In challenging economic times, it’s more important than ever to deliver value to customers – and to capture the most revenue from every customer relationship and selling transaction. I think that’s why I have been called upon to evaluate product packaging on several occasions in the last year. There have been several common themes among these engagements:

How do you make sure that the products you are building solve real needs in your target market and that they are adequately differentiated from the competition? The classic answer is the market requirements document, or MRD. Too often, though, companies skip this critical stage in the product development process. Or, so much time elapses during the product development cycle that the MRD is out of date before a product is available to sell. So what can marketers do to make the MRD more relevant?

The high-tech world has been full of competitive switch campaigns: some legendary, some not even a blip on the radar.  Think Oracle versus IBM; Cognos versus Business Objects; Salesforce.com versus Siebel; and many more.

Technology companies seem to have an extraordinary amount of suffering when it comes to making pricing decisions. Everyone has a pricing committee; and no one loves it. Effective pricing policies really do require lot of cross-functional input and viewpoints, but many organizations struggle to establish and maintain a solid process for making decisions.  Based on my experiences, both good and bad, here are my recommendations for transforming your pricing committee from the Bundy household to the Cosby’s.