Understanding the importance of first impressions

We can’t state strongly enough how important making a good first impression as part of your launch is. Here’s what making a good first impression can do for your product:

• It sets the competitive stage. If you’re entering a crowded market, a good impression gives you a chance to be considered against the competitive alternatives. If you’re entering a new market, a positive impression gives you the chance to set the standard against which all new products will be judged.
• It gives you a positive presence online and bolsters affirmative word-of-mouth responses. Customers rely on word-of-mouth, social media buzz, and information on the Internet more than ever before.
• It allows for positive press coverage and stellar product reviews. The press and customers love to tell others about products they love.

Conversely, a bad first impression can really damage your product’s image and your bottom line. Here’s what happens when you create a bad first impression:

• It puts a bad taste in customers’ mouths. By launching a product that isn’t ready for the market, you’re opening the door to a whole host of problems that customers may encounter with a not-ready product. Customers are demanding. Giving them a bad experience will taint your brand, and they may never be willing to try your product — or even your company — a second time.
• It creates a poor online presence. A bad impression could live on forever via negative postings on the web.
• Sales often stall. If the first experience that customers have with your product gives them a bad impression word may get out to other potential customers who will choose not to buy your product, and you may not be able to meet your revenue projections.

Detailing the elements of a successful product launch

The elements of a successful product launch are many:

• Planning: Follow a plan to make sure all elements of your launch are in place.
• Communication: Communicate with all the parties internal and external so that awareness of your product is broad.
• Timing: Planning launches typically requires three to six months. The sequence of events is staggered depending on how close they are to the customer: internal departments first, partners and press next, and finally customers and the general public. Your aim is a seamless meshing of internal operations readiness, sales and marketing readiness, and product readiness.
• Effective marketing program mix: Have you chosen the right mix of activities, such as online advertising combined with product reviews and a social media campaign? Creating the correct marketing program mix generates the sales results that you’ve agreed to with your company.
• Compelling messaging: What messages are going to motivate customers to buy your product? Do you need to deliver those messages in a particular order to be more effective? Have you tested them with potential customers?
• Budget to achieve goals: If you have big sales goals, your marketing and launch budget need to give you the ability to reach customers with appropriate marketing tools.
• Message reach: Make sure the marketing activities you put in place reach the customers that you want, and avoid spending money reaching those that aren’t your target market.
• Product readiness: Your product must be ready at the quality level that customers expect. If it isn’t, you’ve wasted a lot of money attracting people to a product that either isn’t available or disappoints customers.

Keeping these in mind can help make sure you do everything possible to run a very successful launch and have the best possible chance of achieving your revenue goals.

Launches under Agile or very frequent releases

Some products don’t need any formal launch marketing activities. For example, if your product is web-based and you release new features to customers online once a month, you may need to do very little other than notifying your customers with a pop-up about what the new features are. This kind of launch strategy is common with teams doing Agile development. If the new version of the product contains major features, you may want to update your website and marketing materials to include the new features as well. The downside of this kind of approach is that launches are usually so small that getting any kind of press coverage or generating much excitement is difficult because everything you do is a minor launch.

Make sure that your launch cadence takes into account how quickly your customers want to have to learn and get used to new features. If you change your product too often, even if the new features provide value, your customers may become overwhelmed and unhappy. This point is particularly true if the new features change how users perform any of the most important and critical tasks that they routinely do with your product. If your customers have to re-learn how to do basic tasks, they may become frustrated and turn to a different product. A strategy for combating this feature-release fatigue — and helping you generate excitement, buzz, and awareness about your product — is to hold off releasing smaller iterations of your product when their development is complete. Instead, combine a larger set of features into one major release. A company that uses this technique well is Salesforce.com. Although the company does fully Agile development, it saves up the features and does bigger releases less often so its customers aren’t inundated constantly with new features and the company can get websites and analysts to write about the new versions of its products.

Easy does it: The soft launch

The first type of launch is a soft launch. A soft launch is when the product is launched without a lot of corresponding launch activities to generate widespread awareness. Sometimes companies do this type of launch if their product isn’t fully ready and they want to deploy to a limited set of customers who may have special agreements to delay payment until the product is deemed final. Start-ups often use soft launches because they don’t have the financial and marketing resources to do much more. They may have a need to get the product out quickly, capture some customers and revenues, and then use results to go to venture capitalists for additional funding to expand their sales and marketing efforts.

