How do you follow the "Big Bang" of a product launch to drive/nurture sustained growth?

Good question. For Zuora - which is a B2B enterprise software product - a “Big Bang” product launch usually drives awareness, not necessarily immediate adoption. It takes additional education to get a buyer to commit resources to the sales cycle and effort to adopt a new software. That being said, a coordinated follow-up between Marketing <> Sales <> Services <> Customer Success makes all the difference here. 

For example, if the launch did not enable Sales and Customer Success effectively, then both orgs will be faced with a ton of questions from prospects / customers and they are only able to give generic answers. I find that this can always, and should always, be re-iterated after a Big Bang launch to ensure all teams are enabled with:

• What do you say when a customer is interested in the new product? 
• What are the answers to common FAQs? 
• What content, demos, videos, etc. can I send them to give them more information?
• What is an example of a customer using the product already? 
• Are my partners in Sales Engineering and Services ready to act if the customer wants to buy?

From a customer comms standpoint, there should be continued marketing momentum after a product launch. Most people probably didn’t see / hear the first line of communications. Follow-ups can take the form of customer email communications, in-app messages, and other assets that can promote the launch from a different angle (e.g. webinar featuring a different POV, new customer case studies, etc.). 

My honest take would be – the best way to build a follow-up strategy is to build the product launch into a system and cadence that you already have. Some examples that we've built at Zuora are:

• A "What's New" page on the website that we can keep pointing customers to. We update this for every seasonal launch. Subsequent in-app messages, email newsletters, and others channels point back to this page.
• An internal Product Overview Deck that all of sales refers to for the latest and greatest product releases, updated every season as well.

One way to do this is build a launch plan that eliminates the “Big Bang” altogether :).

When building your launch plan, craft a “Season of Launch” instead of a plan that is centered around a single moment in time (ie, when your product/feature is announced or generally available) and ensure your resources are allocated thoughtfully across the “Season of Launch” time frame. Also, your launch plan should ideally define goals that map to broader company goals (ie, awareness uplift, usage & adoption, revenue, retention etc) and it will be super tough to move those metrics with a “Big Bang” approach centered on a single point in time.

You should certainly rely on your launch day to drive top of funnel awareness but you’ll need a set of integrated follow on tactics such as paid digital, email nurture, influencers, partnerships & more to move prospects through the consideration & acquisition funnel. You should be able to leverage core content from your launch day throughout your “Season of Launch” (ie, keynote deck as input to sales enablement, launch video cut downs for paid digital, customer speakers for case studies, demo’s for sales toolkit).

Overall, ensuring that your launch plan is resourced to drive a drumbeat of marketing tactics over time, aligned to your customers buyer journey & in support of high impact goals will take the focus off of the launch day itself & move focus to the business impact you will drive with your “Season of Launch”!

• Data! Everything you do once the launch has started should be about strengthening the feedback loop between your tactics and your outputs. Make sure to have everything you need and want to track in a built-out dashboard or in the form of queries you can run daily or at least a few times a week during launch. If you’re delayed on measurement, you’ll be slower to diagnose problems and learn from what’s working/not.
• Conduct user research. If you had a pre-launch beta group great, follow up with them, but also reach out to new folks who have considered, purchased, or churned from your product post-launch. Pulling for feedback about what’s standing out and what’s falling short can help your product team know what to prioritize in future releases. Products often need more polish after initial launch, so improve the interpretation of your quant metrics with qualitative insights.
• Make use of high visibility real estate. If you have certain sections of your app or site dedicated to “new and noteworthy” highlights, negotiate to use those and make a plan for how long you’ll have messaging in those high visibility spaces.
• Lifecycle. Nothing shocking here. Make sure the product or feature makes its way into important nurture flows. And beyond that, if you didn’t already do so before launch, consider what new behavioral and time-based triggers would be a good fit for your target audience’s natural purchase or adoption motion.
• Empower your cross-functional team to collect success stories. Can any of them be evangelists? Are they organically sharing or educating others about it? If so, amplify their messages. If not, even if you have to do a little more digging, can you test using testimonials, case studies, and mini stories to illuminate value?

Proactively plan for sustained momentum from day one. It’s tempting (and deceptively easy) to over-invest in “launch day” activities given all of the buzz these moments can generate. While it varies based on the tactics you deploy, the initial launch announcement is often great for top-of-funnel awareness but can leave some significant gaps in product adoption given the short attention spans of consumers. Mapping out a steady drumbeat of activity post-launch is critical to sustaining that desired momentum and meeting your adoption KPIs. A well positioned launch plan will allow you to continue leveraging the same or similar messaging, value props, and even potentially creative assets in your post-launch activities.