Product launch process example for product marketers

Product marketing is the glue between so many parts of the organization. Product marketing teams have to know what’s happening in the market (industry trends, competitors), the customers (success teams), what’s working when it comes to messaging & sales training (marketing & sales teams) and what is working and not working in the product itself (product teams). Often, all of these inputs can get overwhelming. I started to implement a process specifically for product launches that I thought might be worth sharing here. This deck outlines Phase 1, which is kind of the most important part of the launch process. I call it the inquiry stage.

This template includes all of the departments/roles you need to speak with, and the questions you need to ask of them to get your launch off on the right foot. Let me know what you think!

Account Based Marketing (ABM) fails without great change management

I first heard about Account Based Marketing (ABM) in 2013. And yet, I still am hearing about big companies who are just starting to think about ABM as part of their GTM strategy… ABM started for me when I went to a Terminus conference in downtown Boston. Terminus had partnered with Marketo to talk about how to do account-based marketing. The room was FULL of marketers who were looking to switch from the good old “spray and pray” method, to a more targeted “relationship first/personalized” method of marketing. I remember thinking that the reason we were able to actually do this now, was because marketing automation had finally advanced enough that marketers could understand on a large scale more about their target audience. It did mean that many processes were going to have to change. And, that’s when I realized that ABM is actually more about change management than anything else. And, even more so, without great change management, ABM as a marketing and sales strategy will fail.

As I’ve worked with clients who are making the switch or looking to test out ABM I have ended up using a few of the same tips each time. So, I thought I might as well get them down in a post, maybe someone else can use them.

1. Know yourself, but more importantly, know your audience: This sounds like something my therapist would say, but if you have been reading this blog, I actually think it’s a good tip for marketers ALL the time, not so much about themselves, but about their company and their market and the connection between the two. ABM is essentially targeted marketing. You pick a small list of companies that you want to sell to, and you figure out all that you can about them: what are their pains, what’s going on with them in the market, what are their goals, who are potentially on the buying committee for your product? Then you come up with ways to communicate how your product/service/solution can help them achieve their goals faster, stop the bleeding faster, etc. So, you HAVE to know your audience, and you have to know if your solution actually solves their problem, and/or enough of your ABM target audience actually has the pain you’ve outlined. If they don’t and your success to date has been realized based on weird human decisions, ABM might not be for you. But, if you KNOW you have a solution that fits a small audience (you have to know your revenue numbers here to know if this is a good enough strategy to sustain your company) and you know the messages have resonated in the past, then it’s just a matter of executing. But, all of that starts with a solid understanding of your prospects, their pains and your ability to solve those pains.

2. Cross-functional teams: Gosh, I can’t say this enough, but when you change to a new sales and marketing method, you HAVE to get everyone on board, early. And, it’s actually not just sales and marketing, it could be product and engineering, it could be finance or support. If you are going to change how you go to market, think about the impact on your business as a whole. If support calls start coming in from a specific industry that you’ve targeted in your ABM strategy and those questions are detailed and your support teams don’t have that level of expertise in that industry, that’s not a great experience for your new customers. So, get people from all of these groups on a team and walk through what ABM means. It doesn’t just impact what marketing is doing. I should note here, that, ideally, you got buy-in from senior leaders (read COO, CEO) who have sway over multiple departments, before just deciding to “do ABM,” because ABM doesn’t just “get done” after you’ve completed a list of operational changes.

3. Operations: Speaking of operational changes, these changes aren’t just switching from using a “Lead-> Opportunity-> Account” to “Account->Contact->Opportunity” process in Salesforce. The impact on operations could touch commission structures, marketing MBO’s, support KPIs and even hiring strategies. Yes, you have to figure out how you want to use correctly use your CRM and marketing automation tools, or if you want to add additional tools, but ABM, really is a strategic shift in the way you do business, not just how you market and sell. So, give your operations teams the time and space to make those changes, correctly.