The other reason for doing a soft launch is that a company wants to get the product into customers’ hands rapidly to get some quick feedback and improve the product. For products that are a brand-new type of offering, this type of early feedback may be necessary in order to make course corrections to get to a version 2.0 or 3.0 that truly meets market needs.

The downside to soft launches (when a product is fully ready and the company’s goal is to maximize revenues) is that, more often than not, they generate little or no revenue. Because a soft launch doesn’t have the momentum of a big push behind it with the corresponding marketing and PR activities, the launch often creates little or no press coverage, and the company finds itself weeks later wondering why it was unable to generate more interest in the product and why it missed its revenue targets. Once the product is launched, the company can’t go back and re-launch it because it has been available and is old news. So they must create extensive and expensive marketing programs to attempt to make up for the lack of awareness created by the soft launch.

A small effort: The minimal launch

A minimal launch is something you want to consider when you have a small launch budget and few resources to work on the launch. Your product may not be that important to your company’s strategy and overall success, or you may be coming up with a minor revision and only want to make your existing customers aware so that they upgrade.

Companies also often use minimal launches because they’ve failed to plan early enough and then have to scramble for a minimal launch because they’ve run out of time. Another scenario is that companies mistakenly think they need only a minimal launch to meet their goals. This happens because of unrealistic expectations about how important their product is to the market and the assumption that the product will sell itself.

Minimal launches can be very effective if you use your resources wisely. For example, instead of trying to do a horizontal launch to make the entire industry aware of the product, a company may want to target a specific vertical market, such as the insurance or health care industries, with a combination of email blasts, PR, and seminars. If the product is a good solution in that vertical, it may provide the company with the revenues necessary to expand the marketing campaigns later on.

Minimal launches can have the same downsides as soft launches (see the preceding section). When a company has minimally launched the product, it may have to spend an extraordinary amount of money to build the revenue momentum it needs, if it can at all.

Going all-in: The full scale launch

A full-scale launch is designed to maximize awareness, generate as many leads and sales as possible, and let the industry know who your company is and why you matter. You spend more money on a full-scale launch, but, spent right, each dollar is much more effective because your marketing programs build on each other and provide synergy. For example, imagine you place dozens of product announcements in publications, follow them up with advertising that reaches the same readers, receive excellent product reviews, and then send your target customers a direct-mail piece. Each one of these exposures to the potential customer creates additional awareness and credibility and builds on the others, ultimately enticing your prospects to act and buy your product.

Full-scale launches can be broadly horizontal in nature or can target one or multiple verticals. The choice depends on your product and chosen marketing strategy.

A full-scale launch gives your product the best chance of success, though most companies are afraid to spend the money to execute one. Even though they may have spent millions of dollars developing a product that is going to change their customers’ lives, when it comes down to spending a few hundred thousand dollars they aren’t realistic that this amount may be required to generate the millions in revenue their plans call for.

Choosing a launch type: Key considerations

An excellent strategy for planning is to use a full-scale launch as the starting point. If you’re budget, resource, or time constrained, scale back the plan and use a subset of the programs listed in Figure 14-1 (and even more options listed in Chapter 15) to run a more minimal launch. This gives you the best chance of success, ensures you don’t forget to consider all the options, and allows you to make educated trade-offs about how you’re going to reach your goals. Use Figure 14-1 to look at the trade-offs in results and Figure 14-2 for relative costs for each kind of launch.

Guerrilla marketing activities are things the employees and friends of the company do to promote the company. They can include wearing product t-shirts at an event, writing blogs, posting on Twitter, and liking and sharing the company blog article about the release on LinkedIn. All these activities cost little or nothing. They often have minimal impact as well, but when you don’t have a lot of budget, you get very creative. Guerrilla marketing activities have such a low impact on full-scale launches, it’s as though they never happened.

