Archive for product launch
Product Launch Planning: Sales Channel and Sales Cycle Complexity
Posted by: | CommentsAs it relates to your sales channel and channel partner readiness, there are two things to consider when developing your own product launch time line. First is the size of your sales channel. The second is the complexity of the sales cycle. By focusing on the sales channel and channel partners you address what is typically the most time consuming and riskiest part of a successful product launch.
Size and of Your Sales Channel and Channel Partners
Get your sales channel and channel partners ready for product launch is often the most critical and time consuming part of product launch. You can deliver the best promotional programs on the planet but if the sales channel and your channel partners aren’t ready (or haven’t embraced the new offering) your success in the market could be severely impacted.
The size of the sales channel and channel partners has a direct relationship to the amount of time it takes to prepare it for launch. Let me illustrate.
When the sales channel is limited to 6 direct salespeople in one office, you can get them together over lunch. But when the sale channel is a combination of direct salespeople and channel partners scattered across three continents you have to plan ahead. Sometimes months in advance.
Let’s say that Acme Software has a direct sales channel of 300 salespeople in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. They are in 15 countries and speak equally as many languages. Additionally there are channel partners in 10 other countries.
In the case of Acme Software you may need to start the product launch planning process of sales enablement training 6 months in advance of the target launch date just to coordinate training dates. If you have the added constraint of not being able to get everyone together in one place at one time, consider traveling to them or conducting sales enablement training online.
The Complexity of the Sales Cycle
The complexity of the sales cycle can introduce another dimension into your product launch planning. Products that are relatively simple to understand and sell, lend themselves to a much easier sales enablement training regiment and therefore a shorter planning horizon. On the other hand complex products take longer to understand and require much more involvement from buyers before a purchase decision can be made require a longer planning horizon.
Complex sales cycles require much more training about the problems addressed, who is impacted within the buyer’s organization, and what will they need to know in order to make a recommendation to buy.
Let’s build on our Acme Software example. Assume Acme is launching a new solution and for the first time will introduce to the channel a product with a complex sales cycle. Management is anticipating a 9 to 12 month sales cycle with no fewer than 8 to 10 people from the customer’s organization to be involved in making a decision to buy.
We’re presented not only with a new product to launch but a change in the way our sales channel will sell. This introduces risk. In order to minimize risk we may have to consider sales enablement training a year in advance by focusing on the problem, the market, buyers, and how they buy.
Another consideration here worth mentioning is sales culture. It’s not uncommon to see a sales culture where it’s OK to sell what’s not yet available. It’s another opportunity to introduce risk. Only this time the risk is about negatively affecting current sales before product launch. When we start sales enablement training we may run the risk that salespeople start talking about the new product immediately and inadvertently stop the deals they are working on today.
While I’m a strong advocate of a sales culture what sells what we have, I’m also a realist when it comes to long, complex sales cycles. If we wait until the product is announced we’re starting from scratch to build a pipeline. If we have a sales culture that sells futures, we start building a pipeline for the new product but run the risk of reducing the size of the pipeline for current products. Sometimes we’re in a no win situation. Err on the side of getting the sales channel and channel partners prepared to sell and leave the problem of selling futures to the VP of Sales and the CEO to resolve.
What are you struggling with?
Let me know by leaving me a comment below or sending me an email at ddaniels@pragmaticmarketing.com.
Launch Clinic Top Product Management Blog for 2012
Posted by: | CommentsStrategic Product Manager listed Launch Clinic as a top product management blog for 2012 – booya! Thanks, Stewart!
Hopefully this whole ‘the world is going to end thing’ doesn’t pan out and I’ll earn my way onto the list for 2013.
SEOmoz: 8 Things You Can Give Away to Earn Links + Mentions
Posted by: | CommentsKenny Martin over at SEOmoz has a nice list of easy things you can do to earn links that can help you build better organic search rankings.
Ah, nice outfit Kenny.
4 Steps to Solving the Cross-Sell Problem
Posted by: | Comments
Many organizations I work with struggle with getting their sales teams to sell ALL the products in their product portfolio. This is particularly difficult to do when there are silos of business units each with their independently defined goals, that don’t include helping the other silos sell their respective products. This gets further complicated when each silo has its own sales force. In the absence of a big organizational change, what can you do to please management’s insistence that product marketing managers do something about the lack of cross-selling?
Step 1: Focus on the primary buyer not the products
Product marketing managers get stuck in their cross-selling programs when they focus on the features in the products rather than the problems they can solve for their buyers. Your sales team can’t possibly build sufficient knowledge about every product. They zero in on a few that will help them achieve quota. Each business unit likely has a go-to buyer persona they consistently call on. Who is that? Do you really know the buyer or just their title? If you haven’t already, build a buyer persona for this buyer.
Step 2: Identify the primary buyer’s top 5 problems
When you have a deep understanding of a buyer persona you have identified their top issues/challenges/problems and ranked them in priority order. For now let’s just worry about the top 5, because any problem that is a lower priority than 5 won’t get attention anyway.
Step 3: Find the products in the portfolio that address the top 5 problems
Take your understanding of the buyer persona’s top 5 problems and match the products in the portfolio that truly address one of their top 5 problems. Don’t force fit it or make it only work at the PowerPoint level. It either addresses the problem or it doesn’t. Don’t fool yourself.