4. Clean data: Pretty sure my second favorite thing to write about is clean data. It just goes hand in hand with knowing your audience. There’s no sense in spending all this time knowing your audience if you are just going to have weird automation things happening because your data isn’t clean. Take the time to clean your database and have it reflect the amount of work that you’ve put into understanding your audience.

5. Pilot programs: So, if you’ve read this far, you might be feeling REALLY overwhelmed. I hate that feeling. So, I am actually a super fan of doing pilot programs. Pick 20-100 prospects, 2-3 salespeople, 1-2 marketing people and try ABM out. Find a target group that doesn’t require a change to your support and finance teams. Still, get the buy-in from the people in charge of those teams, but pitch it as a pilot and illustrate goals, timeline, responsibilities, results and decision dates. This helps you test the impact of the message, your channels, the new process and the impact on your organization without making EVERYONE endure change unless you are 100% sure it will drive the revenue you need.

Change management doesn’t have to be hard, and hopefully, these 5 tips have given you some peace of mind as you embark on the journey that is ABM.

B2B Sales Toolkits: need to have vs nice to have

Since I started my career in sales, I am one of the first marketers to lean in when a sales manager says they need a sales toolkit for a new launch or a new market or a new company. But, having worked with SO many companies, and sales managers, they all have ideas about what a sales toolkit should include. After my decade’s worth of experience and watching what’s worked and what is important there’s a couple of things to do before you just run and build a toolkit.

1. Figure out who the market is: Ask questions or know if this is for a direct sales team or a channel team, who is their audience, what do they care about, etc. You can read more about how to get to these answers faster in this blog post. You need to know if this product is being sold to existing customers or new customers, which will affect what kind of tools you need your sales team to have.

2. Figure out what they think a toolkit is: This is where we talk about the “medium” you will use. Do they want a bunch of 1 page PDF’s, or videos, or white papers? If people want videos and they receive white papers, you are never going to get them to use the toolkit. I’ve found that varying mediums actually makes them accessible to everyone.

3. Pick 4: Don’t try to boil the ocean and build ALL the pieces of a toolkit. Pick 4 pieces, vary the mediums and message and let your teams start to use them. If you do what I mentioned in my “how to get your sales enablement content used” post then you’ll be able to figure out what’s working and not.

After you’ve done all the things above, here is a sales toolkit framework that I’ve been using for about 4 years and with just some minor tweaks it seems to work.

Anything in here that I am missing that you think are must-haves versus nice-to-haves?

4 Tactics to Achieving Simplicity in Messaging

I’ve been working with a couple of clients on their “who are we” pitch. For many technical founders its one of the hardest things to communicate, and it makes a ton of sense. Many technical founders have created this technically amazing thing. It’s complex because these days tech can’t just be simple, technology these days is used to solve complex problems, so the tech is complicated.

So, creating a simple message is hard. And yet, if you can’t explain it quickly, you’ll never get the attention of investors or customers. Here are a few ways you can try to simplify the message:

1. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: Think about why and how your customers could use your product. Think about their pains and how your product makes their lives easier. It might not always be that you save them money or time, maybe you just make their daily tasks less tedious.

2. Use an analogy that 80% of your audience will understand: Look at your audience (prospects or investors) and have a couple of analogies that work well for them, either how they work, or their hobbies, or how they interact with businesses, how they parent or manage their own parents. One of the best analogies I ever heard included a washing machine breaking. That’s something nearly everyone can relate to. Think about something that most everyone can relate to. An analogy that most people can relate to, makes your business real. It’s easier to invest in or purchase something new.

3. Explain it to your mother or grandfather: An analogy here can be really helpful, but if you can’t find one, be able to explain the solution to your parent or grandparent (depending how old you are). The point of this is simplicity in your message makes it easy for someone so far away from the problem and solution to STILL see the value.

