10 Tips for a Successful Product Marketing Launch (Part 3)

In this post we are continuing the three part series on successful product marketing launches.  Please see part one and part two of this series as well.  Previously we’ve covered:

• Creating a plan, building consensus, and assigning ownership
• Writing a positioning document so your team moves in unity
• Feeding your friendly analyst
• Don’t just ship – generate buzz
• Time your release to something important
• Get buy-in from sales (and execs)
• Leverage strategic partnerships

Those tips are a great start to a successful launch.  Now, let’s close this out with tips 8-10:

8.  Success stories.  Success Stories.  Success Stories.  Did I mention Success Stories?

If there was one thing I learned at my previous company, it was the value of success stories.  My EVP of marketing was fanatical about them.  He taught me that potential customers want to know how you have solved their problem before.  And the last thing they want is a feature list.  Even speaking in benefits (which is clearly better than features) can be tedious for customers to sit through.  They want stories.  With compelling narratives.  Beginning, middle and end.  If you can express the value with a good customer story you will have a strong impact on prospects.

A few years ago, when I was a more green product marketer, I recall being my company’s annual customer summit where I had an epiphany.  We were readying the launch of one of our products and I was lead the product marketing manager on the project.  I organized the launch plan and all of the activities that flowed from it.   I was super detailed, kept everyone aware of timelines, and had us moving forward on track and on time.  Everything looked great.

In the midst of all that I ran into my EVP as he was on his way to deliver that morning’s keynote speech to the customer audience.  He asked how the product launch was going, and I gave him the standard response – “great!” and proceeded to list all the things we were doing.  He nodded his approval on the plan, but he asked one simple question.  “Do we have a customer story yet?”

The truth was, we didn’t.  I really hadn’t spent too much time on this as we had a few customers coming out of beta but hey we won those customers already, right?  Wrong.  He stopped right there, on his way to speak to 600 people, and helped me brainstorm how to find a good reference customer that would put their stamp on the value of our product publicly.

He stressed to me how important this was to effectively marketing B2B products.  And he was right.  As I looked back (and continued on in my career) every time I had a good customer story, my positioning resonated.  I didn’t have to get technical, and convince people that our product was good by showing them all the great things I did.  I spoke about problems.  And how Customer X solved them and saved the day.  And those were the best meetings, webinars, and collateral pieces.  They got the best ratings, flew off the shelves and won us deals.

Your product development team will be looking for early adopters to be test customers.  Make sure that you are part of that process so that you can hear the good things that came out of the customer’s usage of the product.  Be an advocate for the customer.  Get them what they need to be successful.  Gain their trust, and eventually they will start telling you stories about what they are doing.  The better relationship you have the more likely they will be willing to be named in your case studies.  If they aren’t willing to go public, at least get their agreement to do a blind case study.

Then, lead your messaging with those stories.

9.  Update/Create Your Collateral and Demo

Collateral and demo development are such a big part of product marketing that they will get a much deeper analysis on this blog fairly soon.  For launch create a spreadsheet and track all of the collateral you are developing.  Assign owners to each element.  There are some standard collateral pieces that every software launch will have: data sheets, white papers, solutions guides, presentations, etc.  Plan early to get these done so you aren’t working feverishly at the end to write.  You want launch time to be about telling the stories, not writing them.

Your demo should be well in hand by this point as it generally gets produced during product development stages.  My key tip here is to once again, frame a narrative.  Don’t create a script that’s point and click on features.  Create a few storylines around real customer problems and how they can be solved by your product.  If your demo storylines are good, the demo itself almost doesn’t matter.  It’s all about the problem and how you are solving it with your product.  Not which buttons you click to get there.  We will get deeper into this subject later.

10.  Conduct a post-mortem

This post is all about how to go about achieving a successful product launch. But how do you know if your launch was a success if you don’t clearly outline your goals and measure the outcomes? Many companies just skip post-mortems because they are busy moving on to the next thing.  But don’t let that be you. Take some time, and it doesn’t have to be a lot.  One meeting and summary report can be sufficient to document and went right and wrong with this launch and learn from it.  The key here is that the process will help you express the outcomes formally for the first time and get you thinking critically.  Just verbalizing the findings will help your team institutionalize the findings so that the good can be repeated, and the bad can be avoided – almost intuitively.

Go Forth and Launch!

Thanks for sticking around for all three parts.  I had a blast writing this and appreciate all the comments and feedback.  What did you think here about part 3?  Did I miss anything in the 10 tips I’ve outlined?   I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.