Step 4: Define product bundles
The intersection between the buyer persona’s top 5 problems and the products that address those problems is your baseline for developing product bundles – that are anchored in the buyer persona. Develop positioning documents for your bundles and enable the sales force to close more deals.
Where is the ‘product’ in a product launch?
Posted by: | CommentsPut another way, if a product is something that solves a customer problem, then a ‘product’ is all things necessary to solve that problem. Sounds simple enough but often confusing in technology companies where our ‘product’ is defined as the thing we’ve built, but the customer’s expectation (buying criteria) can be very different.
From a product launch perspective this narrow definition of product sets the stage for chaos, confusion, and blame, much of which is placed on the product marketing manager (often the job title responsible for product launch). Let me take a software example and look at the bill of materials that might be needed for a contemporary technology product. We would need the thing that we built and it should have all the things that make it a useful product with a delightful customer experience. Things like help, documentation, quick start guide, etc. We thought through the things our customer needs to use the product.
Then we need to think about the steps necessary for our customer to get to the point where they can have that delightful experience. If the product is complex enough that implementation planning and services needed, who will do that? We may need to define a step-by-step implementation process. Is this process something we charge customers for or is it something they can do themselves? Does our product have any prerequisites? Is that something we provide or will we need a partner to fill that requirement?
Now we need the things necessary for us to make it a business, like a price, a way for accounting to book the sale, a plan to pay our salespeople, and a transfer of knowledge to our customer support team.
Then we need the things to help us communicate to the target customers in our market aware that we have an answer to their problems, like buyer personas, positioning/messaging, and a go-to-market strategy.
Where companies get in trouble is they mistakenly define their product as the thing their development team built (using criteria) without considering what their customer is expecting to buy (buying criteria). When the development team is done they throw it over the wall to the product marketing manager to launch. If it’s an incomplete solution from a buyer’s point of view it makes for a difficult sale, revenue expectations aren’t met, and the blame game starts.
We can get so caught up in the excitement of creating that we lose sight of the fact we’re running a business.
Friday Reading
Posted by: | CommentsHere are some links to articles/posts I’m passing along that I found interesting…
Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing from Junta42
The Metrics that Matter for Marketing Measurement from Marketo
6 Ideas to Get Your B2B Social Media Plans Started from Social Media B2B
Enjoy.
SWAT Team Approach: Introducing New Products to Established Sales Teams
Posted by: | CommentsYou are responsible for launching a new product and you have an established (perhaps large) global sales team. The board of directors has high expectations the new product and if you nail it, you have a shot at a big promotion.
The risks are high. You have two reasonable options. Option A is to roll it out to the entire sales force at one time. Seems logical. Get it into the hands of as many sales people as possible and magic will happen. Option B is to do a controlled introduction by using a small but highly focused sales team.
With Option A a significant risk is that the new product will get lost in the portfolio. Your sales guys may already have more products they can sell than they can keep track of. Couple that with the fact the new product requires a different sales approach, calling on a different buyer. It’s critical to get a beachhead early on to build sales velocity.
The SWAT team approach is more conservative. Take two salespeople and a sales engineer (technical presales) and have them dedicated to the new product for a limited period of time. Consider the expected length of the sales cycle and start there. Conduct sales enablement and then provide very close sales support. As deals close, the other salespeople will take notice.
By containing the risk within the SWAT team you have the flexibility to make adjustments as you get market feedback. Once the patterns of a successful sale are revealed you can roll out the new product to the rest of the sales force, hopefully with a few success stories. You’ll have refined the sales tools and understand which buyers get involved in a buying decision.
A bonus is that you’ll have two salespeople and a sales engineer who are the ‘go to’ guys for the rest of the sales team.
Sales Velocity Killer: Delivery Bottlenecks
Posted by: | CommentsIn the Product Launch Essentials class we introduce the concept of identify and correcting “speed bumps” that get in the way of achieving your launch goals. Product delivery delays are one of those speed bumps.
The product delivery delays I’m referring to are not the delays from development. These are delays in getting the product to your customer after the deal closes. If the delay between contract signing and delivery becomes too long, customers get irritated and contact their sales rep to express their dissatisfaction. If sales reps experience this uncomfortable situation too often they will find ways to avoid selling the product and focus their attention on other products in the portfolio that can help them hit quota.
The initial excitement of the hitting your launch goal can turn into despair. Plus the product can get a bad reputation within the sales force (or channel) that may be difficult to overcome no matter how many new features you add to it.
The answer to this dilemma is planning. Evaluate the selling/delivery process for your product end to end. Don’t assume that delivery will automatically correct itself if sales take off. Reset your launch goal accordingly if delivery is a potential bottleneck to success or at least note it as a risk in your launch plan. It may take time to ramp up your delivery resources. Time you may not have.
“Pragmatic” is the word of the year for 2011
Posted by: David Daniels on December 16, 2011 | Comments (1)Merriam-Webster named “pragmatic” the word of the year for 2011. So nice to feel like one of the cool kids for a change.
Pragmatic – advocating behavior that is dictated more by practical consequences than by theory or dogma
Are you taking products to market by theory or dogma or by practical consequences?
See also: Effective Product Marketing and Product Launch Essentials