(This article is cross-posted at onproductmanagement.net)
Try this exercise.
Go to your marketing collateral closet and pull a sales packet of information out. These are the same data/sell sheets, white papers and pretty pictures that you would pull if you are preparing to speak with a potential buyer. (You can leave the pretty folder in the closet – they cost extra money to produce.) If you don’t have a marketing closet, go to your Web site and print out the packet of material.
(This article is cross-posted at onproductmanagement.net)
A product launch or release takes time, effort and money. It takes energy. You can’t always guarantee the success of the product when it hits the hands of the market; but, with some extra effort, you can guarantee the success of the launch.
First, any launch means you stay put!
(This article is cross-posted as a guest post at onproductmanagement.net)
In baseball, everything you’re first taught about pitching has to do with speed and location… you want to throw the ball past the batter, and put it in the corners of the strike zone. Go for the heat!
In a recent blog post, Forrester CEO George Colony wrote that CEO’s want better sales forces. As the sales enablement arm of the organization, how do product marketing professionals, ensure that our sales team is effective and ready to sell our new products and have well designed sales tools aligned to the ever-changing sales cycle?
When we are orchestrating our launch, something we often don’t even think about, but is probably the most important launch element, is respecting our launch partners. Within each organization, we have different sets of partners, but universally without respect for the partner’s work effort and the time required to complete their tasks, we cannot drive a successful launch.
