When I joined 1WorldSync in 2020, one of the first things my new CEO said to me was that when new features or products were developed, they ‘escaped’, they weren’t launched.
In other words, there was no formal plan between the product and marketing teams to properly launch and promote the new thing. It was released, some sales reps might talk to customers about it, others not so much. That was the launch. Done. Sound familiar?
Clearly, this was a problem we needed to fix, and we did.
First things first. We (marketing) needed to get visibility into the product roadmap so we had at a heads up on what was coming. Check.
We needed to partner with the product on a launch brief that looked like this:
- Who is the new thing for? What segment of our customers and the market?
- Who is the buyer (role, level, etc)?
- What is the job-to-be-done it’s solving?
- What are the expected impact metrics on the customer side if they use the thing?
- Can we get some beta users to give us feedback and early quotes/testimonials/success stories?
- How are we weaving this into the overarching narrative of our platform?
- Which sales teams do we expect to sell it?
- What are the competing products in the market? How is ours different?
- What are our internal launch goals? How do we know if we’re making traction?
- Is this a tier 1, 2 or 3 launch (i.e., how big do we go relative to the size of the revenue opportunity)
Once we had alignment on the brief, we kicked into high gear on how we got the word out.
- What channels can we leverage?
- What’s the PR plan?
- What is the specific messaging?
- What sales enablement materials do we need to create?
- What is our comprehensive asset library?
- Do we need to translate assets into specific languages, based on region applicability?
Set the timeline and commit. Hold everyone accountable to it.
Launch the thing and measure rigorously. How on/off are we to the goals we set? If we’re off, what’s the hypothesis as to why?
The marketing and product teams should be joining sales calls or, at a minimum, listening to call recordings to hear how prospects and customers are responding to sales messaging at the assets created to support the sales conversations. Where might confusion exist? What’s really landing that we should amplify across channels? We iterated where it made sense.
The other important thing to keep in mind is that there are no rules around how many times you can launch a product. People are overwhelmed with the amount of information flying at them so there’s a decent chance they may not see your message the first time. People also leave and join companies all the time, so that new person who was not at the account when you launched initially likely has no idea the thing exists. Re-launching isn’t repetition, it’s just good strategy.
Let me know if any of this sounds familiar and what you’ve done to fix it.
