AMA: Qualia Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Priyanka Srinivasan on Go-to-Market Strategy

Like many marketing organizations, we utilized a tiering structure to determine the priority of product releases as well as level of effort. In general, I’m always looking to link our impact directly to revenue (new logo or expansion) first and foremost. As a result, for us, “Tier 1” launches will typically contain those products or features we think will really move the needle in terms of generating hand raises from (1) total prospects (i.e., new logos, those who don’t own any of our products at all) or (2) those who are expansion candidates (those who own one of products today but are great candidates for cross-sell on another product in portfolio). After direct new revenue influence, I obviously am also focused on retention and the extent that adopting a specific feature will help drive up customer satisfaction and retention. If, for example, we have a feature that customers have really been asking for that might not necessarily get a prospect to raise their hand for our products but that would go a long way to keeping our existing customers happy, we want to make sure we do a fair amount of customer marketing and education around that. Finally, you might have feature releases that are more regional in nature, or only apply to a (smaller) customer segment, or even bug fixes (where you wouldn’t really even want to draw a ton of attention to). For these, we do an appropriate level of customer education and marketing and try to keep things lightweight. In general, we’re releasing a ton constantly across the board, so having a strong framework in place to determine level of effort for each release is critical. It’s important to note that while you have a general framework, there are of course always exceptions to everything! Sometimes we might have a feature release that we don’t actually think will generate that much net new revenue, but there is something strategic about it (for example, some way it will play with something else we have coming down the line, or it’s part of a larger narrative we are trying to tell) that pushes us to consider a larger splash for it.

In my mind, enablement of internal teams is one of the most important thing you can do when it comes to repositioning or changing GTM strategy, including making it simple and effective to deliver on. We are currently in the process of this with one of our products and audiences right now. Changing how people talk about and position a product is incredibly hard, especially when they’ve been pitching a product in the same way for months or years. From my experience, not only does it take creation of written enablement materials (e.g., FAQ docs) but also live trainings, certifications on new scripts / talk tracks, listening to calls, and an *a lot of repetition*. On top of that, probably one of the most critical things you can do is enlist the help of various team leads / exec leadership to really hit home the fact that we need to be talking about a product / service in a fundamentally different way. It starts from the top where your leadership (Sales, CS) has clear expectations and standards around how you speak about a product and your level of knowledge about it.

Yes - we definitely have a framework! It is based off of our launch tiers (which I touched upon above). Essentially, we have 4 launch tiers, and each tier has a corresponding set of activities that we’d “light up” if a feature / product is determined to fall into that tier. You can think of the total list of activities like a menu, and a certain set gets lit up depending on the tier. It’s not a hard playbook - sometimes for a Tier 1, for example, we might not do a specific activity that we would normally do, or sometimes for Tier 2s we might include what would normally be a Tier 1-only activity, but it gives us a general sense for level of effort for each launch and the teams that need to be involved. Now comes the natural question of how we determine *what* activities (e.g., press release, emails, in-app, partner marketing, ads, etc) we’d do for each launch tier. This is something I sat down and determined initially with leaders of various cross-functional teams (namely, Demand Gen, Sales, Customer Success) based off of historic level of effort and productivity of these activities / channels. It also can be very specific to your industry / audience in terms of what channels they are active on. One thing to note is that it’s not something that is completely fixed - we’re actually in the process right now of doing a post-mortem on several of our launches over the last 6 months to see if the activities we conducted for them were the ‘right’ ones given their tiering, whether we want change recommendations on activities by tier, etc.

I don’t know if it’s my ‘favorite’ launch but one launch that someone on my team recently did was around some exciting automations within our product. What makes a launch exciting for me isn’t the types of activities we do, or how much cross-functional collaboration there is, or whether we came up with something flashy for it. For me, what’s most exciting is when a product or feature is incredibly strategic to the overall vision of our products. This feature we recently launched was exciting on its own, but when put into the context of how this will change the way a real estate transaction is conducted (in terms of the manual effort involved), it is game changing. Being able to tell *that* narrative (vs. just the more ground level view of how this feature will help an individual) is pretty exciting. Coming up with the messaging for that is fun, and working with cross-functional teams to incorporate the right messaging into our marketing, outreach, sales conversations, etc is challenging and highly impactful.

Tactically, we hold our campaign tracking open for 6 months from the launch date to track any direct inquiries a launch was responsible for as well as any opportunities it might influence in a small touch way. If my primary goals is revenue generation, I’m very interested in the direct inquiries a launch/campaign generates, which typically occurs in the first few weeks after the launch when we are making the biggest splash from a marketing perspective. Ideally, you continue marketing major products over time (i.e., it’s not just one-and-done), but it’s pretty normal to see a significant drop-off after the launch activities have concluded. If the goal is more around product adoption, that can definitely take more time and require more customer education and enablement over a longer period of time. We’ll typically hold a post-mortem on a launch a couple of months after where we’ll look at both leads / pipe generated as well as any early metrics on adoption.

As always, the answer is probably “it depends” as it really does depend on what the goal of your launch is. For example, are you trying to drive awareness of a feature? Adoption? Expansion sales? Once you’ve determined the goal of a launch, the KPIs should be relatively straightforward from there. For us, most of our Tier1/2 launches have the goal of generating pipeline revenue (for either new logos, or expansion, or both) so we look at number of demos set / pipeline generated. Even if the opportunity already exists, I’m also curious to see whether this was the thing that moved the needle for the prospect to buy. When it comes to Tier 3/4 launches, the metrics may be more focused around product adoption and less around direct revenue impact. Did the customers we were targeting in our marketing actually try using the new feature? How often do they use it? For example, is it happening on every order/transaction they do with us, or only a subset? For product adoption you also have to determine what “success” means - that is, what is the specific ‘event’ you want to track when it comes to the feature that would make it a successful use.