In our company, product marketing owns sales and company enablement. What can enablement do to ensure a successful product launch?

Our CMO always says, “Market your Marketing!” I love that because it's so true. The best thing we can do for our product launches is to bring the creativity and excitement to a launch. The more out of the box and memorable you can make the launch when you are sharing the launch news with your internal teams, the more excitement you will build. And in your case of company enablement, i’d also say that getting folks inside the company as excited about your launch as your prospective customers is just as important, if not more important!

Enablement is the act of getting people ready for something. In this case preparing for launching a product.

Your executive team’s expectation is that the organization will be able to market, sell, deliver, and support the product being launched.

Too often launch readiness activities are plagued by not having enough time for proper preparation, poor planning, and a misunderstanding of what ‘ready’ means.

Define Launch Objectives and Launch Strategy

The guardrails around launch readiness are launch objectives and launch strategy: what we are we trying to accomplish and how we expect to make it happen. Getting that right from the beginning helps shape the next step.

Define What Readiness Looks Like

Define what readiness looks like, so everyone knows what being ready means. It sounds obvious as you read it but the problem is rampant. Readiness is often defined by the outputs not by the outcomes. You want to focus on outcomes.

Sales is a good example…

• Can my sales team identify a good prospect?
• Can my sales team qualify out a bad prospect?
• Can my sales team communicate the unique value proposition of our company and our product?
• Can my sales team close a prospect and turn them into a paying customer?

Let’s say the above questions represent readiness for a sales team. If you get to a ‘yes’ for each question, you know the sales team is ready.

Next, you have to fill in the blanks for each question.

• What are the attributes of a good prospect?
• What are the attributes of a bad prospect?
• What is the unique value proposition of our product? Our company?
• What are the steps buyers will take to make a purchase?
• What information will buyers need and when will they need it?

Now that you have the answers to those questions you can move on to the next part: identifying readiness gaps.

Identify Launch Readiness Gaps

There is only a need for readiness activities when there is a gap between the current readiness state and the readiness state needed for a successful product launch. I call this readiness gaps.

Here’s why this is important. Launching a new product into an unfamiliar market is very different than launching an existing product into a familiar market. The level of effort needed for readiness is vastly different.

Work with people on your launch team who are functional area representatives. These are the people you rely on to be experts in their functional area (like the sales team).

Using the sales team again as an example, understand the state of the sales team if they were told to start selling the product today (before enablement). It helps to surface readiness gaps because it focuses on outcomes rather than deliverables.

Develop Plans to Close Readiness Gaps

When you understand readiness gaps you can develop plans to close those gaps. And you have a way to measure if the gaps are really closed. You can track progress and report the status to stakeholders. You can also stand firm when someone wants a deliverable that isn’t necessary.

There will always be requests for more stuff. Keep your focus on the outcomes and ignore the rest.

For me, revenue team enablement, not just sales enablement, is a crucial program that product marketing should own, or at the very least, provide guidance and input. Revenue enablement for a launch encompasses enabling the sales, marketing, channel, customer success and leadership team. 

The sales enablement portion of your launch plan defines the knowledge, skills, and programs required by direct and channel sales to adopt and sell the product successfully. Per my earlier response, ensure you enlist sales leaders and sales operations early to define sales content, training, and communication requirements – their buy-in ensures they have skin in the game. Sales leadership (esp front-line sales managers) should help inform which programs and incentives will motivate their troops to engage with buyers about the new product. 

Enablement tactics will vary by sales hierarchy with front-line managers involved in pre-launch planning and buy-in sessions to being training kick-off champions, role-playing scenarios, driving certifications, deal war rooms, etc. At the same time, account execs will require playbooks, online training sessions, role playing, tele-prospecting scripts (more so for inside sales), competitive battle card training, and constant communication and gamification. 

Beyond sales, other revenue team members need to be enabled to represent the new product properly. Consider the various communication channels to address these folks (intranet, internal departmental blogs, internal communities, newsletters, team meetings), and the types of training per their functional contribution to the launch. (e.g. demand generation needs to be briefed thoroughly before developing acquisition campaigns, while customer success needs to know how to start "expansion" conversations, and support needs to be enabled on how to handle incoming customer inquiries via FAQs, scripts, knowledge videos, etc.)