   • Have them explain it back to you: The second part of this is that they have to be able to explain it back to you. This means that they aren’t just nodding that they understand, but that they really understand what your product does. They often use analogies to explain complex things, so they might be able to get you to a useable analogy as well.

4. Tell a real-life story: If you are lucky enough to have a real-life user that’s finding value in your product. Use this story about their life before your solution and then after. Explain 2-3 things that your user has found the most valuable.

Any of these tactics can help you communicate your message successfully. In the end, it’s up to the person who has to do the pitch to use the one that works best for them. Have other tactics worked better for you? What are they?

How to create Sales Enablement content that sales teams love

If you know me, you know I started my career in sales. It was the early 2000’s, and I was cold calling. It was horrible. I have never forgotten the pain of picking up the phone and getting “no” after “no.” It’s one of the reasons I love working so closely with sales teams and new founders. Selling is hard, but once it works, it’s magical. That feeling of being able to solve a problem with your solution, quickly recognizing product-market fit, and being able to clearly communicate value?!? MAGIC!

But, that doesn’t happen overnight, it happens when sales and marketing teams can work together to understand and develop content (demos, sell sheets, landing pages, campaigns, events) that either generate revenue faster or help sales teams identify deals they should walk away from faster. In order to identify and create content that sales teams will use, start by:

1. Understanding your audience: not your potential buyers, but your salespeople. Know what it’s like for them to get hung up on, know what it’s like when they get the deal to the proposal stage only to get told that they lost to a competitor, and know what it’s like to win a really hard-fought deal. As marketers, the only way you can really understand this is to ask and watch and listen. This is not the time where you think or assume. This is the time where you are curious. Being curious is the best skill a marketer can have, but as a marketer responsible for sales enablement content, curiosity is the only way you will win.

   • It’s worth noting here that I am assuming marketers know their prospects, but if that is still unknown, take some time to talk to your sales teams and customer teams and develop your personas. Who is buying? Who is blocking? Who is signing? Defining and understanding the pain points of your prospects should be done before you engage your sales teams for content.

2. Understand the process: There are content pieces that can be used at different stages in the sales cycle that help sales teams either move prospects through the funnel or out of it. In either case, the faster the salesperson can move the prospect through a stage the better. So, as a marketer, know your stages, know what moves deals from one stage to another, know what needs to be answered or “checked-off” in order to get from Discovery to Qualified to Demo to Tech Review to Contract to Won.

3. Get creative: Once you understand your sales team, the challenges they face, the process they go through to get a deal to the finish line, think about how to remove the obstacles your prospects face. Do they need a presentation to be able to share with their boss that outlines successes of the trial? Do they need to be able to whiteboard their challenges to other teams to get their support to invest in this software? Do you need to try out different mediums: calculators, demos, videos, testimonials, in-person meetings at events? Go beyond the traditional: discovery questions, deck, PDF, and technical demo.

4. Test and Tweak: Just as any good lead generation team does, there’s nothing wrong with trying something and watching it fail. Part of testing is trying something on a small scale and then going “all-in” on it. I’ve always worked with 1-3 salespeople to test out content and get feedback before rolling out to the entire organization.

5. Find your advocates: Just like your demand gen team will find customer advocates, product marketers need to find their internal advocates. In your test and tweak stage, you probably worked with salespeople who were hungry to try something different. Use those same folks as your advocates for the rest of the sales teams. If salespeople are seeing success, they’ll brag about it and then you won’t be able to keep that content on the shelves.

Getting sales teams to use sales enablement content is one of the hardest sales jobs you’ll have as a marketer, by front-loading the process with a lot of listening and curiosity, you’ll find success faster.

Where does Sales Enablement fit in a B2B marketing org?

In the recent years, sales enablement has become a "thing." So much so, that now there's an annual conference, there are local associations with smaller teaching events. The thing I find lovely about this group of professionals is that they're all trying to make it work while learning from others. Sales enablement is a tricky skill and role. Because the audience is primarily the sales team, secondarily the target market and thirdly the org as a whole, and yet often, the role sits in marketing. Below you'll find my thoughts on sales enablement roles and where they should fit. 