Building your launch squad

Make sure you identify who will be on the launch squad from each of the respective departments, including operations, marketing, support, engineering, public relations, quality assurance, international, and any other pertinent groups. While sales can be part of your launch squad, they are often not in the office. It’s easier to keep sales informed or ask them for specific participation as you need it. Meet with squad members at least three months prior to launch to have a kickoff, walk through the plan, and set expectations of what you need from them. If you meet resistance, this point is the time to address it and make sure you have full commitment.

Let your company and a broader audience of stakeholders and executives know who is on the launch squad so that the squad members feel happy to be included and publicly committed to the success of the launch. Acknowledge the role of each squad member and the specialty skills they bring as being critical to the plan and show that you have confidence in the team to deliver.

Tracking milestones and ensuring accountability

Build out a chart of milestones and a table with key activities, such as collateral and website content being completed, showing who is responsible for them. Include due dates so that you can track progress on a weekly basis. Hold launch squad meetings as often as necessary so you can hold the team accountable and make sure nothing is slipping through the cracks.

Make sure you communicate the status in a brief report to a wider audience, such as your executives and channel partners, so they’re aware of the effects of how the plan is being executed. For example, if the launch slips, let them know so they can plan how they need to respond in their area. Share any bad or challenging news with them, and highlight positive happenings — giving your squad credit, of course!

Arming your sales team and other key stakeholders

A highly effective tool during the early part of your launch is a product launch one-pager like the one shown in Figure 14-3. This short, simple document gives your sales team and other key readers the critical, need-to-know information. Creating this document and making it readily available can save you dozens of hours answering questions and explaining (and re-explaining) the product details.

Early on in the launch process, create 25-, 50-, 100-, 150-, and 250-word descriptions of your product. You’ll need descriptions with various word lengths for web, brochures, ads, and partner sites. Getting them all done at once saves a lot of time later on.

As you approach launch, you want to train your salespeople so they know who the product is for (that is, the personas; see Chapter 5), what’s in it for each of the people in the buying cycle, why it will be compelling and easy to sell, and what’s in it for them. (Tip: Make sure salespeople see how they can meet their goals and make their quota and commissions easily!) Train the support staff and, if your product is replacing an existing one, let the appropriate people know the end-of-life plans for the retiring product. (Chapter 16 has details on end-of-life planning.) And train and inform anyone else who will be critical to keeping your product launch engine running smoothly as the launch starts and progresses.

Recognizing the importance of the launch plan

As with all things in life, spending some time upfront planning your launch will likely pay off with great success. If you have an idea of what your goals are and have a well-thought through plan, you’re at least headed in the right direction.

In our consulting practice, we can’t believe how many companies spend lots of money developing the next killer product yet devote little or no time determining how to launch it and get the revenue and profit engine going. They simply assume customers will flock to the product. Instead of simply relying on assumptions, make sure you’re ahead of the game so that your sweat and labor building that great product don’t go to waste.

Your planning for launch happens during the develop and qualify phases (which we discuss in Chapters 12 and 13). To make sure you cover all the key questions, use the launch plan template included in the Product Management LifeCycle Toolkit (included as a free download with this book; see the Introduction, page 4, for details). Note: Be sure to revisit documents you’ve already developed, such as the market strategy document; they already contain some of the elements that would typically be in a standalone launch plan (such as the total available market, market segmentation, positioning, and unique selling proposition). You can update them now based on any changes in the market and/or product and include them in the launch plan if others in your company need to know about and/or approve them.

Filling out the launch plan template

The launch plan template includes a brief back story to the launch. Most of the launch plan is a long list of launch activities and reasons for each of them. The better you can tell the overall launch story and how all the pieces fit together, the better you can defend your launch plan.

Financials and launch budget allocation

What is the budget for your launch plan? Provide a pie chart of how you’re allocating the launch budget (Figure 14-4) and give the details in a table. Include a short explanation of why you’re allocating the funds the way you are.

Launch budget and ROI

What is your launch budget? What do you expect each line item to contribute to the overall launch ROI? Your launch sales don’t usually recoup all the product development costs. Ideally, you want the sales generated during launch to reimburse the launch expenditures. If you’re working for a start-up or have very long sales cycles, recouping your investment during the launch may not be possible. Figure 14-5 shows a typical launch plan ROI calculation. Refer to Chapter 9 for more information on ROI calculations.