion­ers may have been blind to this ear­lier omission.

In any case this is a good change on Pragmatic’s part, one I hope rip­ples quickly through the global tech mar­ket­ing com­mu­nity. Bet­ter align­ment between buy­ers and sell­ers will be good for business.

Tagged as: B2B, frameworks for marketing planning, product management