Sales Enablement in Sales

I think this structure makes the most sense when your sales team is larger than 50 people and the sales enablement team or person is responsible for content, training, and operations. That way your enablement team is able to have a shared departmental vision with the team they service most often. It does require a content person who is able to get content approval and buy in from marketing and other subject matter experts. And a training person might have to be closely aligned with HR who is traditionally responsible for training. 

Sales Enablement in Product Marketing

According to the folks at Pragmatic Marketing, sales enablement should be the job of the product marketing team. I believe this can be a good fit, if you have a robust sales operations and HR teams and or, you are just getting started with sales enablement. No matter what the first need that comes when you hire someone to fulfill the sales enablement need is around content, so who better than a product marketer to combine their knowledge of market, positioning, and product to build out content that sales can use to close more deals faster. The problem comes when it's clear that operationally there are additional process changes that need to happen, or there is a lot of training that needs to be done. 

Sales Enablement in Demand Generation

I believe that there's a time in which sales enablement belongs in demand generation. At the very beginning when there aren't enough hands and when enablement enters maintenance mode. In many small B2B organizations the first marketer hired is a demand generation marketer. The person who understands the market develops and executes campaigns and that person often ends up supporting sales teams throughout that process, sharing their knowledge gained along the way. So, almost every bit of content created for a demand generation campaign can also be used as sales enablement content. At that point, there is no measurement of the effectiveness of the content, there are no process changes needed, there just needs to be more content, and the demand generation team is churning content. After sales enablement is up and running and processes are working and content has been measured, the demand gen team is a great resource to take back the content creation part of sales enablement. At that point, the organization has already invested in sales training and sales operations that help with training and processes around sales enablement. This new state of the union allows the sales enablement role in marketing to just continue to generate content. 

Sales Enablement in HR

This option makes the most sense when the main goal of your sales enablement program is training. I find this happens when you have a new sales team, but a strong HR team, often within product led organizations that are looking to grow. The great thing about enablement existing in HR is that there are plenty of HR tools that are available to help build training content and track training effectiveness. The problem is that eventually, the need for content will come back around, and often HR teams are not the ones well suited for creating compelling customer facing content. And, when that need transfers from heavy training to more content, some other team must rise to the occasion.

What's best for your business

In general, it's standard marketing procedure to expect sales enablement to come out of product marketing. But, each organization is different. So, ask yourself these six questions to determine where Sales Enablement fits in your org:

1. Is more than 80% of your sales team "new" (less than the length of a sales cycle)?

   • If yes, then consider starting by enabling your sales teams with training from HR.

2. Do you have a product marketing organization?

   • If yes, then most likely this fits well into that area of responsibility.

   • If not, then consider demand generation or sales.

3. Is your demand generation team meeting their MQL goals?

   • If yes, then consider putting sales enablement content requirements on the Demand Generation team.

   • If no, then put the responsibility into another department. The next logical places are product marketing and sales.

4. Does your sales team often have content needs that require a quick turn around (sub 48 hours)?

   • If so, then consider putting this responsibility on the sales team.

5. Are there standardized templates available within your company that ensures a consistent message and branded content if used by teams outside of marketing?

   • If so, then you can consider putting your sales enablement content arm in the sales team or in the HR teams. You might still lack the positioning/product knowledge, but if other answers above point away from marketing, there is a reason to consider putting it elsewhere.

6. Does your sales team need training, content and process adjustments equally?

   • If so, then consider a cross functional team that reports into sales that has direct reports that sit in other departments either for full time or part time work. This is really the best of all worlds because your teams skill set could be used in other departments, but the primary benefit would be to your sales teams.

 Where does Sales Enablement sit in your org? Is that working?