how to work well as the product marketing manager at a ERP software company?

Question

how to work well as the product marketing manager at a ERP software company? For example,the revenue forecast is the big headache.please give me some clues,or some weblinks.thank you very much

Answer 1

Wow. I actually WAS the product marketing manager at an ERP company for a whopping 7 months. Worst job I ever had. Only job I was ever fired from! (This is an indictment of the specific company and management I worked for, not the job itself----I've worked as a product manager for a manufacturing company for 9 years and do so today). Your revenue forecast needs to come, really, from your sales force. They need to tell you what they expect in new license sales, and at what confidence levels; your back end people should be able to help you with support contracts. In your business, there's a tremendous amount of year-to-year variance in new licenses (support is more predictable) because companies only buy new ERP systems once every 7 years or so.

This is not something you're going to find on the web somewhere.

Good luck.

Answer 2

A basic tool to help you with forecasting is previous sales. You should see periods when sales were up and when they were down. Sometimes the peaks correspond to marketing activity like a trade show or direct mail. Other times ups and downs are caused by the seasons, especially in retail. Then there are industry specific peaks, like August for Federal Government customers.

If you have no history, research your competitors. If they are a publically traded company their performance can be found in a number of resource locations.

Finally, the goal in forcasting is to be exactly on target. Sounds obvious? Be careful. To over forecast will make your boss happy untill you fall short of goal and have excess inventory. To underforecast is even worse. You won't be able to meet customer demand.

Good luck.

Answer 3

Some ideas... Make a simple game (solitaire, minesweeper, etc) Make a more complex game (using openGL or directx for graphics) Make a web site in your favorite language (apache as the server, using CGI if there's no apache module for it already) Write a program to crawl a directory tree, look for MP3 files, scan in their ID3 tags, and provide you with a searchable database of those tags. You could go so far as to provide a web interface to search and download the songs for private/LAN use (kind of like GNUMP3d) Write a program and user-interface to create arbitrary datafiles, kind of like a FileMaker or PgMyAdmin type of thing. Write a library for creating/interacting with a flat file database (the way in which the database operates would of course be up to you). if you're not into Linux, give Linux a try. You typically find yourself writing small programs on a daily basis to take care of repetitive tasks. Try asking google for ideas?