Last month’s KickStart Accelerator discussed successfully launching to the sales organization. This month’s article discusses the outward-facing launch—to customers, analysts and the market.

• Different functional groups on the launch team have different views of the goals and objectives of the launch, and produce conflicting or inconsistent messages and deliverables.

• Beginning to execute before a launch strategy is agreed upon wastes everyone’s time and kills momentum from starting, stopping and changing directions.

1) Establish your launch strategy. Is there advantage in preparing the market prior to product availability (a “soft” launch)? How much impact do you need to make, and on whom? (Prospective customers, of course, but who else?) Will it be a “stealth” launch, purposely “leaked”, or “open”? Launch strategy discussions must include VP of Marketing and Director of Product Marketing.

2) Gain committed budget and resources to fund all aspects of the plan. You can’t count on funds or resources that have not been approved by the Marketing VP or Director. Ideally your plan would come first and the budget would follow, but we all know it doesn’t work that way. So develop the plan and prioritize each item, allowing for pruning of the plan to meet the available funds and available time.

3) Finetune your positioning and messaging. This is where you need to spend serious time because a good positioning and messaging framework will make development of all your launch deliverables much faster and easier. It’s clear where you’re going if you have a plan. If there’s no plan you’ll likely end up going in a wrong direction, or no direction at all! Besides the Marketing executives, make sure Sales is involved in the process. If you don’t have buy-in on positioning and messaging, don’t move forward!

4) Establish a date to begin launch team meetings. The issue here is best use of people’s time. Consider several scenarios – best and worst case, and perhaps something in between. Determine which deliverable will take the most time and back up your launch team kickoff to a date that comfortably accommodates that item.

5) Identify launch team members and request their commitment of time to the project. If they can’t commit, ask for recommended alternates. Be clear about which members’ presence will be critical to effective launch meetings. Name a dedicated launch manager to lead the cross-functional launch team.

• Product Management
• Product Marketing
• Channel Marketing
• Marketing Communications
• PR
• Sales Planning
• Marketing Programs
  

In This Issue:

• Launching Solutions with Impact - Part #2
  Ready, Aim, Fire!
  
  
• 10 Practical Launch Planning Tips

10 Practical Launch Planning Tips:

by Mary Sullivan

1. Launch Action Plan - Assign a target date and priority level, identify a resource, and estimate costs for each deliverable in your plan.

2. Branding and Positioning – Be consistent with your branding strategy and complementary to the positioning of your other products.

3. Sales Involvement – Recruit an experienced sales rep for your launch team. It’s hard to get sales reps’ time, but they know the market better than anyone. The Sales organization will welcome the results of the rep’s high quality market feedback.

4. Analyst Involvement – For technical products, industry analysts are key influencers, and early analyst involvement can help validate your positioning.

5. Public Relations – Regardless of the scale of your launch, engage PR at the outset. You won’t want to miss key Editorial Calendar dates that match with your introduction.

6. Launch Venue – Choose it ASAP. Any venue – an event such as a trade or private show, a Webinar, or a “Press” launch – takes advance work.

7. Sales Launch – Choose a Kickoff location, a Road Show, a Webinar, or eLearning, and work with Sales to make arrangements. See the March 2004 KickStart Accelerator article, Launching to Sales with Impact,for more tips on sales launches.

8. Customer Sales Tools – All customer deliverables should focus on benefits, because they are at the root of customer decisions. With good positioning, this will come naturally.

9. Channel Launch – The channel launch is part of your sales launch, however plan a Partner Launch for your Channel Partner Product Managers so they can plan their own pricing and product introduction.

10. Demand Creation – Make sure you implement lead tracking to measure campaign effectiveness. Testing with pilots of two different campaigns may cost a bit more, but you can finish off with the campaign that delivers the most bang for your buck.

These are only a few of the many details that all launch leaders and teams must consider. For additional tips and tricks, please contact Mary Sullivan, KickStart Co-Founder, at 510-482-0510 or marysullivan@kickstartall.com.